Quaristice

The new Autechre album is great, but it's still hard for me to listen to 73 minutes of electronic audio-shrapnel at a time. This probably wouldn't bother anyone who didn't have my full-album listening obsessions.

Dylan seems to have vanished from the Internet. This is unfortunate; I did so enjoy reading her stories and thoughts...

Classes have started. Somehow I don't care. That will probably change after I leave for a week and return to find I can't catch up with any of my homework. Class has always been more stressful for me than research: research, while huge and convoluted, is usually a single coherent entity, while everyone wants me to do a different thing and think in a different direction as far as my classes go, and each professor seems to expect you to treat their course as the only one in your schedule. It doesn't help that my course schedules are usually schizophrenic (in one corner this semester, Bioinformatics and Cell Biology; in the other, Poetic Forms II and Poetry of War), and it becomes extremely difficult to keep track of who wants me to do what by what date, and how that relates to all my other deadlines, and even what state of mind to be in on a certain day to maximize productivity. The ideal has always been to be all things at all times; obviously, though, this is impossible, so I have to settle for either drifting between aspects semi-spontaneously as events warrant, or existing as a compromise of all aspects, both of which cause me to react badly to deadlines. All of which help to explain why during the semester I often find myself paranoid that I Should Be Doing Something Else.

It should be a little more manageable this semester, though, because I am only taking 13 credits (I didn't do terrifically when I took 13 credits my sophomore spring, but then again, I was not myself), and I only expect one class, Cell Biology, to give me any genuine annoyance. It was a huge shock to walk into Cell Bio lecture on Monday and see the lecture hall packed beyond capacity by hundreds of undergrads from all the biosciences disciplines, most of them likely sophomores and juniors, after having been spoiled by a year's worth of 10- to 20-person courses (except Reproductive Physiology, which was a medium-sized lecture, but that was a bad time) of mostly Biophysics students in my own year who knew more or less what they were doing. The guy next to me in the back row texting on his iPhone (one of many current badges of bloated consumerism), the kids stammering obviously half-digested, dimly-recalled facts in response to questions...these are things I thought I wouldn't have to encounter again. It's probably unfair of me to say this now, as I have a couple years' college work on most of these students, and was probably just as stupefied two years ago as many of them seem to be now, at least in Orgo.

As for the other classes...Bioinformatics will be fun. It's with Pat Fleming, who taught me Computational Biology last semester, and who is an extraordinarily good-hearted teacher--certainly far more good-hearted than most of the students at this school, and probably a few of the Biophysics students he teaches. I was surprised to see that most of the faces in the class were unfamiliar, save for Brian and Svetlana, and Brian being the only one who carried over from Comp Bio; it's rare to see non-Biophysics students in a Jenkins Hall class. Poetry of War will be an interesting experience, as I've never taken a serious, analytical poetry reading course. Poetic Forms II should be mostly familiar ground with Williamson--I'm really happy to be able to take one last class with him before graduating. His question of, "so who traveled the farthest over break?" has become an established first-class-of-spring-semester ritual, and for once, the answer was not me with my usual 19-hour jaunt. He asked me about grad school and told me about his father who is a professor emeritus at Vanderbilt (in mechanical engineering, ironically).

Some interesting people in my poetry classes. I keep expecting the old Wmson loyalists--Fox, Anthony, Chunwoo, Max et al--to appear, but they've all graduated. Instead I'm studying alongside Sue and various other characters I'd never expected to see again, having rather awkwardly brushed past each other (aesthetically speaking) in earlier writing courses. Some of them, including Sarah T., seem to comprise a parallel Wmson faction I didn't know existed. Jen P.; I have promised Maura not to show her any of her poems if they turn out to be good. Jana, who virtually shares both John's first and last names, just returned from Spain, and will be a ski instructor next year, and who speaks with really big eyes like she's running a hotel front desk:

"You are applying to grad school? Which schools did you apply to?"

"Ah, science things, actually," I said, exposed for the closet scientist I am. (As a side note, I have a self-imposed rule on not going into the details of any of my "specialized" topics with anyone who isn't into it already. It's not that I felt offended at being asked.)

(Still speaking like a hotel front desk.) "That's so exciting. Good luck with your interviews!"

At which point I thought, you are so outrageously unlike John it has gone from being ironic to hilarious back to simply ironic.

Jess is in my Poetry of War class, and for that I am grateful. If I'm her moral compass, then she's my psychiatric anchor, and it will be nice to have her around when I deal with all of the "real" writers. I've gotten used to having serious conversations with her at least a couple of times a week; we're meeting for lunch tomorrow before she goes to Richmond and I leave on my odyssey.

Jess suggested last weekend we should all go to live clean lives in a monastery; while I wouldn't object to this (religion aside), I feel that I haven't found my tether in life as she has with Thom, and so can't retreat from the world just yet, much as I sometimes would like to. So I suppose I must keep casting myself and breaking against the jagged cliffs of society for a while longer. Oh well. What's another three years?