Thursday, April 30, 2009

a goodbye

I have been waiting to set up this account until I get my official umn.edu email address (minus the "morris") but I couldn't wait any longer-- the Twin Cities campus is decidedly neglecting me and wordpress is annoying and unfamiliar.

An overpriced Starbuck's frappuccino-- the kind you get at the grocery store in glass bottles (Morris is too obscure to have any chain coffee shops)-- is making its effects known almost nine hours after being imbibed. I should never be allowed to have caffeine. I tell myself almost every morning that I will go to bed at 10:00PM, or at any rate before midnight.

This never happens. The unbalancing reemergence of the sun this spring has me consciously aware that it is the reason why I can't go to sleep: I need a certain amount of dark to start studying, to start feeling sleepy, to start going to bed.

I need to not sabotage myself with caffeine. I don't even like coffee.

At some point, I should probably take stock of this past year or even the past two years at Morris. Compile all the fun-facts: like how it took me almost two years to realize that the Library has two more floors than I had ever visited, or more than a year to figure out that there was a "Humanities Lounge" (the most pitiful place in the world).

Maybe to remember what it all looked like because I'll never have a reason to drive in that direction again. No more dismal succession of railway towns that are so isolated and dead that they don't even have gas stations. No more driving past the building that housed my first apartment that was owned by the most noxious/unprofessional landlord in the region (even the fact that my old apartment, and the one he wouldn't rent me because I-wanted-the-nasty-couch-gone, is unrented after a year doesn't make it better). No more unwashed Morris students without shoes. No more blaringly obvious race quotas/mongering--oh, wait.

The Twin Cities promises slighly more-- if only because its noxiousness will be dilluted by 19,000 more people than Morris. I am quite dissapointed with its transfer process but what can you expect? Transfer applicants are obviously scum because they didn't chose your institution for their freshman year (or worse, weren't smart enough to get in) and so deserve to be treated like shit. By the time I am able to register for fall classes on May 19th many of my favored classes will be "closed". Professors will be unsympathetic because they hear it everyday. ("Hey! Your transfer from another UMN campus lets you not register quite as late as other transfer students! Isn't that a consolation?" Ah, no.) Also, I am required to go through a herd orientation session before I am allowed to register.

And at the time of orientation they MIGHT not have the credits for my major transferred-- no big deal.

I spent a good deal of one night last week trying to reading Foucault and miming the stabbing of my margin-writing pencil into my neck.