Or, as I almost called it, "West Michigan Blizzard 2007". Yep, the incentive for me to write a journal for the first time since before the New Year's pretty much ended up being the fact that I'm currently buried in at least a foot or two of snow and don't really have much of anything else to do.
Yep, I was told repeatedly to expect mass quantities of the white stuff when I decided to go to school in Michigan, so I guess this is kind of par for the course. 'Course the temperatures are now also down in the single digits and negatives so that's always fun as well; it's just too damn cold, though. You can't even go tubing or skiing because the cold'll just go right through gloves and balaclavas and everything. Not cool. Well, it is cool, but in the literal sense.
And I guess there're some things that actually CAN cancel college classes. All this weekend since late Friday the campus has been effectively shut down, and from what I've seen on the school's website it will be for tomorrow too, so I get an actual college snow day! That's almost a unique achievement in itself, really, but then again, when there's that much snow on the ground and it's that cold, it must make sense somehow. Whatever works, I guess.
Educational Status</u>
I've got effectively a month of semester behind me; I'd forgotten how effectively short the GVSU semesters are. It's already February and we're less than a month away from Midterms already, although this has the added benefit of like I probably mentioned, Finals being the end of April. Classes are doing surprisingly well for me, but I guess that can be more attributed to me becoming more at ease with the university concept and grasping what all I have to do to succeed in class.
MTH 201, Calculus, is proceeding much nicer and easier than last semester, even if the latter is probably from the fact that it's a retake and all. I've gotten a lot more comfortable with the class which is more than likely because it's in the afternoon and not at eight in the morning, but still. I'd like to think I've convinced my professor that I actually want to succeed in his class, and I think I've done well at that so far.
I'll also say that there's not that many things as inherently satisfying as your calculus professor passing back papers and simply saying "Good job on the test, Dan." That let off so much suspense on me, even if we haven't actually gotten the tests back yet. It's just good to here, and I hope I can keep this up for the rest of the semester.
COM 101, Communications, has been rather interesting so far. The first part of the semester so far had rather depressing undertones as my professor's husband passed away, leaving us with both cancelled classes and substitutes, but she's returned and is feeling better now, so that's a plus.
We've already been formed into groups for future group projects, and my group is planning on doing a mock propaganda film advertising the university in the style of 1930's era German propaganda films. That should be interesting, to say the least.
PSY 101, Introductory Psychology, has been one of the quietest yet more interesting classes I have. It's been fairly uneventful in the sense of making new friends or interesting other things happening since it's a gigantic lecture hall class and I haven't had the same seats twice, but the professor is good. He's also the chair of the Psych department at GVSU, so he's apparently damn good, really. We've had one exam in there so far, which was a multiple-choice scantron test, and also painfully easy, so I guess that's good as well.
CTH 151, Acting 1; this one started out rather uncomfortably with an incredibly awkward sense of stage fright on my part, culminating in a tremendously embarrassing monologue attempt. Fortunately for myself and my GPA, I believe I've overcome the awkwardness and gotten a lot more at ease with it, as my second monologue presentation came off a lot less robotic and scared than my debut monologue.
I'm definitely not ready for prime time or much of anything yet, but I'm hopefully on my way there. By the way, my acting professor wrote the book mentioned in the "Reading" heading.
Rowing Status
We're less than a month away from Spring Break and the initiation of the spring water season, so we've begun the shift from distance pieces to pure power pieces on the ergs. I did end up finishing the million-meter challenge, and I'm awaiting the monogramming of the gym bag I received as a reward.
The Florida trip went reasonably well; the weather was excellent, the lake was excellent, and the beach was excellent. Well, except for all the man 'o wars and the rip current. Like, five of our guys got stung by the man 'o wars and one of them had the scabs from it until like, just a few weeks ago still.
Also, I learned I need to take a remedial swimming course or something since I got stuck in this nasty rip current right over this part of the beach that was full of holes, so even though I was mostly taller than the water, I kept falling down and basically almost-drowning. Fortunately, I didn't, otherwise I wouldn't be typing this. Still scary as hell, though.
Another funny thing that happened during the Florida break was just plain and out something I thought I'd never see. I'll have to browse my friends' accounts on Facebook to see if they've posted the pictures yet, but still. One of the days I was rotated into the frosh 4 instead of the frosh 8, the Frosh 8, driving the Spirit, somehow managed to flip the fracking boat. Not swamp, not beach, flip.
There seems to be a curse for a freshman crew driving the Spirit to have something horrible happen to them.
Fortunately, unlike last year's incident, this year's Spirit Misadventure resulted in no boat damage, just a lot of ego damage. I guess what happened was the coxswain was trying to hurriedly align the Spirit amongst the other boats and turn to prepare to do race pieces, but they ended up taking like, five straight backing strokes before she ordered port side to row. Bad idea. Port's oars apparently dug into the water and pulled the boat into a painfully slow, unrecoverable flip.
I wish I'd been facing the other way when it happened. Oh well, we saw it, and we heard the hilarious aftermath, including Coach verbally destroying anybody that tried to swim away from the boat. They were just really damn lucky they flipped it where they did, in a cove near a bunch of condos' private beach thing, where they got it un-swamped and dumped it out. I can't even imagine what would've happened if they'd flipped it on the side of the lake that didn't really have anything but a bunch of mangrove trees for a shore. Or the middle of the lake, for that matter.
We never did get to go to Disney, although we did go to a Jai-Alai place and bet on stuff. No, I didn't win anything, although they had good French Fries. New Year's we spent in Bahama Breeze, a seafood restaurant where I ordered chicken. Kind of inherently contradictory, but even though I hate seafood, that's where everyone was going, so, eh.
Florida notwithstanding, I'm still basically trying to beat or beat up two or so other freshman for bow seat in the aforementioned Spirit. This might become easier if our biggest freshman, at a ridiculous 6'7" and like, 230, ends up going varsity, which wouldn't be much of a stretch since he's already the third-fastest out of ALL the guys. But still, it's hard to say. I personally think I've noticed a sudden increase in my speed this past week, but it's still too soon to tell. I hope it was. An increase, that is.
Another thing that's slightly irksome occurred during the Saturday morning practice, where our task was to simply pull the fastest 500-meter split in 20 minutes. My personal record on the 20' piece previously was a 1:49.8 split. Pretty good. The team goal on Saturday was for the entire team's average to be one second lower in PR split. Okay.
I pulled a 1:49.9.
You know, I've done pitifully bad on 20' minute pieces before, being an amazing eight seconds off my PR before (not a good amazing), but missing my PR by a tenth of a second is even more aggravating than blowing it completely. If I'd started sprinting just a minute sooner, I could keep asking myself "What if" questions until the cows freeze over. Oh well, that didn't make any sense.
Even though the rest of the university stuff remains closed, we're actually still scheduled to have practice tomorrow, although it's reportedly 'any time between 1-7' instead of being a set time, so I guess they just figured if you're physically not buried in snow you could come. Whatever works, I guess.
Art Status
I'd like to think I'm starting to escalate back into the art scene; for whatever reason it's gotten incredibly easier the more comfortable and the better I've been doing with my classes. A counselor, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or a parent could probably explain why, but I can't. Oh well, it works. I've gotten a lot of non-art stuff done lately like the influx of deviant stamps and the new CSS journal stuff, but there's been a decent amount of art flying around.
At the writing time of this journal I'm consolidating what my original plan for the journal header was into a deviantID, and hopefully my theoretical company's logo won't be splashed around my front page too much. It should work better than that Jeopardy! one; even if I still think it's a fairly original idea, I just can't get myself to like the looks of it.
New designs for Camaron and other furry characters of mine should be forthcoming, as well as perhaps some Transformers fanart and more bird-like robots. I've also been writing a lot of things like biographies for my characters, and depending on who you ask they've either gotten pathetically over-long or amazingly thorough for characters that started out as fancharacters, but then again, that's all opinion. Still, I can keep hoping that I'll be able to successfully pitch a series or three down the road.
Concluding Status</u>
I think this is one of the longest if not THE longest journal I've ever written, to the point that my fingers are frankly starting to hurt and I'm probably going to get carpel tunnel. I guess that's my fault for letting my life backlog since late December, but at least if I update more in the future I shouldn't have do describe a month plus in a few paragraphs.
Hope you like the new journal set-up I got here; all my stamps've moved to the Shoutboard plus a little dohicky I picked up from WZZM... I love the Weatherball. It's even cooler in person, but unfortunately it's a wee far from campus. Maybe I should just go downtown more, though. Oh, and the two flags are just showing off a little quiet national pride, me being half-Korean and all. Nothing major.
With that, I leave you with a head full of unnecessary information and myself with negative lows and accumulating snow drifts. Peace out.