Vacation is over… yay… *sniffle*
Well, here we are, a week into another semester. It comes with new classrooms, a new schedule, new teachers (for the most part anyway), and, for us freshmen, our first taste of real college. Ugh…
It’s not that I mind waking up at six to be in the classroom by eight. It’s not that I mind that biology is my first class of the first day of the wretched, wretched school week. It’s just, I love this little thing called sleep and, while we had a magnificent love affair over break, I feel as though my work is starting to strain our relationship.
Not only do I have a harder schedule for school (my teachers also decided this was the week to break us in as far as homework… or break us, I can’t decide), but three days of the school week I go to work directly afterward ‘til ten (feel free to come and laugh at me, I work customer service at Super Saver). However, in the hectic-ness of my life now, it’s nice to have an excuse to write. I will admit, last semester I did terribly as far as keeping up on these things, but I have a flash drive and plenty of time between classes every day so I have no more reasons why to be late. I believe I even still owe you the conclusion to my three part on Fall Retreat.
My break went well. It was hard passing the first year anniversary of my grandma’s death, and the dog I’d raised from a puppy died this year, so I’m starting to hate winter with a passion, but aside from that, I worked a lot, had a great Christmas, and am, overall, enjoying school. It’s funny to have a teacher encourage the use of caffeine as a stimulant, but she is a smart woman; keeping us awake in our 8 ‘o clock biology class needs anything and everything she can dish out.
I do have a hate-list already though; bio, just because it’s too early for owls, and psychology. Ugh. Psychology is just dumb. I thought it would be interesting and kinda relaxing, but NOOOOOOO… man was I wrong…
What really bugged me was when I was looking through the textbook and I read about people of ‘higher intelligence’. Okay, so you have some freakish thing happen so that something thinner than usual or something and somehow you’re smarter than the rest of us?! Okay, maybe you are, maybe you have a higher IQ, I don’t give a crap. Too often being ‘smart’ is confused with actual knowledge, a knowledge that you always have to work for. It’s not smart, it’s learning how to better yourself and temper you life with wisdom and that’s actual intelligence. There are so many stupid kids who, because they have been fed as ‘geniuses’ from their youth, are growing up thinking they are actually smarter than the rest of us poor saps.
What’s worse is music. I hate how so many people try to claim that classical music is gonna give you a genius child. Better return those ‘little mozart’ DVDs because when your kid starts smoking pot in high school and decides not to go to college like you expected, gets a dead-end job, and dies drunk in a driving accident, well you better have nothing there to lay the blame on except yourself. And, somehow, us poor metalheads are losing brain cells. Yet we can understand those words that our bands are shouting with such fierce passion, we can hear the amazing excitement hidden in the music, and the things they sing speak to us; that’s better than most can claim. Even the most accepting, tolerant person can’t listen to it without criticizing both us and the ‘noise’ coming from the speakers. But they expect us to tolerate anything they throw at us.
One of the most important things I’ve learned during my short stay here is that belief is everything. If someone believes something, they will push it on you, whether passively or aggressively, or just acting as though that is just the way things are. Everyone tries not to let you have your own opinion. From my group of friends pushing me to lose my virginity (yes, I am still a virgin), to my biology teacher presenting the theory of evolution as though it were fact. But why should I give up something I have been saving desperately for someone I truthfully love just because? Why should I believe this theory as fact just because the evidence for it was analyzed by people with a bias? So much for open-minded science, they already refuted themselves without realizing it, but they don’t care so long as there is no ‘creator’. Meanwhile, here I am, the ‘intolerant Christian’, quietly taking in their words, processing them, then deciding, just as silently, what I want to believe.
Silently. And just as silently, I will say now, they can think what they like. I’m not accusing anyone of shoving anything down my throat, because if I am there and listening, it is my choice. I just wish everyone would be as tolerant of my views as I am supposed to be of theirs. If I weren’t, I would be labeled in a heartbeat. Truly, there is no one more highly respected in my mind than those who have their views and will listen to mine without judgment.
My English teacher of last semester is a loss to me this semester, though my current teacher is amazing; one Miss Rosemary Moore, a great teacher I can assure you. She disagreed with me on almost every paper I wrote for her, but she loved my writing and the boldness with which I presented myself. She wrote a cover letter for me to get this position even. It would have been so easy for her to hate the fact that I stood strongly against many things she believed in firmly.
But not all people are this way and I don’t care. If I can get a mere few in my lifetime that can listen and help me to better myself, I will be more than happy, because, in the end, what everyone else did won’t matter. What I make of it, however, will. No one can govern what I do, and so long as I don’t restrict myself by allowing others to control me, as my dad said, I will, at least, be happy.
And I hate Dodge Hall; the floor squeaks.