Worst Kept Secrets

I’m taking an undergrad Chinese class, courtesy of an incredibly generous tuition discount offered through my employer, and it starts tomorrow. I just bought mechanical pencils and a binder, I’ve got my syllabus all printed out and stapled, and I’ve been dutifully reviewing the material we’ll be covering in class tomorrow. The entire process is cracking me up a little bit.

I haven’t been in a classroom since I graduated in 2005. I’m in the middle of an MLS program, but it’s entirely online. Taking classes online feels a lot less like Going to School, and more like a really weird way to choose to spend your free time. I’m not saying it’s bad, it’s just a different experience from wondering what your classmates are going to be like (and how obvious it’s going to be that you’re eight years older than most of them), picking out your school supplies, and trying to find a decent outfit to wear.

I’m also in such an entirely different head space than I was my freshman year at Carleton - I don’t remember being particularly thrilled about learning when Mom and Dad loaded up all my Nine Inch Nails posters into the minivan to pack me off to Minnesota. I was more excited about the possibility of cute boys who read lots of books and wanted to stay up late having impassioned discussions about them, decorating my dorm room, and pretending to be a grown up. This time around, though, I’m so wholeheartedly, single-mindedly intent on learning as much as I absolutely can that I’m worried I’m going to be a thoroughly contemptible object to my classmates, who are probably not spending their shower time reciting an introductory speech in Chinese or frantically tearing through the dictionary in a desperate weekend long cram session. I’ve been a bit of a teacher’s pet/goody-two-shoes all my life, but throughout high school and college was able to cut it with a lot of black eyeliner and an angsty scowl. I have no idea how my lunatic inner over-achiever is going to go over now that I’m a thousand times more likely to rhapsodize about my dog’s doggy smile than the existential beauty of a dead rat I saw in the parking lot that made me think a lot about the fleeting nature of life and love and unspeakable bleakness, and would you like to see the poem I wrote about it?

I have quite literally spent the last hour and a half working on the questionnaire our professor sent out, which probably was meant to require about ten minutes. I hope she likes me! Go Razorbacks!