Office Hours

So on every single college tour I’ve ever been on in my life, they make a big deal out of office hours, and on orientation, they talked about office hours, and as it turns out, I went to a few, and they’re actually good. I went to go talk to my chemistry professor (which is part of my Master Plan To Discover My Secret Love of Chemistry (which is working, by the way, I liked chemistry more after the lecture than I did before)) and it turns out he’s really nice! Which is unclear when there’s a lecture hall full of 150 of my closest friends. He also said that he could tell that I really cared about chemistry, which is one of those self fulfilling prophecies that will come true. I read an article once in the Wall Street Journal that talked about criticizing people for certain behavior only encourages it, and telling them something positive about themself that isn’t yet true is more likely to make it true. I’m not sure whether this is an actual study or more of an unsubstantiated observation, but nevertheless I believe I can convince myself to like anything.

That’s what happened with physics, anyway. (I wrote part of my pysch midterm- the question was something like “what is one of the things we learned in psych that you can apply to your everyday life” on how I operant conditioned myself into liking physics. If Walden II said it could be done, who am I to argue….?)

However, this idea is not shared by all of my peers- I told one of my friends about this, and she was unconvinced, and then tried to fall asleep in the lecture and I had to poke her and threaten to turn on her robot, which makes a lot of noise and would have walked across the floor. (Yeah, I have cool friends who build frog robots.)

I also went to the one for my Russian professor mainly to complain about how I’m not a heritage speaker and don’t deserve to be there (actually I asked a few really specific and non-complainy questions) and she suggested I stay after classes on Fridays to speak more. So yay for more practice. And she said “don’t worry about it” instead of “yeah you talk really badly you should probably just drop the class and never say another word of Russian in your entire life” which I guess is kind of what I half expected.

I still don’t have that much homework, which is weird, and so I end up spending a lot of time wandering and attending 17000 different club meetings, most of which I don’t intend on joining. I think I’ve already talked about the tryout process and cost of admittance and commitment level of a lot of these clubs, which is pretty intense, and means you can really only join so many clubs. Like 2. Also that they all meet on the same time. And some of them meet when I’m in class. And I need things to fill up all my days and not just the same 2 hours on Monday and Thursday to juggle between 5 different locations across campus.

Yesterday I spent an hour and a half baking with a woman who lives near (on?) the campus, and who’s hosting a dinner that I will not be attending due to reasons tonight. We made a lot of food, and we talked, and it was really pretty nice and relaxing, but then we finished making food and thus I had to go sit in the library and waste some more time.

The food here is good. I eat so many vegetables (and breads, and dessert, and ice cream… :))