Deepest fear realized

Well, friends, it's official. I'm back in school. Break out the nerd goggles, the travel mugs and the barely-edible breakfast muffins!

Yesterday was my first day of classes. I will quote for you a segment of email I sent to my sister the day before: 'I'm nervous. Not about the classes so much, but about the whole new campus and new school system and all new profs and new ways of doing things and most students don't start at the beginning of summer so there's no real 'orientation' or new-student-friendly thing-a-things, so I'm nervous about that.' You see, it's the 'going to' part, not the 'school' part that makes me want to eat the contents of our cupboard, and follow it up with the door handles.

So yesterday I show up for my 10:00 class. There's only one other person in the room. I ask him if this is English 120, and he thinks so, so I sit down. We wait. I play Spellbound on my Palm Pilot (like I said, nerd goggles). Another guy shows up. It's 10:00 by this point. There's only the three of us there. The awkwardness is palpable. Are we in the wrong classroom? Was class cancelled, and everyone knows about it except us? The one guy suddenly whips out his schedule and says, hey, what do you all think this means? He points to where it says 'English 120, July and August.' Somehow the three of us missed the fact that our class didn't begin until the latter half of the semester, EVEN THOUGH all of us were taking at least one other class that began at the same time, and were well aware of this anomaly.

Good thing I live a twelve-minute walk from the school.

My two other classes were fantastic as far as first classes go, in that I don't totally hate everyone in them, and we got out early. All both of my textbooks that the bookstore had in stock came to a total of $117 (which, and Joel remarks scornfully, is nothing compared to his $150 paperback text, one of many).

I have an assignment due tomorrow already, bringing with it that anxious weight that a first assignment for a new prof in a new school for a class that I shouldn't technically be registered in because I don't have the prereq's but for which I plea-bargained my way in inevitably carries. So instead of doing that, I've been poking around on my Facebook (takes off nerd goggles, replaces them with fashionably huge faux-D&G shades) and eating Pringles.

You all wish you were me.