Day One..

As it turns out, Day One wasn’t so bad after all. That’s not to say it went smoothly or even that it went well, but at least Christina didn’t come home to find me hiding under the bed sucking my thumb. Here’s how the day went..

I arrived on campus at about 9:00 for my 10:00 Organic Chemistry Lab. That’s really early but I had never dealt with the bus system before and although I knew which building to go to, I didn’t know exactly where the room was. The bus system turned out to be incredibly efficient by the way. All commuter students have to park at the football stadium and take a bus to the campus but the buses come about every 5 minutes so it’s not bad at all. Even with that frequency they can get crowded but if you’ve been on a busy subway before it’s no big deal. Unfortunately no one groped me like they do in New York.

After casually walking by my classrooms I could see where it was but not let on that I was there so early, I doubled back to find a place to wait. On my second passing I notice a flyer on the door saying that lab actually starts Friday. DAMMIT!! I didn’t have any other classes until 1:00 so I took the bus back to my car and went home. That’s when I noticed I received an email notifying us of the change in start date. I got to campus so early that I was already in the building by the time the email was sent out.

After a few hours of screwing around I started my day over and headed to Physics. Let me first say that my Physics professor looks like.. a Physics professor. It started out fairly simple with a review of assignments, grading, expectations, etc. That was followed by news that our first quiz will be Thursday so we should probably go ahead and read chapter one. The rest of the class was a review of his research on spider silk. I have to admit that when he first told us what he was researching I thought it sounded ridiculously boring. Without recapping his lecture I’ll just say that spider silk is actually kind of cool.

I should mention that the biggest, baddest earthquake on the east coast in 60 years interrupted class. I know it wasn’t much of an earthquake in the grand scheme of things but for me there were some exacerbating factors. First, like most east coasters I had never felt an earthquake before. For those who have never felt one before I’ll describe it in the best way I can. THE WHOLE EARTH FUCKING QUAKES! It’s nuts. Another issue for me was my presence in a 100 year old building that has the entire first floor closed for construction. It’s not hard to imagine someone reading the plans wrong and demolishing the wrong wall which coincidentally brings the whole building down. I mean, maybe that’s a stretch but the quake only lasted a minute so my brain didn’t have time to process that notion completely and discard it.

While waiting for my next class, the inevitable happened – I got my first age question. I was sitting beside a guy who had missed the lecture so I was telling him what the professor said and basically that he didn’t miss much. I could see him eyeballing my hair while I was talking so I wasn’t terribly surprised when he asked if I was the TA for the class. I then had the pleasure of explaining why I am old and taking the same classes he is. Also, he is my new Physics lab partner. I can’t decide if I’m bothered by the experience or just glad that I found someone with whom I can discuss the class.

Physics Lab itself was kind of a joke. Actually, it WOULD have been kind of a joke if I had not failed miserably on what the TA called “8^th grade math”. I managed to minor in Math at Guilford and never learn trigonometry. So when our review said “Find the secant blah blah blah” I didn’t even know where to start. Whoops.

Overall the day wasn’t so bad. Only one lecture and one lab and both were relatively small. I just walked into my Calculus class and I swear the look in everyone’s eyes was “Why is our professor wearing a Karate Kid T-shirt?”. I’m pretty sure I’m wrong though because the only Karate Kid they’ve seen had Jackie Chan in it and there was no All-Valley Championship.

Three big classes today. Day Two should be a little more interesting than Day One!