silly billy

So, school is kind of a lot of work. I missed my first graduate workshop last week, which was both a bad first impression and a terrible blow to my pretentions of being a responsible adult. Jane, my workshop leader was really cool about it--I got sent conflicting emails about when the class took place (it's not held on the campus, it's at this poetry resort-type place in downtown Tucson), and I picked the wrong day to go. What probably made it feel worse is that I actually rode my bicycle down to Casa Libre (the place) while my class was having its first meeting to see where it was so I wouldn't have to try and find it and be late the next day when I thought class was happening. I ended up poking around the place and totally saw something going on inside and decided to beat it before I was being stared at like some silly wanker.

My class on Plato's metaphysical development is going a little better than I had imagined it would. My professor held reservations about my ability to take a course, being a non-philosophy grad student and all. Thankfully, so far I have yet to prove total incompetence. I just start to get scared when a bunch of undergraduate philosophical prima donnas start spittin' play and jargon. In an english class it's easy to call them on their use of a big word to compensate for not knowing the actual concept behind it (thanks to Dr. Orr), but in philosophy I just assume they know more than me, and I'm so busy following their argument closely so I don't miss the chance to learn from them that by the time they finish their point I think to myself, "hey, just because the guy has a shaved head, long red (natural) goatee, and thick dorky glasses, or talks slowly (extremely) and should model for the gap, doesn't mean that they've worried about the actual problem that's going on." (I should mention that the class is set up with under/grad lecture on monday, full class discussion wednesday, grad discussion friday.) Whatever, I'm just glad that I'm going to be able to hold my shit together. The thing with graduate school that srikes me most is how similar it is to undergraduate school, which was disappointingly similar to high school. Home school, however, was very different from high school. There definitely is a lot of work, and you actually have to do it all, I think, but you're mostly studying things you're interested in, so you don't have to worry about taking biology 100 or any of that sort of crap. And you can go have drinks with your teacher during office hours, which is pretty good.

A lot of other crazy crap has been going down, especially this past weekend. Most of it isn't worth too much detail, or at least I don't feel like it right now--I'm exhausted. Three little teasers, though, from the weekend: (1) I was at a birthday party for a baby and this dick who was a cop (the boy's uncle) was carrying a glock in the front of his pants the whole party under his t-shirt (who does this shit?) (2) I was walking to get coffee and read me some Plato when I witnessed a motorcyclist get rocked by a car. I was the first person there, it was freaking nuts, and the man lived. (3) I was getting my sleeve worked on and during a smoke break (Jason, not me) a guy came up to us, walking quickly, and he was shiny with sweat and holding a white(ish) bedsheet around his crotch, with nothing else between he and God's green eyes, asking if we wanted to buy some shit. Since we were at a tattoo shop, like eight heavily tattooed dudes had guns out and pointed on this dude before I knew what was going on (I had stubbed my big toe in all the commotion). Pretty silly, but pretty good weekend overall.