The Soul of Wit

The first week of the semester is strangely slow, as the work begins piling up imperceptibly. So imperceptibly, in fact, that I (in a fit of delusion that I will regret when midterms roll around) feel like I have time to write a nice long entry on my impressions of classes.

Bio 1B
More interesting than expected! The professor (for the first third, at least) is surprisingly un-soporific, considering that it is an 8 a.m. class and he has started off with fungi. Of course, I haven't been to lab yet, so my impression may change: theoretical biology is usually more tolerable than the practical, as most unfortunately evidenced by 1A and 1AL last semester.

Chem 4B
The majority of this class is freshmen and there is a suspiciously science-fair-like research assignment looming in the distance, which prejudices me against 4B from the start. However, the first two lectures have been okay, and we're getting into redox, a topic I rather enjoy. I'm ambivalent about the fact that the last third of this class is an intro to organic chemistry: on the one hand, it will be incredibly dull to go over bond-line structures and nomenclature after having taken a year of organic; on the other, it might boost my grade after what will no doubt be a horrible research project.

Physics 8B
"If you adapt your eyes to darkness for about 15 minutes and then have a friend chomp on a piece of [a Wintergreen LifeSaver] in the darkness. . ."
No. That is one "if" that no "then" could ever justify. With this paragraph-opener a few pages into the textbook, any wild hopes of 8B quashing my long-standing dislike of physics have been dashed. I'm pretty apprehensive about this course, largely because I have a huge mental block against electromagnetism, and I fear that, to overcome it, I may actually have to like the subject. And to like physics, as we all know, would be something of a monstrous taboo, so I intend to push that mental block right under the rug (frictionless surfaces, of course) and blindly force myself through the misery.

English 125C
Oh, right. I'm an English major. This is my first upper division English class, and it's on the European novel. The first book on the reading list - Waverley, by Sir Walter Scott - is beginning most sluggishly, but I'm still hopeful about this class. For one thing, I prefer literature courses that are grounded in history like this one is; for another, I'm just so grateful to be out of the survey of modern lit I took in the fall that I am happy to bear thousands of pages of tangents, so long as they don’t deal with race, gender, sexuality, urban disillusionment, and, generally, utter garbage. And the pages will definitely number into the thousands, as the other novels we're reading are: Notre-Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo; A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens (always nice to have one I’ve read before on the list); and War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy.

We'll see how it all goes. I've almost survived the first week (I have one more class to go to today), and in my experience, if you can do that, you can do anything. And the title alludes to Wordsworth, if you care.