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!

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.”

All of my final grades have been released. The following graph shows my final grade, what grade I think my professor deserves, and how I grade the class as a whole. I gave my professors grades based on how I felt I was treated, how much interest they put into the class, and how well they taught. I graded the class on how people interacted together and how interesting the material was.

For all of my classes, the material was pretty interesting, but not necessarily something that I would use outside of college. In the case of my Books and Dialog class, the material will be useful for my whole life (I didn’t sell back any of that class’s books), but the people in my discussion group did not want to participate.

As for the professor ratings, the two professors who got an A knew how to teach well, had a tight lecture schedule that they stuck to, and knew my name. My professor in my Latin American class knew my name by the second week, and I was one of 200 students (give or take a few) in her lecture hall. My English teacher, though very nice, did not teach me anything. I’m not sure if she taught anyone in that class anything. And my Human Geography professor seemed to enjoy teaching, but he didn’t enjoy anyone who was not an honors student.

I got a B in English. Eighty percent of the grade was based on 4 essays, and the remaining percentage was based on other little writing projects that we did. My essay grades were really all over the place in that class. I don’t feel like I’m that inconsistent in my writing, but maybe the inconsistency comes a little from my professor and a little from me.

It is such a relief to have this semester over with.

The other day I was on campus, in between activities, and I watched groups of parents with their kids wandering around with lost looks in their eyes.  They were holding the characteristic red orientation packets that scream, “I’m probably lost and confused right now!”  Moms were holding maps upside down and backwards, pointing at buildings and screwing their eyes.  Dads were standing in the middle of the roadways, blocking bicycle traffic.  Girls were trying to fit into the college crowd, combing their hair with their fingers and looking around nervously.  They were wearing nice clothes and designer flip flops.  They failed miserably at fitting in.

See, at this point, with only 11 real class days left in the fall semester, we college kids are in survival mode.  Last week I pulled two all-nighters.  Seven page paper due tomorrow?  No problem…just lemme run to Starbucks first.  I’ve seen more bloodshot eyes in the past few days than I have ever seen in my life.

“Why is your shirt all wrinkly…and smelly?”

“I wore it yesterday, and I slept in it last night, and it was the first thing I saw this morning so….”

“Yeah,  I know what you mean.”

I am in survival mode until the end of the semester.  I can sleep at any time, in any situation.  I will eat things that are total crap, just because I’m not sure when I’ll have time to eat next.  My drink of choice is caffeinated tea.  I feel like a character in a first-person shooter game whose mission is to survive under fire for 10 minutes; I know it’ll be over soon, I’ve just got to make it there.