Anyway, the alternate title for this post was: Everything In Your Life Is Awful Right Now.
Granted, I don't actually know that for sure. As I believe I've mentioned before, one of the beautiful things about writing this blog is that I have no idea who you are — parent, professor, prospective student, pre-frosh accepted via Early Decision, Wesleyan student, one of my relatives (hi, guys), someone who randomly stumbled across this blog while searching something completely unrelated on Google. (That would be kind of cool, actually.) Which you'd think would make it harder to write this thing, but I've decided to follow one of Kurt Vonnegut's tips for writing short stories:
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.And nobody wants to have a sneezing short story, do they? Especially since I think my short stories have asthma to begin with. BUT, the point is that most of my fellow bloggers have been directing their recent posts towards You: The Prospective Wesleyan Student Who Is Currently In The Hell Known As The College Decision Process, and to that You, I say...
Well, everything in your life is probably awful right now. But really, I mean that in the best way.
I'm not actually going to take this time to convince you guys to come to Wesleyan. My fellow bloggers have already written up several convincing posts, and honestly, when I was a senior in high school, I already felt so overwhelmed by all those different little pieces of trivia that are supposed to help you make a decision, and so grumpy about the entire process that I was ready to snap at anyone who asked me which colleges were at the top of my list.
...I didn't really enjoy the college search thing, if you couldn't guess.
But you know what, even if you end up picking your college out of a hat, or if you choose based on whether they allow easy access to falafel, it's probably okay. And if it's not, if you're so stressed right now that it seems like nothing will ever be okay again?
Well, that's cool too. And if you're interested, I am very willing to help distract you right now by, as usual, spewing a ridiculous load of random nonsense.
[Under the cut: a ridiculous load of random nonsense.]
So because I haven't really done anything this week — well, I wrote an essay, and procrastinated on a lot of my other work, and made an almond tart/cake, the base pieces for an almond macaroon torte, and the batter for gluten-free chocolate financiers, and then froze/stored them so they would be ready for Passover, but besides that? Eh, not really — because I haven't done anything, I figured that I would just ramble for a little while about something incredibly important to the learning experience.
Namely? Deciding where to sit.
Look, this shit is crucial. I don't know if this happens in your classrooms, but in the classes I've typically been in, people tend to stick to one seat/seating area over the course of the semester. Granted, there are always the Chair Nomads, who like to change things up. Chair Nomads pose a bit of a problem, because on the one hand, I want them to follow whatever seating method makes them happy. On the other hand, if they sit someone else's usual seat and that person has to take my seat and I end up having to move all the way across the room? Well. Let's just say that I will be very grumpy that day in class.
I don't just decide this stuff at random, okay. I make an informed decision based upon several factors that vary depending on class and room, namely: proximity to door, line of sight, and distance from professor. To illustrate, I've done Awful Photoshop Drawings of my four classrooms this year.
First, Distinguished Writers, New Voices:
So DistWri is one of those classes set up as stadium seating, which means Line of Sight is automatically negated; should the professor write anything on the board, it’s not going to be blocked by the freakishly tall head of whoever’s sitting in front of you. On the other hand, there’s also slightly less point to the Distance From Professor qualification. The whole point with that one is to be close enough that you can see the professor and ze can see you, but you’re not going to be the first thing in hir line of sight. I have an expressive face; I don’t want it to be my undoing. Sometimes I just want to be able to sit back and not worry that the professor’s going to hate me because I forgot to bring the book to class that day, or because I’m doodling while taking notes.
I try to sit a few seats in, as well, because I like to reserve the aisle seats for people who come in late. No one should be forced to undergo the misery of trying to reach a middle seat 15 minutes into class.
You may notice that I’ve marked off the back as the “Slacker Zone.” This was probably a little unfair of me, since I don’t know if it’s actually true of the DistWri kids — stadium seating, remember — but in flat-bottomed classes, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the kids sitting in the back are usually the kids who’ve done the least work.
Crap, now I feel bad about generalizing.
Anyway, the most important qualification is Proximity to Door. The red dotted line marks the farthest from the doors I am willing to go, in order to get out of the post-class jam as quickly as possible. It’s not that I’m in a rush to leave because I didn’t like the class; I just really, really hate waiting around while people crowd around the door or take ages to get their backpacks in order.
Next, Human Skeleton:
This is the reason why context matters. For HuSkel, Line Of Sight trumps Distance From Professor. You may notice that my little green X is sitting at the front-most table; this is because the prof will point out features on actual bones, and I want to make sure that I can see what the heck he’s talking about. Some of those things are tiny, okay. Teeny-weeny! Especially on the skull, oh man, the skull is awful, it’s like it evolved for the express purpose of frustrating students.
Anyway, the next consideration is seating, since it’s hard to maneuver between tables — and I mean really hard; there’s very little space, especially when other people are already sitting down, and the chairs make a really loud, obnoxious noise when you move them around. In this case, an aisle seat is absolutely necessary, especially because my next class begins ten minutes after this one gets out, and I always have to sprint to make it in time. A quick departure time is key.
That class happens to be Theory 2:
Here my seating choices partially depend on what’s still open when I get to class. I’ve taken the three options marked in green; I prefer the ones by the right wall, because their Proximity To Door means that I can slip in more unobtrusively. Also, they’re out of the immediate line of sight of the professor — not that that matters much when you’re sitting in a vaguely circular chair formation, where the whole point is that everyone can see each other, but it still makes me feel better.
In classrooms like this, I would be tempted to say that the corners are the slacker zones, since that’s usually where a lot of the chairs crowd up together and some people are forced to sit behind others, but honestly, everyone in this class is so freakishly intelligent that I can’t actually call any of them slackers. I feel like a slacker most of the time, and I sometimes read our assigned articles twice.
Finally, we have Racial Humor:
…There’s just something very comforting about walking in and almost immediately taking your seat instead of circling halfway around the table, okay. And being in a professor’s line of sight is better than sitting directly next to them — I mean, I like my professors, and it’s not like they smell bad or anything (I don’t think so, at least), but sitting next to them? Not really my cup of tea. Either you’re too noticeable or they don’t see you when you raise your hand.
Plus, there’s something deep-seated inside of me that sort of rebels against the idea. I have no idea why.
With RaHu, however, that has to be balanced by Line Of Sight, because we occasionally watch clips of things on the big screen. It’s not quite as important as it was for Narrative and Ideology last semester, but in a class with a screen, it’s always nice to be able to see without having to spin your chair around and scoot so you’re not up close and personal with the screen.
The fact that my chosen spot has so far been an excellent snackage spot — RaHu, as a 3 hour seminar, has a break midway through, and we have a rotating schedule that designates who feeds us for the day — is just a bonus, of course. A delicious, cheese-, cracker-, and cookie-filled bonus.
[Original tags for this post: a ridiculous load of random nonsense, I have absolutely nothing useful to say about the college decision process except maybe “It’ll be over eventually”, the completely important unimportant things in your life, the return of the badly drawn photoshop comic,this post doesn’t even have fluffy animals, this post is way too long, totally self-indulgent]
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