Done with School!

The past 3 weeks have been incredibly busy, and I had no time to blog. I took a great course called The U.S. Occupation of Japan and Iraq, which is a comparative history class with one of Hiram's best professors (Adam Cathcart) who is unfortnately leaving the school to go to China/Washington. (Yeah I'm not exactly sure what that means.) The class was an insane amount of work, as he thought it was reasonable to expect us to read 200 pages in a night. . . and then write an essay about the reading. There were also map quizzes, projects, a mandatory 4-page rap song with footnotes, and many other assignments.

It was a great course, and I learned a lot while stressing myself out completely and getting no sleep for 3 weeks. Really . . . 3-4 hours in a night was not uncommon, and I pulled several all-nighers.

In the end, it was totally worth it! And I got an A. :-)

Some fun things happened too. . . such as springfest, which is a big event that happens at the end of each school year. It's an all-weekend event. . . they have a dance+dinner, a concert, and a carnival+huge picnic(among other things) throughout the weekend. It was definetely a good time.

Finishing up the year was a bittersweet time. Of course I really love a lot of the folks at Hiram, and I enjoy my life as a student. But the 3-week also exhausted me, and I was ready for school to be done.

Packing up was crazy. . . it's impressive how much shit I accumulated over the year. I didn't think I was going to be able to fit it all into my dad's car! My dad had to borrow a van. . . though this was largely because a friend of mine needed a ride back to Cleveland too, so we needed room for her stuff too.

After a few hours of cleaning and throwing most of my belongings into plastic grocery bags, I (with the help of my roommate, who did the same) transformed my room into the barren and lonely wasteland that all dorm rooms are when empty.

Now I get to go work at my job (which I don't like -- painting) all summer. I cannot wait for August.

Cheers!

--David

Random photos

This does not look edible.
This kid is a favorite.

Me taking a picture of her taking a picture of me.
I'm happy?
Cubing...
Zack eating Gwen's hair.
Annie + Elisa
Becky
Elisa + Sara
Robin (aka thug)
Some of my favorite people.
Something...
Intercultural forum
Rachel + Cody
Me + Robin playing Connect four
Some point of my beard stage..
I'll be honest -- I parked there. . . but it was at a school, on a weekend!
A ridiculous car

More to come perhaps.

--David

Term Papers

So, in college, apparently term papers are supposed to be important, and count as a significant portion of your grade. Certainly, when a person works on these things over time, planning it, writing it, developing it, proofreading it, going back and changing certain things, etc., the best possible paper will result. That is probably the best way for a person to work up to his or her full potential.

However, as I have many distractions and things that I would rather do at school (besides working on term papers), I seem to have adopted a strategy for doing these important papers. My strategy is to not even think about them at all until the very end of the semester, and then to do it all in one night.

For example, I had a paper due in my political science class, "Islam and Politics." Our professor kept reminding us that we needed to get our topics approved by him, and that we only had a week left, etc. So, I contacted him with an idea for my topic. Unfortunately he didn't like my idea that much I don't think, and he wanted to change it a bit. So, I used this as an excuse to not think about the paper until the day before it was due.

Then on that day, I picked a topic, talked to my professor, and wrote the whole paper. It was a horribly inefficient use of time because I think the whole paper could have been done in about 6 hours (including the necessary research). However, I started it at noon and went to bed at 5AM. This was roughly 17 hours, the majority of which was spent on my paper. (Certainly I took some breaks though. . . which counted for a few hours)

All the pressure is a great motivator, and I ended up getting an "A-/A" . I was very happy with this, though I wondered why he couldn't just give me a definitive grade?!? Professors like messing with our minds I guess.

A similar technique was employed on my Ancient Philosophy final paper. . . I haven't gotten it back yet, but something tells me I didn't do quite as good a job on that one, especially because I "finished" it 6 minutes before it was due, and we had the assignment for a month.

So, this technique works sometimes, though I plan on avoiding this in the future.

--David

Price is Right

The other day, the school put on a "Price is Right" contest for students, and I was dragged along by a friend of mine, as I usually don't do anything interesting such as going to cool campus events. I was worried that it would be incredibly lame, but it turned out to be quite cool.

I didn't even remember ever seeing The Price is Right before, but seeing this revitalized some memory that I had of previously seeing it, and I believe it's fair to say that the event was a fair depiction of the show. Anyone who comes in submits a ticket, and these tickets are used to randomly select contestants for the different rounds.

Of course, people had to compete in guessing how much different items cost, and then got to participate in further contests/games depending on how well they did in the intitial round.

What really shocked me, though, was the quality of the prizes. For example, one girl won an iPod along with Sony Noise-Cancelling headphones. I was ridiculously jealous.

(The pictures are by Kasey Samuel Adams Photography. Lots of pictures of Hiram events are at his site http://www.flickr.com/photos/kcadams/ )

Some of the audience -- including me

Something

Spinning the wheel

Contestants

Maybe I should go to more campus events. The Kennedy Center Programming Board did a good job I guess.

--David

Spring Break

Ok I'll be honest -- Spring Break was boringgg.

That is one problem with Hiram -- our Spring Break is the wrong week. Everybody that I know had Spring Break the week after hours.

I had friends (from Hiram) who went on trips to New Orleans, Miami, the Florida Keys, the Outter Banks of NC, etc. I was smart enough to spend my Spring Break in Cleveland . . . where it was 20 degrees outside.

I also was smart enough to get behind in some of my school work, so I had to use break to catch up. . . meaning that I couldn't even take the time to relax, because I had stuff hanging over my head constantly! Ehhh. I need to not do that.

However -- I do realize that my boring break was largely my fault. One of the good thing about Hiram is that the majority of the students are from Ohio. So, for most of us, it's not hard to find people to hang out with, even for a boring week of Spring Break in Cleveland.

But, I took no initiative to call people that I knew (and were in town), and consequently I did nothing. Bad idea.

I did get the lovely opportunity to read Marx though. . . also, I had a paper that I was supposed to write, but didn't. (I did it the Sunday I got back) Damn, sometimes I get pissed at myself.

I just realized that this post is really boring. Oh well, an acccurate reflection of my break.

I don't even have any pictures. To compensate for this, I have decided to include the following picture of mustard:

Sweet.

--David

Work Ethic

Busy week this week . . . I had a large paper due and a midterm (even though it wasn't really the middle of the term).

One of the scary things about college is the constant thought of being in a situation where learning actually matters. In high school, I remember studying for a latin exam or something and knowing that this was my last latin class, and I only needed to know it for the next couple days and then I could forget it for the rest of my life. This was true at the time, of course, and sure enough I have forgotten almost all of the latin that I learned in high school. It's kind of a waste though, when you think about it -- I took four years of latin.

If there are roughly 180 school days in the year. Multiplied by four years, I went to around 700 latin classes in high school, for a total of almost 500 hours of latin classes and probably a few hundred more hours of homework and studying.

But now I know nothing! . . . and it doesn't matter.

College is a bit different though. Granted, a lot of people will continue their education after college, but college is when learning starts to matter a lot more. This is scary when it comes to studying and developing a work ethic.

So, in studying for my midterm, I was pretty sure that I knew enough to BS my way through it. . . but even though I was tired of reading and studying, I felt I should try to learn something! Heck, for the amount of money that college costs, it would be stupid not to.

I'll admit it though -- sometimes I just can't get myself out of my old mentality of trying to do the smallest amount of work possible, working only for the grade and having no real consideration for learning. I wish I could outgrow it.

This will come with time, I suppose.

--David

Birthday

On Wednesday I turned 19. It was exciting. To celebrate, my parents came down and took me out to dinner at Ruby Tuesday, where I ate an incredibly enormous and deliciously juicy serloin burger.

However, the significance of the night was greater than a good burger. This is due to my drastic change in appearance that occured that night. After a haircut, a shave, and a change of clothes (I ended my pajama streak!), I was a new man who was hardly recognizable. Pictures:

This is what I looked like for many months.

The beard

How I look now

The lack of a beard

After 3 months of not shaving, and 4 and a half months of wearing clothes that made me look like I just woke up, people were shocked to see me! I got many great reactions, but one of the most interesting and quick to explain reactions was a guy who refused to call me "Dave" for several days. He called me "Not Dave" instead. Whatever :-)

That night I had a little party in my room. It was actually not that little, and it probably violated campus regulations for dorm room capacity, but it was a lot of fun. We watched Ferris Buheller, but I don't think anybody really paid attention to the movie.

Packed room

Ramya, Beth, and myself

Good ole' Ferris and his girlfriend..?

Tim!

Annie/Elisa, with me sneaking into the background

It was a fun time.

--David