Everything Is New
Cooking and eating and sleeping and learning and reading and writing and playing and riding in Chico again. I want to dissect the experience.
I live in an apartment.
This feels more like the kind of living-on-your-own I was originally promised. There is a kitchen, and my head is comfortably wrapping around the preparation all of my own meals. I have three roommates who are all friendly and ancillary. There is also a kitten, her name is Lola the lolcat. She makes the place much nicer to come home to after classes.
I’m taking four classes.
So far, the most interesting is Anthropology 116: Power and Scarcity. The biggest concepts at play so far are the kinds of power people have (ideological, economic, military/political), and how this power is organized in different areas (kinship, rulers, owners/managers). This is the Professor’s first semester at CSU Chico, and I feel like he’s going to be one of my best. I might be able to establish an independent study with him, focusing on the anthropological side of the green movement. He’s given me books to read. I have a smiling sneaking suspicion that my interests over the next three+ years will expand through philosophy and environmental science and into many more disparate and interesting fields. “The beauty in the world is growing.”I’m taking another class titled Philosophical Methods, the intent of which is to teach me how to correctly read and write philosophically. The professor seeks to accomplish this through the repeated analysis of a small set of philosophical articles. Coincidentally these articles are all centered on personal identity. Lucky me! The professor also promised to psychologically damage all of us. Lucky me! I want to write more about identity considering the temproal, the inanimate, and the mess of the conscious.
Bisected into lecture and lab, Geo Science 130: Intro to Environmental Science leaves me feeling cold. The lecturing professor has invested a great deal of energy into a lesson plan that seems to assume no student would willingly read the text. The first 5 weeks of lab have been scheduled to familiarize us with the metric system and the scientific method. Kill me now. I’m actually quite torn. Part of me wishes there was a required freshman science class for this kind of hand-holding; a class to refresh all the Earth science, physics, and chemistry that I thought we had all learned in high school. Let me test out of this hypothetical Science 101. And at the same time though, a lot of students passing through these hallowed halls of higher education only satisfy the most minimum science requirements. If in doing so they learn something about a field I consider most vital, can it really be all that bad?
The last and least class I’m taking is one of my few remaining General Education requirements. Group Communication Studies really disappoints me. So far we’ve played a few painful name-games and defined all of two terms: ‘group’ and ‘communication’. Two cheers for mediocrity! C+’s all around!
I’m learning to play guitar.
I haven’t played guitar for a couple months. It feels like it’s been over a year since I’ve played a show. My fingertips have softened and any technique seems to have drained from my limbs. But the accoustic guitar has new strings on it, as does the electric. We’ll see what happens, though I still feel detached from what was Meat Machine.
I need to get back into shape.
Prior to the summer, I really did feel like I was the fittest I’ve ever been. Weekly century rides will do that I guess. One of the things I’ve noticed about “the best shape of your life” is that it disappears under cover of darkness. Where did these soft legs come from? I thought I could sprint crosstown in 44x15 and not break a sweat? Why have I lost weight? Commuting to class and a reformed bike gang ought to do me good. I also need to build a new rear wheel, and a bike with gears. Goddamn.