I tumbled into the art room, panting and stomping. A lady, who acted like a professor, looked down her nose at me.

“Art 101?” She asked.

“Yes!” I answered, a little too enthusiastically. The lady went back to her reading.

People were seated in a circle on the floor. A couple people sat in the few available chairs. I flopped down almost on top of a boy sitting zen-like. His eyes were closed, but he was peeking at me out of the cracks.

A girl rocked back and forth, holding her knees and making fish faces with her lips.  She seemed as though she was completely unaware that doing that looked “weird”.

A few minutes past the hour, the instructor began to call roll.  All 20 people who were supposed to be in the class had showed up.  There were no open seats.

“I’m very sorry that everyone who was hoping to get in is unable to do so.  You should leave now, because there is no point in sticking around.”

More than half the people in the room got up and left.  Those who remained were weird.  One boy followed an imaginary light with his eyes.  The fish-face girl continued to make fish faces as the instructor read through her syllabus.  Another girl concentrated very hard on her wandering fingers; her hands chased each other as though they had independent brains of their own.

The instructor droned on, “One of life’s little ironies is that art supplies cost a small fortune, and artists are usually poor…”

After class I called my mom and told her about all of the weird people in my class.  She said, “I think you’ll find more and more of that, the deeper you dig in the art world.  Those artsy types could really care less about what the world has to say of their actions.  In a way, they’re kind of like homeschooled kids.”

Homeschooled kids?  Now this is something I can identify with!

School starts again tomorrow. I can’t believe that I’m starting on my second semester of college. I don’t feel like I’m a college student. I guess I had always imagined that it would be different somehow. I think that the media portrays college as something that is akin to Disneyland for big kids–fun all the time. And not only fun all the time, but the ONLY place on earth that you can have fun. I’m so disillusioned that sometimes I wonder if it’s possible to have fun once you grow up and get a real job.

At any rate, college is fun, but it’s not fun all the time. Just sometimes. It’s fun to look at all the different classes that are available, and imagine all the possibilities of the future. But it’s also been the most stressful time of my life. Now I understand why psychological problems start appearing once people hit the college age.

I’m hopeful and optimistic. This will be a good semester.

For the past week I was in Denver, Colorado, at Life Impact 2008. I decided right off the bat that I loved the city and that I wouldn’t protest if someone forced me to live in an apartment that hung over the top of a downtown boutique.

Here is a totally unedited view from the ninth floor of the Grand Hyatt at 7am:

My roommates and I slept with the curtains open, even though I know that stalkers could spy on us with a rifle scope or binoculars. In Tucson there are about 4 tall buildings, and Tucson has light pollution regulations because of the UofA observatory. So, we took the view any chance we could get, stalkers and all.

The higher altitude in Denver took me the whole week to get used to. One day, I decided to take the stairs up to my room instead of taking the elevators. The elevators gave me a headache because of the almost instant change in elevation. Nine flights of stairs? No problem, right? Wrong. I’m not sure which is worse: wheezing for half an hour or having a headache.

I spent a day in Boulder, too. It was a cute little college town, but I wouldn’t like to live there. I think I like cities with at least a million people. If I lived in Boulder, I would wake up every day and say, “What am I going to do today? Oh right, figure out how to breathe without oxygen. Right.”