Psychology of Weekends

This time, instead of only telling myself I would get work done over the weekend, I actually DID it. I deactivated my Facebook account for a couple days (though Facebook still makes it too easy to sign in again) and resisted the temptation to write in my blog and then check the reader stats a billion times–instead, I picked up A History of the American Musical Theater and downed the whole thing in a day. And then I downed Democracy in America. As if that wasn’t enough, I proceeded on to Borges’ short-story for Spanish class, and I even wrote a little of my response paper about my first-ever musical, “Fela!”

No more staying up until 2am in a vain attempt to get work done for a 9am class. No more half-doing stuff because it’s better than completing one thing and being totally unprepared for everything else. I am going to make this whole 5-classes thing work, and how I will do it is by using my weekends efficiently from now on, just as I did this time around. I feel like a new student.

In other news, I was a psychology experiment guinea pig today because my psych class requires that I participate in approximately 5 hours of psychological experiments. So all those stories you hear about broke college students entering into human studies–those stories are true, only college students don’t participate so that they can eat but so that they can pass Intro to Psych.

Good Mexican Food!

A friend and I started our Friday night early. We started with seeing an art exhibit about the twelve Zodiac animals, which turned out to be a lot smaller than imagined, so we left in favor of exploring the Village–which turns out to be a smoothie made of part Mission, part Haight Street, and two parts truly NY concrete jungle.

And in this Village, we at Mexican food. It was surprisingly good, being on the East Coast as it is and all. This Mexican restaurant might just be the first installment in a possible food blog my friend and I are thinking of starting.

The rest of this weekend I am devoting to work. I feel like, when I don’t do work during the weekend, I truly drown in it all on days that I have classes. Wednesday nights are the absolute worst. So, this weekend I work, and by working this weekend I start a good habit of working every weekend. Hopefully.

That means no blog posts this weekend. Please scold me if you see another new blog post this weekend!

Lost and Found

The premiere of the Final Season of my favorite drama of all time, Lost , is tonight!!! I am beyond excited, I am practically hyperventilating! I really hope that nothing stops me from watching it on either the kitchen lounge TV or the Parlor TV (ooh, that would be sweet–maybe I’ll start a Facebook event to gather all Lost fans on campus…). I mean, there shouldn’t be a problem because I haven’t heard about Gossip Girl or Glee lately. Trust me, when either of those are on at Barnard, you better not want to watch anything else at the same time!

In other news, I seem to have “found” myself in my classes today. By this I mean that I spoke in all my classes (except PE) today, and even multiple times in two out of three of them. I’m quite proud of myself because sometimes I feel intimidated by speaking up in classes where there are SO many smart women in the same room, but today, it didn’t matter. And now there may be no going back to that former shyness. Even when I felt stupid for being too simple-sounding in Urban Studies after I spoke up in that class today, I still felt glad that I at least said something.

Anyway. LOST TONIGHT!!!

Post Script in Support of The Postcrypt

My first time at the Postcrypt might just wind up being the last: not only has the Columbia administration forced the small folk muic venue to pay for a security guard to quell all those unruly FOLK MUSIC listeners, but they have removed most of the elctricity from the joint, including that which powers the popcorn maker, which usually provides free popcorn to all guests. Let me reiterate: there was no free popcorn! How else are broke college students supposed to feed themselves on a weekend if all dining halls and campus cafes close by 8p?

The Columbia administration obviously has some internal problems that it needs to solve without destroying student culture or happiness in the process.

Losers, Literally

Why is it that the women’s basketball team does well but nobody really knows about it, and the men’s basketball team (well, really just about all the men’s teams) suck and everybody talks about it? I mean, it’s true–I went to a game for the first time and Columbia lost to Harvard by 29 points–but why does that stand in for the fact that the women’s team actually does pretty well?

Just a thought.

Is it wrong to be a little bit jealous of your roommate because she has a pretty large group of friends that go out all the time to do cool stuff? Is it wrong to want to be as socially busy as she is? Maybe I shouldn’t complain. I did go to the game today after all, and even though we lost, it was at least fun. Especially when one of the team members did a face-plant onto the court floor by tripping over his own feet. But now it’s 9:30 on a Friday night and I’m not doing anything ELSE fun, even with all of New York there for the taking.

Oh, well. Revising a resume doesn’t count as homework, so I guess I’m not totally lame tonight.

In other news, this is my 100th post!  Woo-hoo!  Not even Harvard can touch that!

Lighten Up

It turns out that taking five classes (six if you count PE) is really hard. I’m going to have to start using all those time management strategies I (hopefully) learned in high school again.

It also turns out that the PE department is really strict. Hear me out: it’s great to have rules in place to support high-quality physical education, and it’s good to put consequences in place for people who do not respect those rules or why they exist. But when you don’t even take into consideration the fact that a student may not have infinite space in her suitcase that she must carry across an entire continent, and that this student may have other things to worry about during the first couple weeks of classes other than buying the right kind of gym clothes for a specific type of excersize, then the rules may need to be revisited. Just sayin’.

Anyway. It snowed again today, and all I heard about it were complaints. “Oh, what horrible driving conditions!” and “Great, now the sidewalks are going to be all gray and muddy” greatly outvoiced my little “Oh wow, look, it’s snowing! That’s so awesome!” What is with this, is even a slightly positive outlook too much to ask during the depths of winter? By the way, winter isn’t nearly as bad here as many think it is. My friends going to college farther up north aren’t complaining about conditions that would make people in New York cry.

OK, I’m done critiquing society for the time being. On to the State of the Union for me.

Peace Treaty

I am now in negotiations with myself over a peace treaty to end the Mental Civil War of Spring ‘10.

The first part of my peace treaty with myself is definite: I dropped Food and the Social Order.  I will miss the class discussions–what does a meal say about modern society, why does one scarf food while walking down Broadway but not at a restaurant downtown?–but I simply can’t handle it.  I didn’t do my homework for Urbs (from now on this is what I’m calling the urban studies class with the really long name) because I was stressed about NY Theatre, and I was stressed out about NY Theatre because I was worried about reading for Food.  So if I get rid of the Food class, I can focus on 5 classes instead of scattering myself 6 different ways.

Plus, now I don’t have to worry about a 12-15 page independent paper that involves creating my own empirical research and other stuff that I don’t know how to do yet.  I think I need a basic Intro to Sociology course first if I’m going to look into sociology at all.

Another reason to keep Urbs over Food: when I went to the Urbs class today, I realized that what we discussed was much more important in our world (even more important than food).  The history of how people have understood race, how we got to where we are today–it’s all so important to understand in a society so wrapped up in race relations.  I believe this class will be immensely worthwhile.  I truly believe this.

As for this NY Theatre dilemma–I will wait until after the next class (Weds night) to decide how I feel about it.  I have enough credits to drop it and still be a full-time student, but there are still good reasons to hold on to it.

Mind In Middle of Civil War

This Food class has me so conflicted: do I want to keep it in my schedule because I find myself deeply intrigued by discussions about food and society, or do I want to drop it because the work is too much and too advanced for one who has never taken a sociology class before? Do I want to stay in it because it works pretty well with my schedule, or do I want to drop it because it probably won’t fulfill any requirements unless I’m a sociology major? (Even that much is not set in stone due to the weird relationship between Barnard and Columbia.)

What was I thinking when I pulled two interesting classes (this food one and the urban studies one) out of a metaphorical hat and thought it would be easy to pick between them? And do I really want to take NY Theatre, for that matter?

So. Conflicted.

Squirrel Nut Zippers

Instead of reading the Bible for my Food class like a good girl, I went downtown with college friends to eat cupcakes (such a New York thing–here’s today’s bakery: http://www.billysbakerynyc.com/) and buy used books/CDs/records/comic books (http://www.housingworks.org/social-enterprise/bookstore-cafe/).  So now I have a ton of work and reading to do for tomorrow’s classes–don’t even get me started on what I have to do by Tuesday.   You know what, six classes really is too much work for me.  Of course, I could have gotten a lot of work done by staying in today like a hermit, but that would not have been any fun.  And I wouldn’t have bought No Doubt and Pearl Jam CDs.  And I wouldn’t be able to laugh about a CD for a band called Squirrel Nut Zippers.  Reading the Bible for class, although it is an interesting idea in and of itself, would not have been as cool of a blog title as Squirrel Nut Zippers.

All in all, then, I think it’s just about time to make up my mind once and for all about what I want to drop for the semester.

Eh, I’ll do it tomorrow.

Statues of the Nude, Vodka and the Nude

The Met is amazing. You can walk through an Egyptian temple on your way to colonial American rooms, ramble on to Indian statues of the Buddha, and find yourself watching a strange collection of junk and wires spin and shake in the modern art collection. It’s all at the Met. I’m not even a museum type of person, really, because I never get to touch any of the stuff (kinesthetic learner here) on display due to their obscenely high monetary values, but the Met…the Met is amazing.

On the bus on my way back from the Met there was a crazy guy talking about how the transport is HIS. How did the driver deal with it, you ask? He almost kicked everybody off the bus instead of just that one guy–I think everyone’s hair, especially bus drivers’ hair, gets a little too frazzled during rush hour.

My Spanish professor talks about vodka during class and makes us work in pairs to discuss pictures of nude people. And to discuss nude people, we must follow a prescribed grammatical pattern. This is going to be one interesting semester.