Seriously, I miss last September’s impeachment hearings.

Four very strong candidates threw themselves into the running for Student Government President: Nate Bronstein, Anthony Dunham, Nirvana Habash, and Seth Rosenstein. Through my past six months as Student Government Parliamentarian, I have gotten to know each of them very well and have worked closely with most of them. Nate Bronstein was an enthusiastic Senator when I joined last September, and is now the Director of Outreach for the SG. He’s the one who put on a Winter Semi-Formal before finals last semester (actually the biggest SG event that actually happened so far this year), and got everyone excited about it by having a sense of humor about it–such as naming sponsorship levels for the event “Bronstein” and “Fiery Passion.” I didn’t have an opportunity to get to know Nirvana very well as she was abroad during first semester and only rejoined the Senate after the Snowpocalypse, but she has definitely shown herself to be an active member of SG. Seth Rosenstein was first sworn in as Senator on the day that I was sworn in, and I’ve seen him take a very active role as an advocate for key campus life issues in the Senate, particularly stepping up after AU’s housing policies flip-flopped last January. And Anthony Dunham was instrumental in helping me get acquainted with the Student Government; he was the Speaker of the Senate when I first became Parliamentarian (making him the person I worked closest with during my first month or so transitioning into my role), not to mention he was my predecessor as Parliamentarian in 2008-09.

See what I did there? I just said something positive and complementary about all four candidates and my experiences with them, without pointing fingers, criticizing their thoughts about running, or saying anything about the state of AU’s Student Government. Nor did I endorse any of them. I know who I’m going to vote for tomorrow–it wasn’t easy for me to decide–but I’m not going to spew out a meaningless endorsement as though one of them is immensely superior to the other three.

And that’s because I don’t expect any kind of huge partisan politics to arise out of a presidential campaign for Student Government. We’re not here to fight over foreign policy or health care positions; we’re all here to advocate and do what’s best for the students of American University.

Last Thursday I produced the televised SG Presidential Debate co-sponsored by ATV and The Eagle. It took a lot of work over many weeks to put together, and a number of communication issues caused me a lot of undue stress in preparing the live production. But in the end, as far as the production was concerned (which was the primary area of my concern), the debate went very well. Feel free to watch it here.

If you do watch it, you’ll probably notice that a) it’s kind of boring, and b) the candidates seem to agree with each other a lot. Knowing all four of these candidates well (as I’ve already mentioned), I wasn’t at all surprised that they would agree a lot with each other. Yet for some reason all of the viewers, campus media commentators, and the other crew members that were working with me on this debate seemed surprised that there wasn’t more drama. For some reason some short-sighted commentators seemed to miss the obvious fact that we at ATV were not responsible for what the candidates actually said. In my view, the debate exemplified exactly what the Student Government and the candidates should stand for.

And outside of last Thursday’s debate, what we’ve been getting out of this week-and-a-half campaign season has been anything but civil, yet the stupid part has been that the primary group responsible for making these elections such a firestorm is the board within SG responsible for overseeing the elections themselves.

You see, AUSG has a whopping seven pages of election regulations that place all kinds of restrictions on campaigns, and it’s up to the Board of Elections to enforce them. Of course it doesn’t help that the Board of Elections chair resigned just a week or two before the elections started getting underway, so the newly-installed chairwoman of the Judicial Board (which oversees the BOE) decided to also take on the role of Acting Chair for the BOE. Hopefully there wouldn’t arise any possibility of a conflict of interest.

Except that a conflict did arise when a staff member on Nirvana Habash’s campaign sent a campaign e-mail through an academic mailing list without permission from the BOE, a clear infraction of the election regulations. The BOE responded by suspending her campaign and removing her from the ballot. (Huh, just for sending an e-mail? But wait, it gets better.) She appealed the decision to the Judicial Board, which of course had the same chair (though the chair claims that she did not speak or vote in the J-Board hearing and deliberations), and they found that the BOE had failed to provide her with the necessary 12 hours to “rectify” the violation. (Though I’m still baffled as to how one “rectifies” the sending of an e-mail to a mailing list.) Of course this caused plenty of controversy, and after a retrial, or whatever it was, the decision was reached that Habash could continue to campaign but would have to run as a write-in candidate.

Okay, that kind of stinks, but the debate was that night and everything was hunky-dory. After the debate, the current SG president endorsed Nate Bronstein in a song, and then Friday came. And then all hell broke loose.

• Friday 3/19, 2:46 PM: Habash calls for student misconduct charges for the acting BOE chair
• 5:48 PM: The Judicial Board chair sends out a Judicial Order in which she steps down as acting BOE chair and announces a replacement
• ~6:30 PM: Some idiot sends a fake e-mail to numerous list-servs, reaching over 1000 AU students, claiming to be an endorsement for Nate Bronstein.
• 8:43 PM: The Eagle posts an editorial arguing that all the presidential candidates ought to just run as write-ins to make the election “fair” again

Oh, and yet another e-mail violation happened the next day.

Now to keep this blog post from getting extremely long, I won’t go into just how crazy all of this was for the candidates, the Board of Elections members, and everyone else in the SG. Let’s just say that it feels like whatever shred of legitimacy the SG may have had simply vanished during this campaign. The idea of having all candidates run as write-ins never happened because apparently–according to the other candidates–Seth Rosenstein refused to do so. Fortunately the fake Bronstein e-mail did not cost him anything (since it was so obviously fake), though paradoxically the next e-mail supporting him that was sent out the next day by an actual member of his staff didn’t cost him anything, despite being similar to the one that hurt Habash. So now there’s all kinds of allegations about every such thing flying around in terms of who did or didn’t violate some rule or act unethically, and there’s no shortage of Senators who claim that they’re going to vote invalidate the election results (I wish them luck, because for some strange reason, our bylaws necessitates a 3/4 vote for that to happen). I’m sorry, I thought we were supposed to be focusing on which candidate would make the best next Student Government President?

Even though I strongly disagree with his unfounded comments towards last week’s SG Debate and his “the world revolves around me” attitude when it comes to AUSG, I would have to agree with him on these comments. But then one scrolls down and reads the mudslinging between the candidates over their different interpretations of what the future of SG should look like–there’s just no need for it. (I guess I should applaud Nate Bronstein for not getting involved when the comments turned into a virtual food fight between the other three candidates.)

As I said, I’ve decided whom I’m going to vote for. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t vote for any of the other three candidates. All of them are active, passionate members of SG and have a wealth of good ideas that they will bring to the office which they seek. None of them deserve to have less-than-an-equal shot at the office because of some insignificant, harmless “violation.” Ultimately though, one thing that this campaign is showing clearly is the attitudes of each of these candidates, and that’s going to be the key to selecting the cream of the crop for this office. The American University Student Government is so dysfunctional right now that–while it may not be anywhere near as bad as the actual government just a few blocks away from us–it is going to take a leader that can reach out to all sides, build bridges, establish good relationships, and especially be able to exude a sense of humor when it’s fitting to do so to help bring the AUSG closer to where it should be–an organization that represents, serves, and advocates for students. And most of all it’s going to take more than just the newly-elected President; everyone in SG and everyone at American University are going to have to stop lighting fires and start building bridges if AUSG is ever going to change direction.

I hope that despite all of the new fires that this election has fueled, we will walk away from this election having selected a leader that will help turn the sprinklers on so that we can all cool down and move forward.

This is about the first time that I can actually say that I’ve had an actual vacation in the real sense of the word. After a long and difficult semester at school, getting to come home, relax, and spend time with family for three weeks has been wonderful. Granted, it hasn’t been entirely about relaxing, as I did get a number of things done over the past few weeks:

• Completed a phpBB Weekly website renovation and edited another “best of” clipshow
• Getting more work done on ATV’s website (though I’ve still got a lot more to do)
• Our family’s harp/flute/cello trio had a great (albeit abbreviated) season playing our Christmas music, playing at a potluck on Friday 12/18, playing at the park each day during 12/22-24 (under awesome weather conditions, for winter), and recording ourselves the following week
• Getting to meet again with friends from church, from 17th District PTA, family, and others
• Getting to pay a visit yesterday to my high school, which was wonderful
• And overall, just having a chance to relax for awhile back in my old pre-DC living routine

But all good things much come to an end, as yet another semester is now coming up right on the heels of the last one. Again, my class load this semester consists exclusively of general ed courses, and I’ve still got an undecided/undeclared major. However this semester’s schedule of classes is much more diverse in its range of topics compared to last semester, and its timing is much more consistent–not all over the place like last semester’s was.

• Psychology as a Natural Science — Mondays and Thursdays, 9:55-11:10 AM — 3.00 credits
• Psychology as a Natural Science Lab — Thursdays, 5:30-8:10 PM — 1.00 credits
• Honors English II — Mondays and Thursdays, 2:10-3:25 PM — 3.00 credits
• Contemporary Media in a Global Society — Tuesdays and Fridays, 9:55-11:10 AM — 3.00 credits
• Transformations of Shakespeare — Tuesdays and Fridays, 11:20 AM-12:35 PM — 3.00 credits
• Schools and Society — Wednesdays, 11:20 AM-2:00 PM — 3.00 credits

So why do I like this schedule so much more than last semester’s? First of all, I found that one of the hardest things for me last semester was how every single day’s schedule was completely different in terms of its timing. My first class would be a really-late 11:20 on Monday and Thursday, a really-early 8:30 on Tuesday and Friday, and nothing on Wednesday. Which was very annoying for someone like me who functions better under more consistency and structure. This semester, I start at 9:55 AM across the board, except for Wednesday which is 11:20. (So what, my high school also had later starts on Wednesdays.) This schedule is also much more respectful of my free time: last semester I had classes scattered throughout the day on Tuesdays and Fridays giving me only small, fairly-useless patches of free time on those particular days. And with the exception of the Thursday evening lab, only two classes per day should be much more manageable as well. And speaking of the Thursday evening lab, it doesn’t go till 10-11 PM like my Thursday night class last semester did!

And my classes score a bit more variety than last semester’s. I indicated in a post last August that my classes seemed a bit Political Sciencey. That omen proved to be accurate, as I kind of found out that political sciencey stuff might not be my forte after all. And having three of my classes relate to it got kinda dull kinda fast. This semester I’ve got a science class (the one general ed area that I didn’t delve into last semester), a class that comes from the School of Communication (which I might possibly be leaning towards), a class that comes from the Education department (another interest that I’ve had), a class about Shakespeare (because it sounded more interesting than the other choices, plus I’ve got some experience with Shakespeare), and English.

So far only my Contemporary Media has a syllabus available, and it’s looking pretty interesting, potentially involving trips to and reports on media events in DC. So maybe this semester I’ll get to delve into some of the political fun happening just blocks away from campus. English is also sure to be interesting: this semester is the semester where each section of English breaks down into a different theme that is focused on for the semester–the one I selected is “the New Yorker course,” which essentially means (to my understanding) that we subscribe to and study The New Yorker magazine as a basis for studying English. Of course I will have a better idea of what we’re doing there once the syllabus gets posted.

Nevertheless, I am very confident that this second semester will be much, much better than first semester was. The main reason: I’ve already done this once. When I left for DC back in August, I had no idea what my life was going to become or what kinds of things I was going to get involved in. I had never lived on my own for so long before, and the dynamics of college classes are 100% different from the dynamics of high school that I was used to. Now I’m heading back to AU with a better idea of how to do well there, and everything is starting again completely fresh. And as such, I’ve got a couple of goals for this next semester:

• Do a better job of keeping up with my classes. I’ve alluded to the fact that I got behind on my reading by the second week of classes and never caught up. But quite frankly, while all of my classes had a lot of reading, only about two of my classes had an insane amount of reading to accomplish, and my generalization wound up being a bit unfair to my other classes. So next semester I’m hoping to do a better job of at least staying on top of the reading assignments, even if I don’t completely get to every single word. Oh, and let’s hope that I won’t beat out the 20 papers that I did last semester.
• Budget EVERYTHING. Money, meals, sleep, daily schedule, studying, free time, you name it. My efforts at doing this failed last semester because things kept changing so much and so fast. This semester, I’ve got a better grasp of the dynamics of being at college, and so I need to start planning and budgeting so that I can keep up with everything this semester. Not having to do late-nighters and stuff would be nice too…
• Get out and about more. AU has a free bike lending program which I didn’t take advantage of last semester, but I would definitely like to as there’s supposed to be some great places to bike in around DC. Or even just taking a walk every once in awhile; the day before I left DC for home I had a nice walk around northwest DC which was very enjoyable and refreshing. I need to do that more; getting off-campus doesn’t have to mean sitting on a shuttle or Metro train. Plus, three places I want to visit in DC this semester: Rock Creek Park, Eastern Market, and the Capitol.
• Learn everything I can about ATV. I’m already about 60% of the way there, but I really want to be able to learn how everything at ATV works so that I can know the place inside and out. In addition, I’m going to be working with them to make a lot of new things possible this semester–pushing the envelope, so to speak–such as Skype interviews and much more. Plus there’s always more stuff that can be built for their website…
• Make Tech tAUk the best show on ATV. Okay, maybe not the best show; I’m not that narcissistic. But I definitely want our show to be the most cutting edge show on there. Our first three episodes have laid a solid foundation for the show, but we’ve got a long way to go to really make it look awesome and professional. And a lot of it will be based on how well I can develop my editing skills. Now that I’ve reached the “experienced beginner” stage of Final Cut Pro, it’s time for me to get even more experience and delve deeper.
• Find a job. I’m getting kind of tired of mooching off of my parents to support myself, though that probably won’t stop before too long. Actually I’ve got a couple of things that I want to be able to do this summer, and I want to be able to set aside some money of my own to help fund those goals.

I’m also entering this semester not completely sure when I’m coming back from DC. My winter break flights were already booked at the beginning of August, weeks before I took off for even my first semester. That’s not holding quite as true this semester. For one thing, I’m not coming back home for Spring Break. The reason is that my family’s spring breaks are around the time of Easter, which is April 4th. My Spring Break is March 8-12. See a problem here? If I came back for Spring Break, my family would all be at work and school, the only time I’d really get to spend with them would be on the weekends, which is (oh yeah) when I’d be flying. Given the cross-country distance, it’s not worth the travel expenses. Of course the other side is that Spring Break will be a lot like Thanksgiving Break was: an almost-completely-abandoned campus, very few food places open on-campus, and an insane amount of free time with which I’ll wind up being ridiculously productive. Meh, I’ll probably be able to suffer through it without too many problems.
As for summer, I’m not entirely sure yet if I want to opt for a summer class or an internship or something. Or I may decide to fly right back to San Francisco and find something to keep myself occupied here. At the very least I do plan to come back to the Bay Area at some point in order to be able to do things like OSCONvasion 2010, etc. The nice thing is that I’ll have a very early and long summer break. My last final is on Tuesday, May 4, and classes won’t start back again until August 23 (I’m assuming based on last fall’s schedule). But I’ll let a bit more of the semester go by before I start worry about any of that.

So here’s to the start of what will (or better) be a much better semester!

P.S. Yes I know that it’s now freezing in DC, and yes my cold weather gear is all ready to go. I actually have a bit too much cold weather gear, if such a thing is possible.

I’m typing this blog post right now on a plane somewhere over the midwest, ultimately bound for Oakland (via a stop in Albuquerque, of all places), and finally ultimately bound for home. I probably would have preferred to have written this post back in DC; unfortunately packing and dorm-cleaning got in the way of accomplishing that goal.

Ultimately though, today is a proud day for me, as today marks the end of my first semester in college. I don’t think that I’ve ever anticipated a day as highly or for as long as I have anticipated today. (Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I’ve been counting down the days on there for the past four weeks.) I actually was here for a relatively long time this semester: a full 123 days. I got here on Saturday, August 15th, the earliest possible move-in date, two days before freshman welcome week, and stayed through today, December 15th, a day before the latest possible move-out date, and four days after my last final. Most AU students got here between 3-9 days after I did and left up to a week before I did, and most of them also went home for Thanksgiving Break. So by AU standards, I was here for a LONG time.

This semester was also significantly long for me in other ways. Never before had I spent more than ten nights way from home in one sitting, and this time I spent 122 nights away from home. In fact, I even went back through my memory and tallied up the total number of nights that I had spent away from my family in my entire life (all of them within the past seven years): the tally before I left in August was 83 nights. Today my tally is 205.

And in some ways my extended length of time away from home was a good thing. I repeatedly told people this semester that I saw this first semester at AU as a marathon: the goal was simply to make it to the finish line. While there were a number of good things about this semester, there have also been many, many times when it has–not surprisingly-felt like the semester from hell.

Random side-note: Trying to type a blog post when you’re sitting in the middle-seat on an airplane is not fun on the arms.

My first week at AU actually kind of felt a bit like a vacation, or like one of those week-long trips that I’ve taken out of town. Part of this feeling was caused by the fact that it was only welcome week (classes hadn’t started yet) and I was still mostly living out of my suitcase until I got more moved in during that first week. But it was towards the end of my second week that I had a moment of reality hit me, as I realized that I was going to be living like this and supporting myself for the next fifteen weeks. That was a very vulnerable moment for me that is actually interesting to reflect on in hindsight now that those fifteen weeks have since passed by, and I have had a number of similar homesickness-induced moments throughout this past semester.

Homesickness is really a difficult thing to try to explain. Sure, you can look up the technical description of it on Wikipedia, but I don’t think that there is really any sort of “according to Hoyle” type of homesickness. But I feel that my homesickness this semester wasn’t due to loneliness (because there were certainly plenty of people around here to mix with this semester), or due to being unable to communicate with my family from back home (because cell phones and e-mails took care of that easily), but rather simply being divorced from everything that was familiar and that I took for granted in my life at home. These ranged from something as big as the supportive community at the church I practically grew up in to something as small and basic as a home-cooked meal.

* * * * *

But college life wasn’t all doom and gloom. Here’s a “thumbs up-thumbs down” look at some of the more notable aspects of life at AU that I endured this semester.

THUMBS UP: Washington Metro
Noting that I have yet to use public transit in New York City (which I’m told is supposed to be really good), the Washington Metro (Metrorail and Metrobus) is the best public transit service I’ve ever used (and as you may have heard, I’m a geek when it comes to public transit). Metrorail is certainly much more frequent, more convenient, and cheaper than BART, San Francisco’s equivalent. Which is good, because quite frankly if you’re going to live on campus as a full-time student somewhere, it is vital for you to be able to get off-campus, even if only to grab a bite to eat and come back. This becomes all the more essential at AU where you can count the number of on-campus places to eat on the fingers of one hand, so getting off campus once or twice a week was very important to me. Fortunately the Metro made this routine possible without having worry about timing or breaking the bank to do so.

THUMBS DOWN: TDR (Terrace Dining Room)
TDR is the one dining hall on campus, meaning that it’s the only place to go to use our meal swipes (freshmen have to invest in 150 swipes minimum per semester). Which would be okay except that 80% of the time, they’re playing loud music over the loudspeakers in there, which is almost always rather obnoxious rap music (my least favorite kind). Perhaps they haven’t heard that some people (like me) like eating in peace. I would probably attribute the annoyingly loud music in TDR to the reason why I’ve actually lost a bit of weight this semester. However they do have good food most of the time and a number of healthy food choices, but in both of those categories they don’t even come close to a good old home-cooked meal.

Other Campus Venues
As I mentioned, there aren’t many other on-campus places to eat, but the ones that are there get a split. Subway definitely gets a thumbs-up for having the healthiest non-TDR food on-campus, and so I’ve grabbed sandwiches there many times this semester despite my refusal to believe that Jared ever wore those jumbo-sized jeans. McDonald’s is in the middle; while I refuse to believe that their food is real food, they have the most convenient hours on campus. While I try to limit my presence there, the “fast” part of fast food has been necessary a few times. Another big thumbs-up goes to Einstein Bros. Bagels, which I started frequenting when I learned in early November that I was running out of meal swipes. Their sausage/egg/cheese bagel became a nice breakfast regular for me, and is less than half the cost that a meal swipe would add up to.

The main thumbs-down here goes to The Tavern, which serves more fast-food types of things like burgers, pizza, nuggets, fries, etc. The servers there are the rudest people I have ever come in contact with. The first (and only) time I ordered there, they yelled at me because I had the audacity to be in the middle of filling up my drink cup at the fountain when the first half of my order came up, and then they refused to give me the fries which I had paid for. It is in fact common knowledge on campus that you will be yelled at if you order food in The Tavern, yet a number of students don’t seem to mind. Me? I very much do mind, and I swore that I would never eat there again, no questions asked.

IN THE MIDDLE: AU Shuttle
I’ve been to Stanford’s campus, and they have a very complicated shuttle service with multiple routes, schedules, etc. AU’s shuttle is much simpler: it goes between campus and the Tenleytown-AU Metro stop. (It also has a stop at Tenley Campus along the way.) An alternate route goes between the Metro and the Washington College of Law (another AU campus). Because of traffic, it does generally take longer to go to the Metro than to get back from the Metro, and it can get crowded during peak hours, but otherwise it runs as a good shuttle service should. Except for the fact that about a week into the start of classes, AU came up with the idea of the “Super Loop,” an awkward combination of the two other routes, which runs on weekdays after 8 PM and full-time on weekends. The Super Loop route is essentially the WCL route, except that once it returns from the WCL it then goes through Main Campus before heading back to the Metro. This isn’t too bad for the people who live on the north side of campus who are still fairly close to where the Super Loop stops, but people like me who live on the south side either have to get off with the north side people, cross a busy Massachusetts Ave. in the dark, and walk all the way through campus (about an eight-minute walk), or stay on the shuttle for the additional 15 minutes it takes to go to the WCL and back. A lot of students are angry about the Super Loop, and so far nothing appears to be changing, hence the reason why the AU Shuttle doesn’t get a thumbs up.

THUMBS DOWN: Dorms
Living in dorms isn’t entirely bad, because you do get to know people. And as for my roommate, I couldn’t have asked for a better roommate to live with this semester. The part that I can’t stand is the noise. Noting that I historically prefer to be an early morning person and have generally tried to go to bed around 10 PM or shortly thereafter, finding out that quiet hours here started at 11 PM on weeknights and 1 AM on weekends was a little bit disconcerting. And even then it will still frequently be loud on the floor an hour or two after that. The walls in Anderson Hall are thin, and my room is located right at the intersection of two loud hallways with my bed right next to the hallway-facing wall. In other words: trying to get to bed early in the AU dorms is a lost cause; my average bedtime this semester has fallen between 12-2 AM, which is why 8:30 AM classes are so hard to pull off (despite the fact that I went to high school starting at 7:50 AM for four straight years). At least I probably won’t have to worry about jet lag when flying back and forth between DC and the Bay Area!

THUMBS UP: Library
This past summer, our local library in San Mateo had to make cuts to their hours, with the hours of 11 AM-8 PM on M-Th, 11 AM-5 PM on F-Sat, and 1-5 PM on Sun. (Actually they were closed on Sundays for a month and a half during summer.) So you can imagine the shock of going to a university library which is open 24 hours for most of the week. AU’s Bender Library regularly opens at 9 AM on Sunday and doesn’t close again until 9 PM on Friday. Saturday hours are 9 AM-9 PM. And for the weeks before/during finals they had a complete 24/7 schedule. (Of course between 11 PM-7 AM the library is restricted to AU students and staff only.) While I avoided the library during finals week, because I was told that it was insanely crowded, the library was certainly a godsend during the month that I went without a computer.

* * * * *

Conclusions
Adjusting to life at AU has been an even greater challenge than I had anticipated it would be. Part of the challenge has simply been the initial challenges that everyone goes through when they have to live on their own and support themselves for the first time, such as planning for meals, shopping for groceries, doing laundry (ugh), budgeting personal expenses, and all of these soft skills while simultaneously maintaining a full-time course load. And all the while remembering that I’m supporting myself off of someone else’s money (mostly my parents’) because I am not yet earning wages or anything. If it wasn’t for my parents helping pay not just for my tuition, room and board, travel, books, etc. in addition to helping me meet my day-to-day expenses, I would count in the District of Columbia demographics as unemployed and homeless. And that’s a humbling thought.

But even more difficult to adjust to is simply how divorced I become from my normal life. Meals have long since ceased to be the enjoyable family gathering around the table to enjoy a warm home-cooked meal made with love. Aside from the few times when I can treat myself to a dinnertime outing in downtown DC or a neighboring city in MD/VA, meals are now simply a mundane chore that I do 2-3 times a day so that I don’t feel hungry. And that is probably the most dramatic example worth offering.

Fortunately, the one saving grace of this experience has been that I have not been alone in experiencing this. Virtually everyone here has been exceedingly kind and friendly (which is both a blessing and a curse due to my inability to remember people’s names), and the upperclassmen that I’ve gotten to know through my extracurricular participation have been able to impart a good amount of advice to me along the way. Even my professors have been very approachable and helpful when getting through some tough spots this semester. And that may perhaps be one of the reasons why my bouts of homesickness grew less and less frequent through the semester as I started to become more involved in other projects and channel my energy towards constructive tasks.

Overall, the college lifestyle is one that I have grown accustomed to, though I still don’t completely like it yet. That leaves a lot of open-ended questions for the future. Will I fare better in Spring 2010 than I did in Fall 2009? Will I be able to prepare some changes to my living habits that can make next semester better? For that matter, will this 24-day vacation back home be one where I will casually slip back into the place where I was before I left for AU, or will my return to the Bay Area feel somewhat awkward or out of place?

Those are questions for me to figure out in the near future. But if there is one thing that I have learned from my experiences this semester, it is to better value the blessings that I have taken for granted in my life, because those blessings become many times more visible once I have been physically separated from them. I would hope that this, my first experience living at a university 4,000 miles away from home, has made me more humble, more thoughtful, and more appreciative of everything and everyone around me.

P.S. One more “thumbs up” to music–both playing it and listening to it–which has kept me sane on a number of occasions. Turns out that “the healing power of music” isn’t just an expression after all. In particular, a “thumbs up” to my new favorite artist Pat Metheny, whose music is so expressive and captivating to listen to that it continues to soothe me despite having listened to it dozens and dozens of times this past semester.

School isn’t just about classes, or at least it shouldn’t be, and that’s why I’m very happy about the extracurricular activities and organizations that I’ve gotten involved in this semester. That’s actually what made this past summer and the start of this semester so tense, because so much of my life had been dedicated to extracurricular organizations that I left behind (hopefully temporarily) to come over to AU, and I didn’t really know what I would be doing when I got here. Fortunately, the various groups I have been a part of have been overall a pleasure to work with and have really helped me get through this semester. So in this blog post (which will be much shorter than yesterday’s was), I wanted to take a look at the various activities I’ve been in and what I’ve accomplished.

ATV
ATV is the student-run television station at American University. I became aware of it last spring shortly after opting to attend AU, and watched a few shows on its website. (One of its shows, AU DeRailed, is actually the first place where I heard an opinion contrasting the advertised view that TDR had some of the best college food in the country. Either AU DeRailed was right or most college food is really terrible.) Well, after having hosted and produced podcasts about technology since summer of 2006, I thought that it would be fun to try to put together a show on ATV covering technology. A few days before I left in August, I even came up with an interesting name while I was about to go to sleep: Tech tAUk. (Note the AU in the name.) Well, a week or two in, I submitted a show proposal, and found out that another freshman had also pitched a proposal for a tech show but with a more magazine-style format. We wound up working together to get the show going following his format and my name, and put out three pretty good episodes during the month of November. You can see them on Tech tAUk’s website.

But while I was making my initial contact with the guys in charge at ATV to work out getting this show going, I mentioned to them that I had some experience putting together websites (after all I had redesigned three different websites this year already), and since their website looked kind of pathetic, I wanted to know if they would like some help. I pitched some ideas to them in early September, and once I got my new MacBook Pro in October, spent about six weeks coding and designing the site under the codename ANewTV. I’ll probably dedicate a whole blog post sometime in January recapping all the work that went into that site, but let’s just say that it was by far the largest coding project I had ever undertaken. ATV’s new site has gotten rave reviews and compliments from everyone at ATV, and I’m very happy to have been able to put work into that project.

Since the site launched on November 11, I’ve been getting even more involved at ATV in ways that I wouldn’t even have expected. I am pretty much now at the amateur level of using Final Cut Pro and am learning more about the program every day. I edited most of episode 2 and all of episode 3 of Tech tAUk myself using the program. I am also now the managing editor of ATV Classics, which is essentially the generic name for reruns which I rip off of archives and format for air, and I have contributed some editing and tech directing assistance on Special Broadcast. Both of those shows now have new opening/closing titles which I edited together. I’ve also been doing Prompter for StarStudded, and probably my most fun bit of work was editing together a Best of Fall 2009 clip-show video for ATV. I also helped ATV launch a live online stream of their on-air programming, and also edited together some great new ATV station bumpers that show the “Now”, “Next”, and “Later” programs in their lineup. We’re also working on some great new things for next semester, including putting together an actual television schedule, and being able to do live Skype video interviews in-studio.

In short, during the second half of the semester I have probably at least a third of my waking hours working at ATV and learning the ropes there. The guys there have been awesome to get to know and work with, especially our General Manager, Sean Speirs, who has been a great mentor to me, an awesome friend, and never misses an opportunity to brighten my day with compliments for my work. At the beginning of the semester I thought that media and communications stuff was more of a hobby for me than anything else, but after this past semester at ATV, I’m beginning to reconsider. Maybe when sophomore year comes around, I’ll end up transferring to the School of Communication? But I’ve still got a few months to ponder that idea…

AU Student Government
I got into the Student Government at American in mid-August when I learned of a vacancy in the position of Parliamentarian of the Undergraduate Senate in an e-mail. I applied for the job, was appointed by the President in late August, and confirmed by the Senate in mid-September.

The interesting thing about the Student Government here at AU is that the prevailing view on campus seems to be that it doesn’t do anything meaningful other than getting itself bogged down all of the time in parliamentary debacles. While the SG does indeed do a good number of meaningful things on campus, it does get itself bogged down frequently in parliamentary debacles. My job is to help ensure that that doesn’t happen, but my role is not equivalent to that of a Sergeant-at-Arms, meaning that sometimes we wind up in parliamentary debacles because certain individuals are trying to make them happen.

It also didn’t help that the very beginning of the semester saw the first-ever impeachment proceedings in the history of the Student Government, as a member of the Senate impeached the Comptroller for alleged falsification of summer time sheets. Being as my parliamentarian role is supposed to have me be impartial, I’ll let you make your own opinion on that case. However, that led into three consecutive nights of 11 PM hearings filled with parliamentary missteps and accusations from the defense of witch hunting–with no actual parliamentarian on hand to help keep some semblance of order, since I hadn’t yet been confirmed as parliamentarian yet. Granted, then-Speaker Dunham did a pretty good job given the circumstances, but the entire process was still a mess for reasons beyond his control. And as the incoming Parliamentarian, I was there to observe, and as I have frequently said, if the Student Government were a fraternity then those impeachment proceedings were my hazing.

Since then, though, I’ve established a very good rapport with most, if not all, of the Senate, and with the new Speaker. I am now very comfortable in my position and quite familiar with the governing documents, and will be an ex officio member of a commission to consider revisions to the governing documents next semester, in addition to continuing in my primary role as parliamentarian.

Music
Finally, I haven’t abandoned my participation in music around here. This past semester I did not try to join the AU Symphony Orchestra because I had no idea how my schedule would work out and didn’t want to over-commit myself. However I do intend to try out next semester. Instead, this past semester I participated in the Chamber Music program, though scheduling difficulties got me into a group with one violin and three cellos, which was difficult to pick pieces for (although I did arrange one piece for our group to play).

However, I have also become a part of the AU United Methodist/Protestant Community, which holds worship services Sunday nights at 7 PM. I am the lead (by “lead” read “only”) male vocalist in their student-run choral group Fellowship of Sound, and also contribute cello there as well. Although adjusting to a different religious community and service structure has been difficult at times, the services have given me a tangible way to stay indirectly connected to home, and it has been wonderful to be a part of it. Plus the home-cooked dinners brought over by the Metropolitan Methodist Church across the street every 2-3 weeks has only helped to sweeten the deal.

So that’s pretty much what my extracurricular activities have been this semester. Of course, there’s always so many opportunities to participate in, and there are a lot of other things that I would like to do but have to prioritize out of my life. It’s also worth noting that I’m still not in an actual job yet, placing me somewhat on the poor side of life, so maybe that’s another thing to think about next semester…

Everyone has a different experience at high school, and no two high schools are exactly the same. Overall, my high school experience was one that I most definitely enjoyed and treasured (even if I didn’t always say so at the time, after all, hindsight is always 20/20), while some of my classmates and floormates here hated high school, and most are rather indifferent. I found my high school classes to involve a good amount of work and commitment, but I generally didn’t have too difficult of a time making good grades, graduating high school with a 3.96 cumulative GPA. Though I wouldn’t come close to characterizing myself alongside some classmates whom have said that they never really did any of the work in high school, just took the tests and got As in the class. But after my four years at Aragon, I would say that it would be rather difficult to get through with all As by never doing any of the work; even if you were miraculously genius enough to pull that off, the teachers and counselors there would be sure to push you towards a more challenging course load.

But regardless of how one’s high school experience was, or how their high school classes were organized, there is no comparison to classes at the university level. The transition from high school classes to university classes literally feels like running head-first into a boulder because it’s the middle of the night and you have no idea where you’re going. And then try adjusting to the different dynamics of a full-time university course load while you’re just beginning to wrap your head around the fact that you have been away from home for two weeks, are living on your own, are starting to figure out that you’ve got to support yourself, and oh yeah, you’re going to be here for another sixteen weeks.

Well, if I was to summarize the differences between high school classes and AU classes, here’s what I would point out:

High school gives you class schedules. At university, they’re more like like life schedules.
At high school, I had six (or seven) 51-minute classes at the same time each and every day. I woke up at the same time every morning, left home on my bike at the same time each day (except late-start Wednesdays, but we’ll overlook that for now), had the same classes each and every day at the same time, and went back home. Routine: it’s a wonderful thing.

Now welcome to American University, where each class is 75 minutes long (though I actually got used to the longer time rather quickly) and only happens twice a week at alternate days. On Mondays and Thursdays I have two classes in a row from 11:20 AM-2:00 PM. But from Tuesdays and Fridays I have a class at 8:30-9:45 AM, then a short break, then a 11:20 AM-12:35 PM class, then a longer break, and then a 3:35-4:50 PM class. And as for Wednesdays, nothing. No day-to-day consistency, no routine. And because I now live at school, I’m always here and can’t get away from it. There is no specific time to wake up and get breakfast, time to go to school and do stuff at school, and then time to go home and do home stuff.

Fortunately my schedule next semester has my classes starting at 9:55 AM across the board (except Wednesdays, though those days will now have an 11:20 AM class), giving me a little bit more much-needed consistency to my schedule. Which is good, because although I’ve attempted on a number of occasions to budget the rest of my life this past semester, it has repeatedly been a lost cause.

Fewer minutes of class does NOT mean fewer minutes of work.
When I was in elementary school, there was this presumed golden rule of the amount of time you should have to spend on homework. Essentially, you were supposed to take your grade number and multiply it by 10 minutes: a 2nd grader would have 20 minutes of homework per night, a 3rd grader would have half an hour of homework, and so on. Well, the failings of this rule became quite apparent by middle school, and far more apparent in high school. (If only I only had 2 hours of homework a night last year, heh!)

And yet, this past summer, I actually had this idea that with only having five classes lasting 150 minutes/week each at university (compared to high school, which had six or seven classes lasting 249 minutes/week each), I would have so much more free time. Ha. I’ve actually been told that the golden rule here is that you should expect to spend twice as much time studying outside of class as you do taking the class. Well, if you can find me 1500 minutes (that’s 25 hours) of available time each week to study for classes, I’ll be happy to oblige. And don’t forget that I’m getting 7-8 hours a sleep each night, eating 2-3 meals a day, actually taking those classes that I’m studying for, and participating in extracurricular and recreational activities to ensure that I can retain my sanity around here.

I stayed caught up with my reading for about the first week, and never caught up since. By the end of the semester, I pretty much gave up trying to do the reading assignments, because (as I frequently explained) I was having a crazy enough time keeping up with the papers. During the sixteen weeks of this semester I wrote 21 papers. 12 of these papers were major assignments requiring five pages or more. And these written assignments often overlapped: I had three papers due on Friday, September 18 (and a fourth one due the day before), and I had four papers due on Friday, November 13.

The readings for most of my classes alone would fulfill the two-for-one studying rule quite nicely, with as many as 100 pages of reading assigned per week. Granted, a few of my classes were a bit more sane with the reading load (I point out the worst offenders below), but I’m an Equal Opportunity Procrastinator, so this semester I’ve become an expert in faking it. And I’m not alone, which has actually led me to my next little revelation…

You’re not supposed to actually do all of the assigned reading.
Okay, you are actually supposed to do all of the assigned reading, or at least I’m sure that this is the case from the professor’s view. But as I’ve already alluded to above, actually doing all of the reading will put you through a world of pain not unlike what taking five AP classes in high school would put you through. (Though for my old classmates in high school who actually did take that many AP classes, I admire you.) Though you’re not supposed to ignore the readings entirely, and this is what I’m going to try to do better next semester. Skim through the readings to get the overall idea for when the professor goes over the content in the next lecture, and be prepared to ask questions of the professor. For someone like me, who is predominantly an audible learner, hearing the professor go over the content probably helps me a lot more than noodling over the reading for hours on end would. And also for next semester, I’m going to try to give some more focus to the classes that have a more sane amount of reading to do by actually putting those readings on a higher priority.

And I’m not making this advice up off the top of my head, I’ve actually had a classmate tell me this specific advice.

It is much harder to get an A at university. It’s also not as important.
Remember why we’re all told to perform well and get good grades in high school? It’s to make our transcript as strong as possible for when we submit our grades to colleges and universities that we’re applying to. While the oft-quoted “it’s better to get a B in an AP class than an A in a common placement version of that class” phrase is used at high school, As are still great things to aim for in high school. And for me, quite frankly, it was expected that I would achieve an A in my classes, with the occasional B. My transcript was fairly strong, even though it didn’t get me into Stanford or Yale. But it did fare me well by getting me into the Honors program at AU and a very sizable merit scholarship.

But now I’m here at AU, and as far as I know, when I graduate in 2013, wherever I’m going probably won’t be looking meticulously over my grades from all eight semesters, and will probably be satisfied with whatever degree I end up having. Or if for whatever reason they do end up looking at my grades, they surely won’t be quite as competitive as what I dealt with during the college admissions process. Now that’s not to say that there’s no incentive to keep my grades up. In order to keep my scholarship and my place in the Honors program, I do need to maintain a cumulative 3.25 GPA. But that’s quite a bit lower than the 3.96 I finished high school with.

And the dynamics of earning an A grade here are considerably different. At high school, you start out the semester with a perfect score (0 out of 0 still counts as a 100% A+), and if you do the work, and show that you’ve gotten the hang of the material on tests and on papers, you can pretty much walk out with an A. Not true here. While most of my professors do factor attendance into the grade (yes, professors DO care a lot about your attendance in class, so let’s eradicate the myth that attendance doesn’t matter right here and now), the grade is primarily calculated based on the major papers and exams of the class. You don’t get a bunch of homework to help you score some easy points in the final grade. Your grade is based on papers and exams, and the exams themselves often consist of long-answer or essay portions themselves, so writing is the name of the game. And whereas in high school you might start out with an A by default, here you start out with a C by default. C means “average,” after all. If you do a good job on your paper, you’ll probably get a B. But don’t expect to see that gorgeous A or A+ on your paper unless you really do have a paper that is superior. That’s not to say that it’s impossible to get an A; I’ve gotten a couple of As on my papers this past semester. But I am not expecting to depart from the Fall 2009 semester with all As by a long shot; if I get one A and four Bs, I will be quite satisfied with my academic performance this semester. (The unofficial 72-hour deadline for my grades has already passed, yet I’m still waiting for grades from all but one of my professors, so those details are still TBA…)

But now some brief words on each of my classes (all of which were General Education classes, since I have no major yet)…

American Society (MTh 11:20-12:35)
A more accurate name for this class would be “Introduction to Sociology,” as the class was primarily about learning the terms and methods of sociology as applied to aspects of American society. While it is definitely interesting to note some of the sociological structures that make up the more unequal and controversial aspects of our society, I don’t think that sociology is really up my alley. Even so, our professor was very enthusiastic and energetic about sociology, and lot of fun to be in class with. She actually was dramatically similar to my biology/biotech teacher from high school, almost in an eerie sort of way.

World Politics (MTh 12:45-2:00)
This class wound up not meeting my expectations in many respects. Maybe I signed up for it because I thought that I would have an interest in politics, though my interest in politics has certainly waned a bit. This class could also have had a more accurate name: “Introduction to International Relations.” This class actually had a bit of overlaps with my American Society class in a couple of places in looking at how international cultures and societies come together. However the more recurring themes included globalization, the changing role of the state, and the three major worldviews on IR. But again, this isn’t really a field that I think I want to pursue.
However I had a very difficult time acclimating to this class and this professor. World Politics is apparently also one of the required introductory courses in the School of International Service; consequently you could count the number of non-SIS majors in the class on the fingers of one hand, and I was one of them. Talk about going from being the big fish in a small pond to the small fish in a huge lake. Our professor also wasn’t present for the first week because he was adopting a boy from Russia (and apparently was unable to pick up his adopted son at any other time), making it harder for me to get used to him. He also was by far the worst offender in terms of assigning way too much reading to do, and for the first half of the semester, he really didn’t go over it in class, instead “facilitating” big class discussions which always strayed away from the main point.
In short, this was my worst class of the semester in terms of how successful I was in it overall.

Critical Approach to Cinema (TF 8:30-9:45 AM; Th 8:10-10:40 PM)
This was a class that I did not have high hopes for at the beginning of the semester, because I didn’t really like movies overall. However, I was pleasantly surprised about how much I got out of the class. Granted, having to throw in a late Thursday night portion in addition to an early 8:30 class wasn’t great (even if the Thursday portion was just watching movies–without popcorn), but overall the movies we watched were better than most of the trash that you see in the theaters today. And even though I still didn’t like about half of the movies we watched, it was quite illuminating to observe the cinematic elements that go into making movies, and just how much of what we see in a movie is done on purpose, even though we take it for granted. My main criticism: the final exam required us to remember aspects of twelve of the fourteen movies we had seen this semester and write about them in medium-answer responses. Trying to remember a movie you saw three and a half months ago is kind of–ahem–difficult. Still, even though I don’t intend to go into Cinema Studies, this class was certainly much more enjoyable than I had been anticipating.

Western Legal Tradition (TF 11:20-12:35)
Okay, I’m not sure about this one. Maybe I thought that I would really dig into this class after how much I had enjoyed the semester of Law & Society I took during my senior year at high school. Well, that idea evaporated when the assignments for the first two classes were to read two Greek plays by Aeschylus. From there, the course moved on to studying the writings and idea of various political philosophers, first Aristotle, then Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Condorcet, and Burke, as well as covering the governments of the Greek polis (or city-state) and the Roman Republic, the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, and the French Revolution. Not really what I had in mind when I signed up last summer. The reading was also very plentiful and very dense.
On the positive side, the professor did have a sense of humor, albeit a very dry one, and a love of hypothetical examples, most memorably one where we were going to invade Bethesda (for you out-of-towners, Bethesda, Maryland is DC’s neighbor to the north) and transform it into a Greek polis. He also didn’t give us any exams, instead assigning three essays over the course of the semester, and he and I have the same first name. Still, I’m starting to rethink the idea of law as something particularly suited to my tastes.

Honors English I (TF 3:35-4:50)
This also wasn’t a class I had high hopes for, since English class hasn’t necessarily been my strong suit. Yet this class ended up being my favorite class of this semester. For one thing, there were only ten of us in the class, and we got along with each other very nicely. The reading and writing assignments were right up my alley: critical pieces concerning how we communicate and associate with each other in our modern society. And the writing assignments were probably the best ones I had out of all my classes in terms of being able to write about things that I actually was interested in writing about. The professor was very personable and a pleasure to be in class with, and always offered great suggestions and advice with our writing. And probably most unique were the workshops that we did for our first two papers, where everyone reviewed everyone else’s paper, and over a span of four classes we all offered comments and constructive criticism on each other’s papers. Maybe English wasn’t a great subject for me in high school, but I’ve certainly felt more confident in it after this past semester.

Conclusion
As far as my classes are concerned, this semester is probably going to go down as the “throwaway semester.” It was my first semester at university 4,000 miles away from home. I entered the semester having really no idea what anything in my life was going to be like, and dealt with numerous other transitions alongside these classes. And my classes this semester were all General Ed classes which primarily gave me ideas of things that I don’t want to pursue in my college career. However, I can at least take pride in getting through my first semester with satisfactory results, and hope for a much better semester when Spring 2010 rolls around.

But today it’s Thanksgiving. And for me, this Thanksgiving is far more bittersweet than in past years, because I’m still here at AU, not with my family. Today is day 2 of a five-day weekend where 80% of the campus has gone home and nothing on campus is open except for the dorms (and that includes any and all places to eat). I know that I’m not the only one that doesn’t get to go home during Thanksgiving, but the first time can be especially difficult to get through, especially when practically the entire campus is gone.

And yet, after over 100 days here at AU (with only 19 to go, as anyone who follows me on Twitter will already recognize), I’ve sincerely come to better appreciate a number of blessings in my life that I had previously taken for granted. And at some point a few days ago, I realized that rather than spend Thanksgiving break feeling lonely, I should instead take the time to do something that I have routinely ignored during Thanksgiving: count my blessings. And so, here are the top things that I am thankful for during this Thanksgiving:

I’m thankful to be here at American University. It’s really easy to name aspects of AU that I don’t like, or to point out times when I was wishing that I was back home. But even through the heartache and homesickness, I am really fortunate to be able to study at this university, and I (and my family, I’m sure) am especially grateful to AU for the significant scholarship that I received to help us better afford to come here. (Although this wouldn’t have been true two years ago, after the scholarship, we’re actually paying less for me to come here than we would for the University of California system. And we all know about the chaos that the UCs are in right now…)

I’m thankful for my opportunities to participate in AUSG and ATV. After two months as Parliamentarian of the Student Government, I have fit into the role very well and have established an excellent working relationship with many of the other individuals in SG. Although SG is a place where you encounter some rather interesting personalities, fulfilling my position there has been an honor and a privilege that has really helped me keep my head up.
And to an even larger extent comes something that I haven’t blogged about yet: My significant involvement at ATV, AU’s student-run television station. I actually spent most of October and the early part of November redesigning their website for them, and once that was completed about two weeks ago, I have since been able to work with the other guys at ATV to bring even more ideas to fruition. (I’m actually spending most of my five-day weekend getting work done there and holding up their fort.) But I can’t express enough how much I’ve enjoyed getting to work with and learn from these other guys at ATV. My involvement there has given me projects to work on to keep myself occupied, but in a larger sense, has introduced me to a number of new friends.

I’m thankful for my friends, teachers, and advisers from high school. There have been a number of times here where I have heard other students talking about how much they hated their high school for whatever reason. I come from a very different place. My four years at Aragon High School opened up a lot of opportunities for me, and I don’t think I would be where I am today if it wasn’t for the support and encouragement that I received from all of the people–adults and students alike–at Aragon. I sincerely miss my high school days and look forward to having an opportunity to visit there during winter break. Yet I cannot help but be thankful for my experiences at high school. And I hope that as I continue to adjust to life at AU, my four years here will also become as special as my high school years were.

I’m thankful for Southwest Airlines. Okay, that did sound weird, but I feel that I’ve just gotta stick this in here. In order to take advantage of hopefully cheaper fares, we actually booked my winter break flights back in August, with me departing on December 15 and returning on January 5. Why return so early? Well, because at the time I thought that being here for “Spring Welcome Week” would be important. Turns out it wasn’t, and by coming back on 1/5, I would miss my brother’s birthday and my only chance to visit my high school during the break. Well, it turns out that Southwest actually doesn’t charge you anything to change flights (if you do it early enough, I presume), so I was able to change over to the same flight on Friday 1/8. But it actually gets even better, because apparently the Friday flight was cheaper than the Tuesday flight, so I now have a $30 credit on Southwest for whenever my next flight is! And that was a change made more than two months after the original reservation. I just can’t tell you how pleased I am about that flight change…

I’m thankful for my friends from home. This is meant to be all-encompassing, covering my relatives, friends from my church at home, and the many people whom I’ve gotten to work with through organizations like PTA and Peace Action over the past 4-5 years. All of these people have touched my life in some way–some of them in ways that I hadn’t fully appreciated until I left them behind for AU. Fortunately through letters, cards, and e-mail, I thankfully haven’t entirely lost touch with many of these people, but I am still thankful for them and how they have each had a positive impact on my life in a small way.

Finally, I’m thankful for my family. In a world where such a large proportion of families end up breaking apart, or in a world where the stereotypical teenager alienates themselves from their parents, I remain so blessed and so thankful for my mom, my dad, and my brother. I have never become detached from them, and they have always been there for me and supporting me in my multiple endeavors. We have been separated by 4,000 miles since August, and I cannot wait to be back home with them in three weeks.

Regardless of where we physically are today, here’s to a very happy and healthy Thanksgiving.

iTouch Me Babe: Bye Bye MacBook
I’m writing this post right now not from my computer, but from a week-old iPod touch. And quite frankly, for the past week, I’ve been doing all of my Internet connectivity from this thing. But not by choice.
I swear I wonder if transitioning to life in DC has made me more clumsy. Only six days in (nearly a month ago now) I had a little bit of accidental water damage to my MacBook’s keyboard. It really wasn’t a lot of water, there was very little left in the bottle, but it was enough to knock out the L and P keys, and make the O key a bit iffy. Cost to fix: $215. Covered under the expensive extended warranty I purchased a year ago? Nope. Temp solution: I bought a wireless keyboard to use instead. Not super-convenient, but good enough. Until last Tuesday (the 8th), when I was using my computer in bed. Not the best idea, but I was exhausted, and I’d done it many times before. Then suddenly I had a freak sneezing attack, and my computer fell to the floor. But it was a carpeted floor and less than a 3 foot drop. But it landed on the lid, on the opposite side of the screen, and that was enough to knock out all but about 1/5 of the screen, allowing me to only see the upper-left hand corner of it. The computer still works fine, I just can’t see what I would be doing. Cost to fix: $755. Covered under that pathetic extended warranty? Nope. (In case you haven’t figured it out, AppleCare is NOT worth it’s cost.)

So here were the choices: no way can I afford to fix the computer, and the cost of fixing it is almost as much as a new one anyway. My MacBook was two and a half years old–almost senior citizen status in the computer world. And since the white MacBook isn’t the best-design Apple has ever made, the case has been getting a little discolored and the edges have been slowly peeling off anyway.
Because I won a Linux computer In the OSCON raffle, and had planning to sell that anyway, that could be eventually used to pay for a new computer, but what was I to do for the few weeks before that got figured out?

I ended up opting to get an iPod touch. I had been thinking about getting one anyway, in order to help me keep track of things like assignments, items on my much-busier calendar, daily expenses, etc. in places where lugging my laptop along would not be practical. Plus at $300, it was the cheapest temporary option. It hasn’t been an ideal way to stay connected, and certainly for doing things like assignments and stuff, it has tied me to the library computers (more on that below), but it’s been better than nothing at all. But man, I look forward to having a real keyboard again.

Impeachy Keen: My Hazing Into Student Government
Yes, I did just describe AU Student Government as though it was a fraternity. It really isn’t, but man, my first week there sure felt like it was.

You may have heard that I submitted an application to fill AUSG’s vacant position of Parliamentarian of the Senate. (Vacant because the last parliamentarian was elected to be Speaker, replacing the last Speaker who became President.) In addition to submitting an application with a r√©sum√© and answers to a questionnaire a week before I left the Bay Area, I was interviewed by several members of the AUSG leadership on August 25, and finally selected by the President as his nominee on the 27th. I went to my first Senate meeting on the 30th, but that was only the first read of my nomination by the Senate, so I didn’t actually get confirmed until last Sunday, the 13th, in which I presented myself before the Committee of Rules and Privileges, which passed me on to the Senate with a favorable recommendation. Finally I presented myself to the Senate, which resoundingly confirmed my appointment (or so I was told), and I was in. I am now the AUSG Parliamentarian!

That’s not what made my first week in the Senate a fraternity-like hazing experience. You see, at the same time that I was just getting in, one of the Senators filed impeachment charges against the Comptroller. Not for embezzlement of funds or anything like that, but for alleged falsification of his summer timesheets. And thus began something unprecedented: the first impeachment hearings in the four-year history of the AU Student Government (AU had a different student governmental organization prior to 2005.) The whole affair was intensely covered (and as intensely looked down on) by the campus media, and pretty much consumed my life during the second week of classes.

Why? Well, the hearings consisted of three nights in a row at 11:15 PM, and went until 2 or 3 AM. A lack of clear procedures in the AUSG bylaws and any other parliamentary authority, meant that the Speaker had to quickly draft a number of improvised procedural rules the day before the hearing, and there were still lots of procedural conflicts and parliamentary inquiries that came up during the proceedings. And probably the hardest for me: I wasn’t even Parliamentarian yet, and therefore didn’t have any authority than to sit in the back with members of the public and observe.

The process wound up getting more and more controversial. What on the first day was disagreement with some of the Speaker’s rulings and disillusionment with how long and slow the process was going gave way to articles in the campus paper alleging that SG executives had been “plotting” to impeach this Comptroller since the end of the last academic year, right after he was elected. And then there was an anonymous person who appealed to the Judicial Board a question on the admissibility of a piece of evidence (a text message) which led to the Judicial Board ordering that the hearings be halted on the third night, leading to some Senators having some very angry remarks against the Judicial Board. That night, the two sides in the hearing met and reached an agreement that the charges would be dropped and the Comptroller would resign. It was rather an anti-climactic ending, and kind of a slap in the face to those of us who had given up so much time and so much sleep to the charges, but no one was complaining that the nightmare was over. It took me over a week to get back to sleeping normally again.

Nevertheless, I think that my dedication to being there (and privately answering some parliamentary questions of some Senators in an unofficial capacity) played a big part in helping me establish a good working relationship with a number of folks there, and I am looking forward to working with the AUSG in my new role.

I Say, You Say, Essays
I mean, bad enough that I’m trying to get settled into a dorm and living on my own for the first time. And that the impeachment craziness made it take twice as long for me to get settled than it should have. But there is one regard in which college classes and high school don’t differ: assignments due at the same time. I had papers in four of my five classes due yesterday, the first of which you saw in first draft form in my last post. But trying to fit all of that in, plus trying to catch up on the insane amount of assigned reading (which I’m still not caught up on yet, though I’m a lot closer than I once was), is quite frankly impossible to do well. Throw in my lack of a laptop, and you can bet that I spent a lot of time in the library this week. I was in there on Tuesday from 5-11 PM, Thursday morning from 9-11 AM, Thursday night from 10:30 until 3:45 AM Friday morning, and another three hours on midday Friday. I did get all four essays done, though I’m not very satisfied with my last one. Fortunately, most of the professors have a rewrite policy: I can rewrite essays once by the end of the semester and receive an average of the two grades. Fortunately there’s just one other time this semester when I’ll have three papers due at once, otherwise this will hopefully remain a one-time nightmare.

Moving Ahead
I am now happy to say that I’m feeling relatively settled in here now. Stuff in my room is now mostly well-organized, I’m starting to re-establish my work habits, within a week or two I will be fully settled in to my extracurricular commitments, and I’m actually getting used to eating at TDR. (Maybe I’ve completely forgot what a home-cooked meal is like at this point.) At the very least, I’m still surviving, and that’s what counts.

1) It’s All About Where the Next Meal Comes From
There is something to be said for a home-cooked meal: it’s got a perfectly-portioned smidge of love baked right in. But the opportunities for those of us living away from home to get some of that love are few and far between, so the consumption of food here is directed by two guiding principles: “Variety is the spice of life,” and “The best things in life are free.”
No way to overemphasize the latter point. If you plan a college event and want people to show up, you offer free food. If you’re a college student, you know where the events that offer the free food are. I mean, yes, we’ve got meal plans for TDR (the Terrace Dining Room), where you just have to swipe your card and you’ve got an all-you-can-eat-in-one-sitting buffet there. And the food is actually pretty good. Except that it lacks the love, because it’s prepared in bulk. Who can spend all of their time eating food in that type of loud environment (which could definitely benefit from a bit more atmosphere) when it doesn’t have any of the love?
Consequently, there are some other places to eat on-campus that you can use EagleBuck$ (stored value on your ID card) for, with more of a fast-food style. Or you can go off-campus, either to Tenleytown or to wherever the Metro will take you to explore the scene. All of which is also very good food, and provides some variety to the palette, but again you lose the love. Throw in that you’ve got to plan where you’re going to go to get that food and how you’re going to get there, and juggle the schedules of when certain places to eat are open and when they’re not, and then plan to do this for at least three meals a day, and you can see why food is on the college student’s brain very, very frequently.
In other words, after eleven days here, I’ve really got a craving for a home-cooked meal. I crave some of that love in my food again.

2) If It’s Free, Let It Be
This piggybacks off of the last section, but that’s the truth: people here like stuff that’s free, whether it’s on-campus movies, games, or food (obviously). But here’s an example of how free-mad people can get. AU has this thing called eSuds, which is a thing that lets you track the washers and dryers on each floor. You can see live which washers and dryers are in use and which ones are available, can get notified by e-mail or text message when one becomes available, and can also be notified when your cycle is finished. And you pay for the cycles with EagleBuck$, just $1 a cycle. Except here’s the catch–the washers and dryers in my section of my floor aren’t hooked up to eSuds. So that means that the system has no idea there’s washers and dryers on this floor, which throws the whole convenience factor out of the window. BUT, and here’s the big but, this means that for now, our washers and dryers work for FREE. And so no one wants anyone to report this issue because they all love having free laundry–and this even goes for the Resident Assistants (RAs), who are supposed to report these kinds of things, because they ALSO love the free laundry! Personally, I wouldn’t care about paying for the laundry just to have the convenience of eSuds, but I’m sure that if I reported anything, my head would get chopped off! (Metaphorically speaking.) Heck, we now even have an issue with people from other floors taking our washers/dryers to get free laundry. I guess it’s a dog eat dog world out there…

3) Coffee!!! Coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee…
While I’m sure that most of the people here aren’t as bad as my roommate, who I consider to be a coffee-holic (in that he claims that he needs a couple of cups a day in order to stay active, and that I’ve seen him struggle to get out of bed in the morning when it’s been awhile since his cup of Joe), there is no shortage of places to get coffee out here. There’s The Perch, open nightly 8 PM-2 AM, part of the first floor lounge in Centennial Hall that has been turned into a coffee house/hangout spot with music and board games, where you bring your own mug for $1/cup of coffee (or buy one of their iconic biodegradable tumblers for $3 with a picture of a bird that almost looks like it was ripped off from the Twitter logo). Or there’s the Davenport Coffee Lounge, a student-run place in the School of International Service building (SIS) (that quite frankly makes the best hot chocolate I’ve ever had). Or there’s the Mud Box, located in the basement of Bender Library and open at not-quite 24/5, but close to it, which I haven’t actually been to yet. Or you can get coffee almost anywhere else on campus (my roommate says that the McDonald’s coffee is the absolute worst of the bunch, although being a writer, he has some much more interesting adjectives to describe it). And of course Starbucks lovers (generally looked down upon here) could take the shuttle to Tenleytown for their cup of Joe.
And here’s little old me, who only occasionally dips himself into a cup of decaf (“Gasp! Decaf??? That’s not even real coffee!!”), so loaded up with cream and sugar that you wouldn’t even know what it came from. Whatever, it’s still a part of the culture out here. Just wait until exams start…

4) “Traditiooooooooon! Tradition.”
And that’s my horrible typing impression of what the song from “Fiddler on the Roof” sounds like. Still, there’s plenty of awkward traditions at any college, and this place is no exception. You could start with “Wings and Water Ice” that happened on my second night here, where everyone was invited to an event in McDowell Hall with games, music, socializing, and–you guessed it (or didn’t)–barbecue chicken wings and water ice in cherry, lemon, mango, or pineapple flavors. Without a doubt one of the weirdest combinations I’ve ever encountered, even though each were individually pretty good. Or there’s commencement, which was last Friday (hot day!), where they paraded the 1500+ freshmen around campus with bagpipers playing in the front, eventually leading into Bender Arena, where the marching band played the AU fight song at least 40 times in a row while waiting for all of the freshmen to find seats, and then had a number of people give speeches. And I’m sure that there’s plenty more of these traditions coming up very soon that I don’t even know about yet.

5) Campus Bookstores Stink
For half of my classes, they got the textbook listings messed up, they run out of textbooks quickly, and quite frankly the prices they charge are big ripoffs. ‘Nuff said.

What’s the point of this somewhat random post? Well, after eleven days here, I’m still not very settled in yet. Welcome Week certainly had some fun activities, but it definitely was not normal in terms of helping to formulate any kind of living pattern to get used to. Getting used to not having seven classes a day, every day, all in sequential order is not easy, and there’s definitely going to be a lot more high-stakes work to do on my own time for those classes, which will have to push me out of summer-break mode to start doing those. And of course, I’m trying really hard to avoid the world of pain that I fell into during my last freshman year: where I got involved in so many interesting activities that I over-committed myself. Trying to avoid that world isn’t easy when I have to apply for everything I’m interested in participating in, and a lot of the things I would like to commit myself to are pending upon hearing back from something else.

Anyway, the honeymoon is over. Right now is the rough patch where I’ve got to dig in the trenches and hold my breath. After all, “we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure of what is normal anyway.”

* Quote from Chapter 9 of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, according to Wikiquote, anyway.

Nevertheless, a Roommate Agreement is required to be filled out, signed by both of us, and turned in to our RA (Resident Assistant) upon completion, and then reviewed again within the next two weeks. (We thought about saying that we’d review it every 35 minutes, but that idea didn’t last too long.) And to make it weirder, that thing is quite cheesy, with tables for “pre-agreement planning,” three pages of “guided discussion to have with your roommate,” and then a list of pre-determined things for which you should establish a policy with your roommate, if you choose to. Of course the policy part is open-ended to you.

After laughing at the cheesiness of the process, we set out to “hash out” our Roommate Agreement, but found that we just couldn’t stay very serious doing it. And then when we got to the last two lines, where the policy for us to determine was a fill-in-the-blank, we just HAD to exploit that for all that it’s worth.

So here it is, after an hour of thoughtful writing and absolute cracking up to the point where we almost stopped breathing: our Roommate Agreement.

Roommate Agreement
Roommates: Douglas Bell and Marco Panessa

On the issue of noise in the room, we have agreed that there will be quiet when we’re sleeping. Otherwise, we’ll make use of alternate study/hangout spaces to accommodate.

On the issue of studying in the room, we have agreed that we will simply read what I just wrote above. How Zen is that???

On the issue of guests in the room, we don’t have a formal agreement, but the following are never allowed in our room: arsonists, serial killers, and zookeepers.

On the issue of cleanliness in the room, we have agreed that it will be possible to walk on the floor without risk of injury, either physical or psychological.

On the issue of sharing personal property, we don’t have a formal agreement, but we’ll try to make our communal contributions in our room (mainly in the fridge) roughly equal. Otherwise, anarchy might result.

On the issue of a zombie apocalypse, we have agreed that if one of us is transformed into a flesh-eating zombie, the other has the right to set the zombie on fire and will call the RA for help.

On the issue of a catastrophic worldwide coffee shortage, we have agreed that for the continued safety of ALL mankind, Douglas must immobilize Marco in a locked cell and notify the Army, the Marines, and the RA.

In the interest of context for the last line, Marco is pretty much a coffee-holic. As opposed to me, who might have some decaf once in awhile (with a lot of added cream and sugar at that), or else a hot cocoa.

In all seriousness, we pretty much figured out that we don’t have any major issues with each other in terms of noise habits, cleanliness, sharing of property (or fridge food) or anything like that. And besides, if we ever do have a major disagreement, all we gotta do is start reading this thing aloud and you can bet that the disagreement won’t last much longer.

Today has been a pretty boring relaxing day, in that there wasn’t really anything going on. Mainly got some work done on my laptop, got settled in a bit, found my way around campus, suffered through two meals at McDonalds due to nothing else on campus being open until dinner time, and found out that the package we shipped here nine days ago hasn’t made it yet. So guess I’ll be sleeping on a bare mattress and one pillow for the second night in a row, which actually was fairly comfortable last night.

I did spend a bit of time today going through the AU calendar for the next few weeks, making note of events that seemed interesting and that I may or may not go to. I’ve also updated this site’s home page; the old Carmen Sandiego page is gone and its contents can now be seen right on the home page. Of particular note is my calendar, which now includes the aforementioned AU events and my AU class schedule.

So that’s all for now, I’ve got to go decide whether I’m going to go to the Ice Cream Social at the Kay Spiritual Center or to Wings and Water Ice in McDowell. (And to think that I didn’t even know what Water Ice was until about two hours ago…)