Please Don't Take this Away From Me, But Help Me See It From A New Perspective

I miss my meteorology class. I miss my classmates, I miss my professors, I miss my TA, I miss the subject matter. I miss having people to talk to, people I looked forward to seeing, people who cared what I had to say. I miss hearing about, and caring about their lives. I miss the way I learned in that class. I miss the way I could learn something inside and out, I miss how concrete it was. I miss knowing facts. I miss the lack of opinion. I miss the way everything I learned was directly relevant to my life, no matter where in the word I was or will be. I miss talking about the weather. I miss the way I knew for sure what I was talking about, I miss feeling smart. and not smart like "I'm smarter than you are", but like "hey look, my brain must work because I didn't understand this before and now I do."

This class I'm in now is the exact opposite of my meteorology class. Where I thought I would love this class because its about something I find interesting (poetry and hip hop), I am hating it. Where I thought I would hate my meteorology class because it was about something I thought I wasn't interested in (hard science), I loved it. Where I forged unexpected connections with my classmates and professors in my meteorology class, I am left stranded and alone in this poetry class.

I thought this class would be an opportunity to learn more about myself and language and poetry and society and culture. But what I'm finding is that I'm not learning much of anything. It is confirming some of what I already thought, but not telling me why I was right or wrong. All in all its making me resentful. I resent the teacher for not having anything more interesting to show me, for not digging deeper, for not having a deeper overarching theme to the class. I don't think he's lazy, but somehow the topic seems played out already, and there are no signs of us digging any deeper into it. I resent my fellow classmates for not holding up their part of the discussion. I resent them for not looking deeper, for not being open to new ways to look at the same old thing. I resent them for not speaking up, not telling me what they think about it. I resent both their ignorance, and their arrogance, as both are holding me back from exploring the matter at hand.

I'm not trying to say I am a model student and that everyone should do as I do. But the way it stands now, I feel like I could be teaching myself everything I have learned so far. Somehow rather than having discussions in class, I feel like everyone is just trying to get their opinion heard, they just want to convince everyone else that the way they see it is the best way to see it. And my god that is boring, because at that point, its becomes less about what they are actually saying and the fact that THEY are the ones saying it. It becomes more about them than about the ideas they are trying to share, which means if you try to engage them in debate about it, they argue, rather than discuss. Rather than trying to explain, they try to tell. Everyone makes things so personal, but instead of bringing us closer together, it is driving us all apart, like magnetic fields, like everyone has to defend their individuality, like shifting your opinion would somehow make you weak.

The worst part about this class, is the way it makes me feel about myself when I'm there: "If these people aren't able to accept themselves, they probably won't be able to accept me, so I had better keep my mouth shut and my head down." Thats no way to learn.

So I guess the only thing to do is shift what I am trying to learn. Instead of trying to learn something new about the connection of hip hop and poetry I am going to try to learn how to navigate this minefield of egos and stay true to myself. I am going to learn how to sit in class for 4 hours every day for a few weeks. I am going to learn how to listen to and talk to people who are not that interested in what I have to say. I'm going to learn how to be in a very draining social situation and not get completely worn out by it. I'm going to learn to leave what I don't need behind, and take only what I do need.

What I Did Over My Summer Vacation

I hate it when blogs start with "its been a while, but here is why I haven't written..." so I'm not going to bother trying to catch you up on what has been happening in my life since I last got around to writing. That being said, how can I possibly tell you what is going on without telling you what has been going on? So here goes. School ended for the semester, and because I took an Incomplete in one of my classes finals were not nearly as grueling as midterms were. Maybe its because everything went so smoothly that I decided to sign up for a May-term class (at the U of M we have May-term instead of J-term, but its pretty much the same thing, a quick 3 week intense class). This has left me with a few weeks of summer vacation before I jump back into class tomorrow. In those few weeks I have done some stuff I wasn't planning on, and not done lots of the stuff I had planned on doing. Which, if you ask me, is the point of vacation.

I finished reading World War Z by Max Brooks. Its a book about the zombie apocalypse, but really its about the way different cultures around the planet dealt with the crisis. If you like zombies you might be disappointed by this book (the zombie information was seemingly accurate, but all in all they played a very small role), but if you like sociology you might be happily surprised, as I was. The book is written from the other side of the disaster. The human race has (narrowly) survived the invasion and after 10 years of getting their feet back on the ground a report is commissioned to sum it all up. The book is what had to be left out of the official report, as these interviews are focused much more on personal stories than on cold hard facts. Through all these stories you start to get a picture of how people survived, how people are equipped (or not) to survive without the structure of society we all have come to depend on (for better or for worse), which gives us a chance to look at how our society has formed us, our opinions of the world, and our opinions of ourselves. Do we think we have the skills we need to survive in the wild? Do we expect someone else to take care of it for us? Do we band together, or try to go it alone? Do we flee, or fight? Anyway, the point is: it was a surprisingly lovely book (lovely and zombie are not words I generally think to put in the same paragraph). It was thought provoking, and well written. I highly recommend it.

I did not start reading any of the books that are in my 'to read when school is out and I have time' pile. I haven't worked on the afghan for my aunt, which was supposed to be done almost a year ago. I haven't listened to all the tunes that I have been saving for 'when I'm out of school and have the brain space to actually take them in'. I haven't played through Portal and Portal 2, which was all I could think about for the last two weeks of school. (To be fair, I have played most of the way through Portal). I haven't cleaned the house (I did clean the bathroom, but the rest of the house is under construction, or full of furniture from the part that is under construction and where is the fun in cleaning that?)

But for all the things I haven't done, there are things I have done too. I have started listening to Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham. A nice surprise to find in my iTunes library. I have learned to sew and made a few skirts already with plans to make a million more. I have cooked myself some delicious chicken curry. I have started going to Temple. I have started doing yoga again. In short I have spent this week coming back to myself. I have started enjoying the space in my head again. Thats what vacation is for right?