It's a cold, and it's a broken Hallelujah.

I want to think I've kept this journal somewhat more mental, more thoughtful than most 'blogs.' Much less superficial, if you will. I can't say with any kind of confidence whether or not I've succeeded, but for the purposes of this entry, I'll pretend I have.

I had a discussion today about how schedules for next year are going to pan out for the three of us (Justin, Ben, and myself). Ben remarked that next year's will suck for him because he's got to take a good deal of labs. I said something about how it seems that either he's always working or not working at all. A matter of extremes. Both of them then remarked that it seems like I hardly ever work. I told them that, yeah, I don't do as much as a given Engineering major or math major. But it sure as hell ain't affecting me. I had a 3.834 after last semester, and I don't see this semester being worse. Justin said he was working his ass off to keep a 3.0, and all I could do was just apologize for the way it's all working.

And I realized later that it's not necessarily that I work less than other people. It's just that I do it in a different way, and with different results.

I know how to play the system. My schedule is beautiful - two days where I have an 8 AM class and then the rest of the day off, two days where I start at 11:45, and one day where I start at 2:50. This isn't coincidence. Arts and Sciences majors have to fulfill some requirements for the core curriculum. I just found that I could take Natural Disasters and Catastrophes to get the Natural World credit. Other people go with Bio and have to do a lab. Then they complain that they have a lot of work and I'm not doing any.

My Fine Arts credit's out of the way with the Intro. to Music class I took last semester. No homework, no real tests, no textbook, none of that. It was a genuinely interesting class, but it didn't follow the classic 'class' guidelines. And I took that instead of, say, an Art class that would require me to go to the MFA once a week (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just inconvenient).

My Russian class is pretty simple. I will admit, I feel like I'm only studying for tests in that class, and not actually learning the language, but I'm starting to change that. I've actually just hung some index cards with Russian script on them all over the suite. These are words I should already know, but don't. My plan is to say the Russian word out-loud just about every time I see the card. It ought to succeed for the given words.

And then I've heard a couple people talk about long essays they have to write and how time-consuming it is. Writing has always come pretty easy to me. I may not necessarily write better than most people, but I definitely write faster than most. And at the risk of sounding boastful, I tend not to need to edit. I don't screw it up the first time. It's one of the reasons I'm good at what I do - I can sit down to write a column, finish a 8-900 word piece in less than 45 minutes, and not need more than 2 minutes' worth of revision before I feel it's fair to send. Yeah, it makes me sound like a jackass, but I don't edit myself cause I don't have to. That's how I think - in good grammar.

Yeah, so that's my little rant about why it might seem like I don't work at all, but I do. I put in a little bit of effort to get the classes I want when I want them. I put in enough effort to get the job done for most classes, and more if I actually give a damn.

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I guess that while I've got this captive audience, I'll get a few other things off my chest that have been nagging at me lately:

1. Some people need to take life a little less seriously. There's certainly a time and place for righteous anger, like when you're missing the start of the big baseball game during Spring Break. But getting ridiculously angry while playing MarioKart with friends from the floor is neither. Yes, the game can suck at times. Believe me, I know. I tend to get the crap kicked out of me while playing, and it ain't because I'm a bad driver, it's cause items will hit me in waves, sidelining me for too long to get back into a race. But it's not worth getting worked up about. You'll give yourself an ulcer that way. I have a sweatshirt (and sundry t-shirts) that has a slogan on it; it's a philosophy I've tried to live by for a while: 'Life is Good.' Just remember that, Mr. Big Picture. Life is Good.

2. I don't enjoy my current extracurricular activity. I'm not really going to try and hide it anymore - it's not what I expected and I don't have fun when I'm doing it. When an activity stops being something you look forward to and starts becoming a chore, it's time to stop. And I've felt that way about this particular activity for quite some time now, dating back to mid-January. But I've (somewhat stubbornly) refused to quit because it would leave this group high and dry. I'm one of only three guys in the group, and they need all of us for any given piece. But after this semester, I'm done. I'd put it at about 95% that I won't be returning in the fall. I considered running for President in the next coming elections, so that on the off-chance I won, I could run things my way and see how it worked, but I'm not so sure. If I didn't win, I would leave the group, and I won't even give the appearance of sour grapes.

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I guess that's all I have to say for now. I'm sure that I'll think of other stuff, though, as soon as I publish this post.