In Which The Student Throws A Tantrum

N.B.: The following is rather self-absorbed and correspondingly boring.

On Wednesday evening I attended the philosophy lecture, which was about the question of what constitutes Self. What the lecture and the two others have proven is that I do explain the cosmos to myself in religious terms — which is comforting because I haven't been too stalwart of a defender either of religion or of agnosticism when I thought I was agnostic — and that it feels comfortable and, I guess, elastic enough to embrace all sorts of explanations.

Thursday was very long, with over three hours of Greek and one hour and forty-five minutes of my History and Culture of the Near East seminar and one hour and forty-five minutes of Latin. At the end of the seminar I asked the professor for the password to the online course material, which was evidently a faux pas, since I should have asked for it far earlier. He said that I should ask a fellow student for the password. Anyway, I summed this up as petty obstructionism and, interesting though I find the class, if it is even more difficult to do what I have to do to prepare for a presentation, catch up on readings which I hadn't figured out until that day that we had to do, and then put together material for a ten-to-fifteen page take-home assignment due at the end of February which I found out about by overhearing a classmate mention it to someone else who also didn't know about it, it won't work out. So I scheduled an appointment during the professor's office hours and will put forward the possibility of my dropping the seminar. Partly I am doing this to make it easier on the professor (certainly not for me, because the bureaucracy will most likely be a headache), and partly I admit I feel irritated and inclined to flounce.

In my defense, I had several courses at UBC which had online course materials, and often they were the professor's PowerPoint slides which I was there to see in person at the lecture often enough, and when they held important information this was explicitly brought up in class; so there was some reason for me to think that the maledicted Blackboard access was not such a big deal. As for asking a fellow student for the password, I think I will; but the atmosphere in the seminar itself would seem to indicate that they would be annoyed at me for accosting them and asking them the question — as I mentioned to my parents during my interminable complaints over the past few days, we wouldn't even know each others' names if they weren't written on the handouts which every presenter must distribute to the class in conjunction with their presentations. (And some students have another class together.)

On Friday evening I was still scourging myself with this tempest-in-a-teapot, so I dove into a sea of research for my presentation subject, and kept at it so steadily that, as the French (as far as I remember) say 'I did not see the hour pass,' and then I came late to Latin. (On the other hand, such lateness is not unprecedented, and was in this case exacerbated by the quick consumption of an extraneous bowl of yoghurt before I left, so it can't be blame entirely on scholarly vigour.)

But in the end it is unreasonable for me to expect to be happy at university every single hour of every single academic day, and my grumpiness and infantile impulses to dissolve into a burst of tears and so on are a rather 'clean' form of unhappiness — nothing depressive or guilty (I feel in the end that I might have done something unwise but not wrong). And as far as the seminar goes, even if I drop out on Tuesday, it and the accompanying lecture have given me precisely the kind of detailed material I can use to set forth medieval Islamic society in a future story and to provide a context which could be useful if I set a story in Europe (or Byzantium or Iran) at the same epoch. Which is part of the reason why I want to go to university: to learn to do good research so that I can use it to learn history out of curiosity, find material for stories, better understand the origins of things, and to write thorough and accurate non-fiction. So in the end I think I have it pretty good.