(no subject)

I have a ton of stuff to write about from the last long while. I was thinking about a lot of it on the way home from the convention yesterday, but I ended up dropping by to visit lisagems first and haven't gotten around to writing 'till now. Hopefully most or all of it will come back to mind as I progress here.

I am registered for college! I have 16 credit hours' worth of classes coming up, starting the 7th of September. I'm in five classes. One of them is actually in the program I want to major in, but all of them seem interesting to a greater or lesser extent.

My first sociology/anthropology class will be Sociology/Anthropology 100: Introduction to Anthropology. I'm most excited about that one and I'm really looking forward to getting an overview of the various branches of the discipline and developing a more solid sense of what I'm interested in getting into.

I'll be taking Spanish 103, which is the introductory level Spanish class. As well as working toward a foreign language requirement, knowing Spanish is, I think, directly relevant to my career interests: working in urban areas and with urban community. Plus, farmcat and I will be able to practice with each other! Hopefully I'll be able to keep working on Japanese independently as well. I feel like my classes so far have given me enough of a base to expand from on that.

I have a Geography class: GEOG 101, which is Geography of American Ethnicity and Race. It counts toward gen ed requirements and will also be relevant to my interests. Nice when that works out.

I have a History Class. Also 101, this one is The United States, Origins to Reconstruction. I'm vastly, vastly more interested in that topic than I was the first time I went through school, and in fact I think it might make sense to take a number of history classes while I'm in school to tie in with anthropology/sociology classes. It's something I'm going to discuss with the anthropology faculty prior to the next semester's class choices.

And finally, I have a Geosciences class. 103, Intro to Environmental Science: An Earth Resources Approach. This is the one I'm least interested in of any of them. I would have liked to retake my one F class from last time for a new grade, but all the sections were already full. This one is a gen ed class again, but should be at least mildly interesting, though 109, Fundamentals of Global Climate Change, would be much more so to me. (It's only in the Spring. Maybe I should think about waiting for that. Now that I write this I'm thinking about looking for something else for this semester. Maybe I'll look into that or chat with my advisor.)

I have classes every day of the week. My first ones start at 9 o' clock on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and 9:30 on Tuesday and Thursday. Spanish runs 'till 3 every day except Friday, when I'm done with my two classes of the day at noon. And on Monday, I have a single late-night class that goes 6 to 8:45 one day a week. I have between an hour and three between most classes, and I'll be there late on Monday, so I'll have plenty of opportunity to keep my butt on campus, doing work and talking to faculty, and even participating in things like the anthropology club.

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There are a number of things centering around school that are making me anxious. I talked about them with danaeris over a nice late lunch after the con on Sunday, and with Lisa that evening when I dropped in on my way back into the city and they both offered insight and advice that made me feel better. They both deserve my thanks.

I worry about doing well enough at my classes. I want to be an outstanding student. I want to have an excellent record that will let me transfer into a more prestigious school, and that will reflect well on me as I think about entering graduate school in four years' time. I worry that if I set a goal for myself of straight A's, that I won't live up to my own expectations. Maybe I won't be able to do that well. Maybe some nebulous issue in one or more of my classes will prevent me, through no fault of my own from performing at that level and it will cause me problems in the future. Scarier than that, perhaps my deepest fear, is that I'll find out that there's no unexplained reason that I won't do well. That I won't be an exemplary student and it will be entirely my own fault. If I put in my best effort and I'm not good enough, not only would I have to think about some other career, but it would be an assault on my self-image.

I don't like to sound full of myself. I wasn't. I grew up with parents who were (are) gamers. They are smart people. The people they gamed with were smart people. Programmers, physicists, mathematicians. When I was little, I learned that, no matter what I knew and could share with other people, there was someone around who knew more about it than I did. If that sounds like a negative experience, it was actually quite the opposite. I didn't know how to deal with anybody my own age, but I didn't have to. I had all these adults who could talk to me about fascinating things. It took me a very long time to even realize that I had a need to make friends on my own, and more time after that to figure out how, and maybe that's related. But I wouldn't trade the way I was raised and the people I grew up around for anything. I was pretty happy, most of the time.

I idolized smart people growing up. I didn't (and mostly still don't) have any idea who the big name sports figures and movie stars are, but people like Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla were the closest things I had to heroes. People I wanted to be like. And being a smart person was integral to my self-identity. I was leaps and bounds ahead of all the kids who were in class with me all the way through school. Until junior-high and beyond when, I think, all the non-academic issues trumped academic ones and I started doing, in short, not as well.

I tell myself that it wasn't about me not being smart or having the ability to learn things. That instead it was not understanding myself and not knowing how to deal with the situation I was in surrounding learning those things. And there are moments in my record that support that interpretation, like one particularly good semester in high school, or the one semester of my last run at college wherein I earned a 3.89 GPA. For the most part, later years of school were pretty bad for me, and while I'm not going to say that it wasn't my fault, I will say that I like to think that it wasn't due to any lack of intelligence or abilities.

If I go back to school, knowing what I want out of it, how to go about getting it, and being ready and willing to talk to faculty and classmates one-on-one when I have any issues or questions to address, and I still screw it up? That would mean I'm not as smart as I think I am. Maybe that would mean I'm not who or what I think I am. I'll be putting my belief in myself on the line. My belief that I'm a smart and capable being who has found work-arounds for most of the ways he is broken and who is going to come back to school and do the kind of work he is capable of and should have done the first time around. If I can't do it this time, I may have a lot of beliefs about myself to reexamine.

Danae continues to be supporting and encouraging, both of my plans and of me. That means a great deal to me, both on a personal level, and because she is well acquainted with higher education. We know each other well enough that her telling me she thinks I can do this has a lot of meaning. I continually feel blessed (in the metaphorical sense) to have met her and very happy to be loved by someone so nifty.

When it comes to my worry about some mysterious difficulties that I can't name (and which are probably just unnameable generalized anxiety) making it somehow actually impossible for me to do well at some class or other, Lisa said something that makes me feel better. That in college, the difference between a B and an A is not so much intelligence as simply being willing to sit down and put in the work. Being smart might get me a B, but being smart and putting real work in should get me an A. And I think I can do both of those things.

In September, I'll start find out whether I really can.