Let The Procrastination Begin

Saw Underworld tonight with Jubb and two of the more interesting Freshmen my roommates have befriended in my absence. It was a solid B movie, and well worth the dollar it cost me.

For the (hypothetical?) people who like minutia: I've got four classes this term.

First, a German class at eleven. There's one other student in the class and, since our Prof is in Germany, we don't (officially) meet for two weeks. Unofficially, we're required to meet with each other in the library three times a week.

I'll have to get up early tomorrow in order to finish my homework for that class, come to think of it.

My second class here and tomorrow is Modern British Fiction. I love Modernism, now that I'm both mature and pretentious enough to have a favorite literary period. Rock Show Girl, who's working towards an English minor, is in that class with me.

That's it for my MWF classes. Tuesdays and Thursday I've got a four-hour chunk of classes which eats up my entire afternoon. I'll never have to get up before 10, usually, which is glorious.

My very first Philosophy class, since I'm thinking about majoring in Philosophy now, is called "Symbolic Logic." It's filled with underclassman and taught by a besweatered man who seems like a slightly evil version of Mr. Rogers. Still, it covers the language-side of philosophy, which interests me at the moment.

Lastly, I've signed up for Fiction Writing again. The Cheerful Cynic, The Idyllist, The Young Loveress, Representative Man, and The Postmodernist are just a few of the somewhat clever handles I get to reuse this term.

(Now that I'm back at Lawrence I suppose I have to start compiling character sketches of these people, for the (once again hypothetical) people who care to know who exactly I'm talking about. Also, it gives me another thing to do instead of homework.)

Fiction Writing is the most useful class I can take here, and I'm glad I can take it over and over again (as an "Independent Study" course). Once again, I have to write at least 50 pages of fiction by the end of the term. I barely managed that last year.

This year's class is English-major-heavy and could be (but isn't, really) divided into three loose factions:

1. Lawrence's thesaurus-using would-be Literati. Excellent, lazy, and self-critical writers, for the most part.

2. A loose coalition of Tolkien fans and Sci-Fi fans. I have a nagging suspicion that J.R.R. Tolkein is posthumously ruining a generation of writers, but we'll see.

and

3. Estrogen-fueled (for the most part) scribblers who decided at some point to trade their Bad Teenage Poetry in for short fiction. The people with the least ego attached to their work, they tend to see writing as a hobby.

If I had to pigeonhole myself, I'd be with the Sci-Fi fans. I'm trying to cultivate a counter-counter-culture attitude towards the talent elite, even though I secretly wish to be one of them. I'd need to buy hipper, darker clothing, though.

And write better, which I expect to do this term. My problem at the moment:

Since what I'm working on at the moment is turning into a story about a writer writing, I can safely assume that I've run out of original ideas. There's nothing so ubiquitous, easy, or pretentious as semi-autobiographical stories about writers. My best effort from last year, Essence of Story, was such a work, sorta.

I've still got a lot of crap to do, papers to get signed and all that. I should go to bed now if I'm really planning on an early start.