The Forge

After reading Nelly's blog over at the Fragdolls site, i thought perhaps i should outline the courses i'm taking this semester for the aid of those living vicariously through me. Or because i had no other idea for a blog and it's been quite a while since i posted one. Either way, here's what Grove City College is slinging at me this semester:

ENGL 202 Brit. Lit. Part 2:
The name is somewhat self-explanatory, but this is the second part of a survey of British Literature. Last semester we started at the very beginning--with Beowulf-- and this semester we'll be ending right around Joyce. I must admit, i'm not as big on poetry as i could be and last semester involved a ton of it, so i think i'm going to like this semester more (it has quite a bit more prose, including fiction which basically didn't exist as we know it in the first half of history).

COMM 235 Journalism:
As you might guess, this course is designed in the hope that once i'm done with it i'll have a fair handling on the AP Stylebook and the format/shorthand/jargon of the world of reporting. Since i still haven't really decided what i'm aiming for when i graduate (newspaper journalism, magazine journalism, something entirely different) i figured it'd be good to have this course in my repertoire. Also it is somewhat of a requirement for the Communications major i'm tending towards.

COMM 104 Public Speaking & Rhetoric:
Just what Adam needed, right? An excuse to talk even more than he already does. Well, actually, i'm hoping this class teaches me when NOT to talk. As you might guess, Public Speaking is a course based on speeches, both the giving of and listening to them. The only speech i ever gave went somewhat well (everyone who approached me said it was one of the best they'd ever heard, but then who knows what people really think when they tell you something like that during a graduation ceremony?) and so i don't know whether i truly need a course on this. Nevertheless this, too, is a requirement for the Comm. major and at least it's interesting.

HUMA 102 Civ: Biblical Revelations:
Part two of a six-part Humanities sequence, "Bib Rev" is an in-depth look at many of the truths hidden within the Bible. Unlike my other classes this one takes place in a lecture hall, which makes it a bit less interactive and far more lecture-oriented. That said, the professor is a cool guy with a penchant for throwing Monty Python and Calvin/Hobbes into his lectures, so this promises to be quite an enjoyable class. I'm also hoping that it will get me to open my Bible more often, something that i'm trying to commit to this year as a sort of New Year's Resolution.

PHYE 102 Fitness & Wellness II for men:
Ah, Fitwell. Glorious Fitwell. It's like God heard my prayers and ignored them, sending you. Well, Fitwell II is the second half of the running joke among GCC students. The first semester consisted of one part lecture on health, one part lab activity. The lab activity for me was Aerobics: just picture me doing Pilates. Yeah, hilarious. Anyway, this semester is simply two lab activities, and while they won't tell me what my final activity is until midterm time, i can tell you that for the next approximately ten weeks i'll be enrolled in Free Weights. I'm actually quite excited about this: it's far less taxing than some other activities--*cough* circuit training *cough*--and yet if i actually put the effort in i will end up with a workout regiment that i can maintain after i'm out of the class. That's another one of my resolutions this year--hitting the gym--and since Jordan told me he's trying to commit to the same thing, perhaps we'll be able to work on this one together.

COMM 261 Stagecraft:
After an invigorating workout and a not-so-invigorating chapel service it's time to hit Pew Fine Arts Center's gorgeous auditorium for 75 minutes of 'learning the ropes' in theatre. By the time i'm done with this course i'll have been certified in pretty much every technical aspect of the theatre, knowing far more than i learned from Crazy For You. This is inevitably the most hands-on course i'll ever take (except perhaps if i get an internship), and i am quite excited to be taking it.

And so, another 17-credit hour semester. At that rate, i will have 136 hours at the time of graduation. Which presents a slight problem.

You see, the maximum number of credits you can earn in any given semester without paying for extra courses is eighteen. Since i've already gone for 34 credits between these two Freshman semesters, that leaves six possible semesters and eighteen possible credits. Six times eighteen equals 108, meaning that if i take the maximum number of courses every semester from now on, in addition to the credits i've already (or am in the process of) earning, i'll end up with 142 credits. Add in the thirteen i earned in high school, and you get 155 credits. Now, i still need to transfer in my credit for calculus taking through the SUPA program, but if those four credits transfer i've only accomplished 159 of the minimum 160 credits needed to get my dual major. Which means that even if i take loaded schedules every semester, i'm going to need to either a. pay extra for an overclocked semester or b. pay extra to take intercession. I have a pretty good feeling i'm going to be taking intercession multiple times so as to lighten the load.

Anyhow, i came to this glorious conclusion last night, which is bothering me a little only because i'd planned on taking courses that overlapped the requirements for my Communications and English majors, and didn't know until yesterday that there was a minimum 160 credit requirement. Of course, had i gotten an advisor who had been here for more than a few months (which i didn't) he'd probably have told me this when i explained my plan to dual major to him last semester. I'm seriously considering officially switching majors just so i have a different advisor (i was originally going to just add the comm. major as my second major--the new plan would be to switch majors and then add english as the second). We shall see.

PS: i'm no longer going to Africa. The truth is, i simply don't have the money--or any plan to earn it--lined up and there was a waiting list. I decided that due to a series of circumstances that seemed less than lending themselves toward my going, i'd let someone else in line (who is probably older and better-prepared to afford the trip) to take my place. Sorry for that: i know some of you were looking forward to my going almost as much as i was.

I've been home for somewhere around three weeks now and i must say, i am quite a slob. At least, i used to be, because up until perhaps a week ago my room was so outrageously messy that i was unable to even sleep in there. Even after i 'cleaned' it there were still piles of books and clothing, not to mention the million other papers and toys and odds and ends that i truly have no idea what to do with. It's much akin to one of those dreadful shows my mother sometimes puts on when there's nothing on television (and this before she had the WGA strike as an excuse!), where some hapless family gets a 'surprise' visit from an expert or two on how to maintain an orderly household. These experts, usually a woman and a very... flamboyant man, lead a cameraman around the domicile, feigning nausea over the mountains of garbage and unnecessary junk that the family has amassed in one or all of the rooms in the house. And by the time the experts are done, the family has been through tidiness boot camp and their home looks pristine and gorgeous.

See, i don't need a gay man to tell me when i have a lot of things lying around that i'm never going to use and/or fit into again. Honestly there are probably a great deal of those "odds and ends" that i've never used in the first place. And perhaps there is no greater offender when it comes to storage of junk than the closet. Indeed, i learned at a young age that when mother is simply trying to find the carpet, she doesn't care if you've assembled an Everest of toys and t-shirts behind the wooden door. "Out of mind, out of sight" worked for her but sadly it also worked for me, which meant that when it came time to clean my room again i'd make the mistake of opening the closet and being promptly swallowed in an avalanche of forgotten junk.

Well i'm eighteen and evidently i never learned, because when i finally built up the courage to open my closet door i was, once again, swallowed in an avalanche of forgotten junk. But this time around, i've chosen to fight back. The first strike was to break out a philips head and take the offending door off its hinges; after all, the door is just an enabler because without it, nothing in the closet is "out of sight." And then i had to make tough decisions.

The first tough decision was to get rid of all the magazines i've collected over the past four years or so. Mostly gaming magazines, i'd neatly organized them until there was no room left on the shelf (after which, honestly, i have no idea where they've been going. I suppose i stopped renewing). But i knew i would never read them again, and so the logical thing to do was to wrap them in twine and put them in recycling. Joshua took maybe a third of them but the rest are now stacked neatly beside the bags of garbage i filled with high school.

Indeed, as much as i'd love to keep my papers and notebooks from high school i ultimately realized that i'm not the sort of sentimental person that would ever happily open up a box from the attic and tearfully pull out my chemistry binder, sobbing nostalgically over combustion equations. The one exception was my English materials, something i've endeavored to keep hold of if for no other reason than to examine the evolution of my writing ability and talent over the years. I still have a first grade report sheet that congratulated me for completing a sentence. I've been doing that ever since.

By far the hardest part of cleaning my room is proving to be clothing. Anyone who knows me is aware that the proper word to describe my figure over the last, say, decade is "growing." Both up and out, to the point where i need two x's before the l's on my clothing before i'm willing to don it. The problem is that when i grew out of clothes, they'd just never be worn again. They never moved on down to younger siblings or out to the salvation army; they just stayed in drawers and on hangers until i needed the space and then they'd end up in storage or at the bottom of the mountain in my closet. And so, even if i'd wanted to just "get rid of" all the clothes that no longer fit me, i had no way of knowing which ones those were.

Which is why today i spent at least three hours trying on all the clothes in my closet and laundry baskets, breaking them down into piles as follows: clothes that fit, clothes that fit but are damaged (i.e. torn or missing buttons), clothes that don't fit and are damaged, clothes that don't fit that i wish fit, and i'd be willing to keep around for, say, a year just in case i actually lose weight this time around, and finally clothes that don't fit that i don't want to put on my body ever again.

And after three hours of trying clothes on, i can honestly say i don't understand why women enjoy doing it. I'm a guy, which makes me at least mostly utilitarian, and thus my idea of clothes shopping is to find a pair of pants that fit me and i'm comfortable in, a (hopefully) matching shirt, and maybe a new pair of shoes if i'm feeling particularly metro. Girls, however, have a penchant for spending hours in clothing stores, trying (i imagine) every possible permutation of top and bottom (and everything underneath that too) before finally emerging with one or two bagfuls and considering themselves thrifty for having not purchased more. I really don't get it--it's both physically tiring and gets old really quickly.

Oh, and when a guy bumps into another guy wearing the same shirt, they have a conversation about it. But get two girls together who happened upon the same outfit? May as well be in the Coliseum.

But i digress. My closet is now devoid of most clothing and it has an empty shelf. There's still much work to do, including the collection of crap (read: souvenirs) occupying another shelf and the mountains of clothes within and on top of my dresser that still need to be tried on. And now if you'll excuse me, i'm going to go back to watching Raising Helen.

Has been removed.

[This post was last edited at 9:59:45 on 1.7.08 for reasons that would be rather obvious to anyone who read the original.]

It's not so much that i regret what i wrote as it is i regret what followed. I particularly regret having allowed an unrelated issue that i am dealing with affect my judgment, resulting in replies to an anonymous poster that were truly unprofessional. I apologize wholeheartedly for this.

In case you are wondering what the "unrelated issue that i am dealing with" is, well...

This semester i encountered a lot that i didn't expect. I encountered a lot of different worldviews that all fall under the category of "Christian." I also encountered a lot of hypocrisy, and came to recognize a lot of it in my own life. Truthfully these realizations have made me increasingly jaded and cynical, a motif i was all too happy to be rid of a year ago when i created The Forge. I read my first post, and the joy with which i embraced a new, more wholesome image, and i have to laugh at my naivety. I did so little to change myself and lo and behold, not much has changed. If anything, i've gotten worse.

Sickened with myself and this discovery, i have begun an endeavor to, as it were, 'cleanse' myself of some of the greater impurities. It's a well-known fact that i often speak without thinking. Admittedly, i've always appreciated my heart-on-my-sleeve behavior, because with it comes a open honesty that most people are simply not comfortable with expressing. And since Jesus is truth, i like to be truthful whenever possible.

Recently i took it upon myself to be rather brutally honest. Over the past semester i've seen more pirating of games, music, and movies than i'd ever seen in my life and the thought that such piracy was running rampant at a CHRISTIAN college sickened me.

And i made mistakes.

I regret that. I regret a lot. And in an effort to both clear my own conscience i recently issued an ultimatum of sorts to the hall via a message on Facebook. In the back of mind i suppose it was a friendly request to keep the law-breaking out of my sight, for my own sake, but due to my inability to keep emotion well-concealed it ended up being delivered in a sort of cease-and-desist or-else format. This is because at the end of my "friendly request" i included a somewhat barbed reminder that if my warning weren't enough to take a hint, well, "violators would be dealt with."

Indeed, threatening to report up to 18 people for anything, illegal or otherwise, is not a good way to tighten your bond of friendship with them.

Really, i didn't expect quite as much rage as i received, but re-reading what i've said over the last 48 hours has reminded me that, once more, i've found the wrong way to do the right thing. After the fact, i've come up with plenty of great ideas about what i COULD have done. But, as goes another of my mantras, "what's done is done, and cannot be undone." Life is about dealing with what one has done, and that's what i'll have to do.

It's just so strange, being at once perfectly secure in the knowledge that what i'm fighting for is the right thing and yet sorry for the grief that could have been avoided by my silence. I lost my temper, and i lost my upperhand. I also probably lost some friends. At least i know that, when the dust settles, the friends i still have are the real ones. To them i give a preemptory thank you.