First Impressions, Part II
Well, ladies and gents, It's new a new week and I'm sure we'll all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, at least those of us who are lemurs. Personally, my eyes never seem all that bright, and "Bushy Tail" makes me think of something all-together different.
I have school from 8 AM till 6 PM on Mondays. Looking at my schedule, I never imagined it would be such a daunting experience, but verily it was. I spend almost 6 hours in one room, an extravagently lit Macintosh computer lab. Being around so much wasted computational potential hard on the geek in me, but even more painful is the effect on the eyes in me. I swear to
Never-the-less, I have now experienced the full scope and majesty of my course-load. I offer you my final two first impressions:
Acom 2273 (Introduction to Digital Layout): This class is basically the sequel to the elements of design class I took last semester. The professor is the same, and everyone in the class is familiar with him. So a part of me hoped we could skip the preliminaries and jump right into things. But instead we got all the same speeches about requirements, expectations and standards, but with a new twist - a lecture on the dangers of internet addiction and an impassioned entreaty to not surf the net during his lectures (he teaches in a lab), left we sink into a self-destructive spiral of looking at porno, or other such questionable influences. In a startling and possibly innappropriate tangent to that discussion, he decided to reveal that he is a civil-libertarian who would defend till the death our right to look up bomb-recipes and nazi propaganda, but only if it's "relevant" to class. I was going to keep this impartial, but I just realized these are my first impressions and this is my website.I'll just say it: I'm sick of this professor, and I'm sick of his whole fucking program. I'm looking forward to working with Quark Express more than I have in the past, but I don't expect it will be made a very satisfying experience.
Acom 2279 (Introduction to Digital Photography): Let me start with a discussion of my primary problem with this class. Everyone see the word digital in the title? Good. So explain to me why I have to buy $400 worth of analogue camera equipment, film and paper. Explain why digital cameras or their use aren't even mentioned in the course outline. Explain how it's even fair to place that kind of financial burden on students who are probably already borrowing money just to cover tuition and books. I'm interested in photohraphy. I like to play with cameras, and I think it will be pretty fun to see a darkroom and develop my own pics. But if there's one thing I'm really self-conscious about it, it's my "eye". I don't have any depth perception, I'm color-blind and If I were two feet farther from my monitor, I wouldn't be able to see the words I'm typing right now. In a class where taking "good" pictures is the primary criteria of success, I can't help but wonder if that counts a legitimate disability. So I'm worried about that, as well as my professor, who seems like a bit of an ass. He wanted to take pictures of everyone to use in remembering their names. I told him I wasn't comfortable with it, and he says "I'll just take a quick shot" and points the camera at me. So I said "Now you're really making me uncomfortable" and he looked like he was gonna push it again, so I just explained that I wouldn't mind if he had troubles with my name and that I'd try and make myself memorable in some other way. I don't like being photographed. Not even of my best hair-day do I want someone capturing me for posterity. That's why in 3 years this website has featured only 2 pictures of me and currently has none. And maybe I'm remembering things incorrectly, but It seems that thousands of people have been able to remember my name without the benefit of a video snapshot they could peruse at home. So maybe the first time I miss an assignment, I'll tell the professor I didn't remember it because I hadn't taken a picture of the handout.
There