Ramblings About the Day and University

By now I'm well rested from the History project; it turns out that Gi. and Ge. got a 3 on it. Which is good -- I suppose. (c:

Today I woke up before eleven o'clock, read the first section of the newspaper, made my bed, cleaned the gas oven, did a load of dishes, went grocery-shopping and to the bank, and made dinner. Besides, I started reading the biography of Niccolò Macchiavelli in Project Gutenberg's The Prince, much to my own surprise. Then I read two articles in the online New Yorker, including a nice one about the jazz pianist Hank Jones (I'm not really interested in jazz, and have barely listened to any, but it was still a pleasant read). In the evening I played bits of Beethoven and Schubert sonatas, then waltzes and mazurkas and nocturnes by Chopin.

Papa bought the Studienhandbuch from the Freie Uni today -- one copy each for T. and me. I started reading in it, but it's reading that tends to discourage more than encourage. I much prefer the straightforwardness and welcoming air of UBC's course schedule. The most agreeable student publication of the FU is, for me, the Vorlesungsverzeichnis, which does have tempting course descriptions and doesn't have totalitarian rules (for example, against taking classes outside one's programme of study).

But I've also been considering going to another university -- say the one at Heidelberg. I want to go to a very good university (on the principle that I will be a better student there), but also to one that doesn't have a very high number of applicants. I liked UBC very much, for example, but I wasn't working there as well as I wished -- I didn't learn thoroughly enough, and I had to write essays on broad topics with what I found to be too little information. I tended (but this was entirely my fault) to read the sources within the last day or two, if I handed the essay in on time; but in one case I even worked on an essay (about humanitarian intervention, for Political Science 260) for five weeks after the deadline and then neither finished it nor handed it in.

The largest problem is that I have no real idea what I want. Perhaps it's still a relict of school that I don't think very highly of grades; they're arbitrary and often give no real indication of how much I've learned. In some courses, for example, my mark was abysmal because I spoke rarely -- only two or three times per semester -- during class discussions. In English 220 I got two "A"s on my essays, and a lower mark on my final exam, but I ended up with 73%. The reason why I didn't participate more is that I'm still used to being as quiet as possible from school; an unwritten law (which can be transgressed only by very self-secure people) is to be quiet if there is the risk of saying anything that could be criticized and despised. Besides, to return to UBC, I prefer to speak only if I have something truly worth saying. At any rate, I also didn't have any direct practical reason to get good grades, like wanting to get into an Honours programme, or into another more prestigious university, or into a particular job.

Even the classes themselves sometimes didn't feel so important. I missed tons of French 221 classes just because I preferred to sleep in. I never planned to miss the class; I just went to sleep somewhere around twelve, then woke up too late. At the same time I did all of the readings, and understood them without the aid of a dictionary. But not only did I miss classes, I also missed the midterm and the day where the second essay details were handed out, and never did my first essay, so I ended up with 22% and an F. What I told myself is that I was at UBC primarily to learn; I certainly did that, but getting better grades couldn't have hurt either.

So, the question is whether to wait until I do feel ready to do proper work in university, or to plunge into university and hope that the motivation comes as I go along. I don't think I can wait. If I had something else I really wanted to do, it would work; if I had the clear-mindedness and determination and confidence, I probably could learn and develop on my own. But what's happening now is that my mind is degenerating. I thought at least ten times more clearly a year ago than I do now. And when my mind is not fit, everything else goes downhill too. I can't learn or appreciate things as well, I can't play the piano as well (though I can play anxious and miserable songs better if I am anxious and miserable), I can't write as well, and I become self-conscious and awkward. Besides, I get into a discouraged mood. Perhaps if I had developed habits of concentrated mental effort and ordered thinking when I was little, everything would work better now, but the truth is that I am naturally very lazy and that I am used to acting based on instinct and inclination more than on reason. So -- university it probably is.