Another Day...

A hell of a lot has happened over the last few weeks, most of which I'm not going to cover here at the moment. The two big things are my return to college and my girlfriend's departure. In the first case, I'm now once more enrolled, this time at Southwestern Community College in beautiful Chula Vista, CA just outside the city of San Diego and literally just 10 minutes from the heart of downtown.


Its a funny thing, being back on this campus after so long. Admittedly I wasn't a student here then. No, at that time I was still enrolled at Mar Vista Middle School in Imperial Beach. Let's just say I found the education at the college to be far more engaging, although it did spoil The Great Gatsby for me...I didn't have to wait another 4 years to find out how insanely tedious it is. That being said, I have to admit I like what they've done with the place, and more importantly, what they haven't done. The grounds are a bit small in some ways, but it really is bigger on the inside with everything being oriented around the Student Service Center and the lovely green space around it. Still a nice collection of shade trees strewn about the grounds and the clusters of short, geometrically interesting buildings with their cool and breezy arcades. I don't know why, but the place always manages to remind me of how cool and awe-inspiring science, technology and "The Future" (tm) was when I was a kid. Its a good feeling.


On the other hand, my girlfriend is now gone off to become a truck driver. I have mixed feelings. I am enormously proud of her! She got her CDL and frankly did better than I did when I went for it. I had to take the test five times! She got it in one. Then again, she's gone for the time being. She's doing what she needs to do, both for herself and so that she and I can build a life together but I can't help missing her terribly. I've lost track of the number of times I started to turn and say, "Hey, check this out," only to realize that she isn't here just now, please leave a message in the awkward silence.

I'm taking three classes atm: Japanese 101, Business 120 and CIS 101. That's Elementary Japanese, Introduction to Business and "How to use Office Suite, for Drooling Idiots".

Well...I might be taking liberties with that last one, but what that hell, it's accurate.

Japanese is far an away the most interesting. Excellent instructor. Ayumi Gervais is her name and she manages to be organized enough to keep things running smoothly, friendly enough to be approachable with questions and interested enough in her own subject to indulge my prodding for further expansion of lesson material. She practically lit up this past Monday when I asked her about the rules for applying the title -san to the name of a third person in a conversation. Going to have to make a serious effort to stay with her in this subject.

By contrast, my Business instructor reminds me of nothing so much as a train wreck in stop-motion. Not even slow motion, but stop-motion. Like some sort of philosophical antithesis to the stop-motion Christmas specials I loved so dearly as a child. She demands a high standard of writing in our weekly submissions in a cobbled together web doco using three different fonts, in no particular order, multiple, variant highlights (using secondary colors that your eye just slides right off of) multiple text sizes and finally, as if it wasn't bad enough, formatted such that these decrees can't be fit onto a printed sheet.

Her taste for not-so-subtly couched free market capitalist propaganda paraded about in the lamb's skin of a lesson plan doesn't help either. Nor am I impressed by the fact that it takes two weeks to get a one-page paper back from her!

Fortunately, I don't have to have much to do with her and my third instructor, Professor Pochodowicz, is far more helpful. Admittedly the course I'm taking from him right now is very light-weight, but when questions do come up, he takes the time to provide an answer. I hope get him again, particularly for any CIS security-type courses. He is very big on security and gives us two or three cautionary anecdotes each day. There are a couple of chatterers however...here's hoping he drops them.