Sweet and Creepy

I am now a student. I walked through the student lounge on Thursday, looking at other students. I picked up my student bus pass and watch movies at student prices. According to University records, these people sitting around me are my peers, yet I am not one of them. Walking into my programming class I thought I had turned the wrong corner and somehow ended up at a callback audition for the next Revenge of the Nerds movie. And when I walked in I’m sure they all turned at me thinking, “This guy is old enough, he must be our professor.”

This first quarter I’m completing prerequisite classes, which means a lot of my courses are undergrad. For my first class, I sat in the tiny desk and waited nervously for the professor to arrive. I couldn’t believe I was actually sitting in a classroom. I looked around at the other faces, they didn’t seem to care about much of anything. Some of them obviously hadn’t bathed that morning, and others were trying to take a nap. I wanted to shout out to these people, “Don’t you get it?? This is for real! You have to get an ‘A’ in this class. It really will affect the rest of your life!”

But they wouldn’t have listened. At 19, I wouldn’t have listened either.

Behind me sat some chatty Cathy with her dopey friend. She wouldn’t stop talking about how she was failing out of every class. Once the lecture started she continued to talk and I astutely determined the source of her problem. About 30 minutes into the class I wanted to turn around to her and scream, “Don’t you get it?? You’re not listening and that’s why you fail! You have to shut up! This is important!” But she would have dismissed me as some uptight old guy who needed to relax.

The class itself was fairly interesting. I concentrated hard to absorb what I could. Early in the class the professor asked the students how many had programming experience. 40% raised their hand. He chuckled, then remarked, “Ok, I suppose we don’t have to go over boolean expressions and floating point numbers.”

I silently cried out, “Yes! Yes, please do! Don’t assume I know anything. I’m a theatre person!”

I’m excited to learn this stuff, but I’m resigned to the idea that it will be hard.

The new year also brings a city-wide change that affects more than just my tiny narcissistic sphere. A smoking ban went into effect January 1. Last night I went to a bar for the first time since the ban went active. It might have been that I wasn’t drinking. (Last weekend’s fiasco soured me against the spirits). It might have been that there was no smoke to cover it up. Whatever was the cause, the bar smelled like pungent sewer gas. It was so bad I had conversations with strangers about it. It was like upon entry every patron checked their coat and was given a urinal cake to chew on. I never got used to it. It never went away. I became sad. Does this mean I have to drink at home alone from now on?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 10:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.