Nanon's Bio

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Hello, Party People,

School has begun in earnest. Know how I can tell? I feel guilty whenever I'm doing anything other than studying or sitting in class. I feel guilty when I take a shower, when I sleep more than 6 hours at a time, and when I actually stop and sit down while eating sans books. I feel guilty right now.

I can also tell that school is on because everyone else in my life (most of whom are not in school) have suddenly taken a keen interest in me. It's the basic grade-school principle: "Ignore them and they will come." Now all of a sudden, people I haven't talked to in six months are leaving urgent messages on my answering machine, and my best friend has gone from calling me once a week to three times a week. Even my husband is in on the act. For the first time in our long marriage, he's insisting on a "date night," which is a good idea, and I wholeheartedly support it, except... I get fidgety with guilt about not studying. I'm working on that.

Now, I'm not normally such a gunner. In fact, I'm more of a crammer. But this semester I'm taking two subjects that require more of me than most classes do. I'm taking second semester physics with calculus and a computer science weeder class.

Physics is actually kind of fun for me, except for all of the math. I haven't taken Calculus in four years, which showed the other night when I forgot what integrating was. I mean, I kind of recognized the symbol for it, but was utterly baffled when cosine theta turned into negative sine theta. My husband looked at me funny when I asked him about it. It was truly a "DOH" moment. It doesn't help that both of my lecturers are not very effective, leaving us to teach ourselves the subject. In fact, they're ineffective in totally opposite ways. One is very into the theory of stuff, and will put her notes on the overhead projector, read them, and then stop for five minutes while we write them. The other professor is highly animated and fun to listen to, but I have no idea what my notes say because he's so all over the place. However, ever so slowly, I seem to be getting the hang of it. It's weird to think that this is the last pre-req I'll ever have to take, after all of these years chipping away at them.

The computer science class is almost all lab. In fact, it is all lab. Six hours of lab a week. You'd think that would be enough time to get all of the assignments done, but I (and most of the rest of the class) seem to be doing a lot of the work from home, even after six hours in the lab. Essentially, I'm teaching myself this subject as well. My Graduate Student Instructor is fantastic, but there's only one of him and 50 of us.

Computer programming is something I used to do for a living, but it's not something that I trained overmuch for, and it's really not something I ever enjoyed doing. I have the patience for it, but not the thinking patterns. I'm more of a... metaphorical thinker, if you will. And I'm not fond of logic games. This class is a three and a half month logic game. I've been dreading taking this class for two years.

But here's the suprising thing. I'm actually not hating it. I won't say yet that I'm loving every minute trying to figure out where I misspelled a word, or where I put in an extra parenthesis, but I'm kind of enjoying the process as a whole. I really, really like seeing a program work. I don't ever remember clapping when a program worked when I did it for a living. So maybe something is changing in me. I'm not planning a return to programming, but I may not absolutely hate the next two semesters of computer science I have to take for my major, and that's kind of nice to know.

That's it for now, so Good Night Party People!
Nanon

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