Back in the Saddle

It's official: I have returned to Bard College to finish my studies. Student Accounts has my parents' money, I've "registered" for courses, and even the library caught whiff of my presence and is asking me to return overdue books from my last semester here (more on the scare quotes in a moment).

I'm living on the periphery of the main campus in Gahagan, an old house which was converted into a dorm. The construction from that conversion was either poorly executed in the first place or has been warped and skewed over the years. (I tend to believe the former with the latter as a factor that compounded already existing problems.) The house has three entrances, one in the front which leads to a common kitchen and the three rooms on the ground floor. A side door serves as a private entrance for one of the rooms on the ground floor. The third entrance is located near the back of the house and leads to a stairway to the second floor, which, in my estimation was either an attic or originally part of the ground floor before the house became a dorm. There is low clearance walking up the stairs and in most of the second floor, making it a less than ideal setting for a tall person such as myself. It is impossible to move from the second floor to the ground floor rooms without going outside to the front entrance. Finally, the latch on the door to my room will not shut completely unless it is lifted while closed.

These annoyances aside, it's quite a nice place to live. The other students living on the second floor are quite friendly and welcoming. The rooms are also quite warm, a nice problem to have after suffering from insufficient heat in my previous room.

As for "registration," technically, there is no space in the classes in which I would like to enroll. In order to register today, I would have had to settle for a selection of classes that, while certainly interesting to others, would have been devestatingly boring for me. Thus, I will be registering by adding classes to my course load during the add/drop period. The two professors who I spoke to today seemed eager for me to be in their classes: political science professor Mark Lindeman and I had a brief conversation about the politics of education, the false dichotomy of dividing America into two diametrically opposed ideologies of red/blue and conservative/liberal, and the decline of Hollywood cinema; sociology professor Yuval Elmelech and I discussed his seminar on social problems in America and my interest in education as one such problem to be explored in his class. I intend to take three courses this semester as a way of easing back into the strenuous academics of Bard, which leaves space for one additonal course. Hopefully, for that final course, I will be able to join history professor Myra Armstead in her research seminar on urban history.

There is one final note, a disappointment, which I must register: the food. "Same shit, different day" seems to me an apt description. All the more motivation for taking up cooking this semester.