“I hold my head and know the streets are mine tonight.”
No one else writes anything! Maybe you’re all just really busy doing… whatever it is you’re doing (I wouldn’t know, you don’t write!).
What have I been doing? It’s been a week since I last posted… classes are going well. In Intro. To Comm. we’ve moved past the preliminaries on to specific theories of Communication. Symbolic Interaction Theory is the one I find most interesting… it’s very broad, but hold various tenets here and there that are actually rather insightful. The theory is based around three themes: the importance of meanings for human behavior, the importance of the self-concept, and the relationship between the individual and society. I was particularly taken in by the section on the importance of the self-concept. This theory purports that individuals develop self concepts through interaction with others and that self concepts provide an important motive for behavior- I was especially intrigued with the former of those two assumptions. Professor Waggs gave us a kind of funny example to illustrate that concept: you know how in the movie “Castaway”, Tom Hanks creates the “character” Wilson, the volleyball? This exemplifies the idea that people NEED to interact with someone (or in this case, something) in order to retain a sense of who they are and, by extension, sanity. I thought that was interesting… we also talked a lot about the “I” versus the “Me”. This part of the theory deals with the idea that we are constantly defining and evaluating ourselves based on what we think the people we’re interacting with think of us. The “I” is the spontaneous, impulsive, creative aspect of ourselves, whereas the “Me” is the reflective, socially aware aspect of ourselves, and everyone has a different balance between their “I” self and “Me” self based on how they read the responses they get from others (liberally or conservatively). Interesting stuff!
Spanish is probably my favorite class… I like the way your brain has to think in order to learn a foreign language. I like the familiarity of the patterns of foreign language. I like feeling like I’m actually gaining something concrete from my studies. I like the monotony of reading through a passage, flipping to the dictionary part of the text every other word to look up what something means. So I think Spanish is going to be something I stick with.
Into. to Euro. Hist. is also fascinating… I like that class because, frankly, I like feeling like I’m going in there knowing more than most everyone else in the class about the subject at hand. I mean, I don’t know much beyond English history, but I know English history pretty thoroughly, and I’ve picked up bits of French and Spanish history here and there, so all together that puts me quite a little bit ahead of the game. I genuinely really like history, just as a subject in its most base form, and I’m sort of wishing I could think of something to channel that interest into.
Nothing really need by said about Calculus or Geology… easy and actually interesting when I apply myself, which is rarely. So that covers all of my classes!
I had my first real meeting with my academic advisor earlier this week… I’m definitely leaning towards Political Science at the moment. I came to that conclusion when I saw a guy the other day wearing a “Beamer 2008” t-shirt (Frank Beamer is our genius of a football coach) and I had a sudden pang of longing for the more political climate of a year ago… I just realized how much I love the hype, the pomp, the idealism and the sinfulness of the political world. Everything about it- structure, coverage, key players, issues, parties, rhetoric- it all fascinates me. So maybe I should actually look into that.
Socially speaking… basically I hang out with Reed and V.J. and we watch movies! This week I bought Marie Antoinette, Pocahontas, Evita, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Mulan J. V.J. and I are actually getting to be legitimate buddies, and have actually gotten over the awkwardness of waking up and getting ready for class in the same room. Reed and I basically sleep together every night, but we try to alternate rooms… we figure that having two other people in the room rather than one isn’t that big a difference and it’s probably well worth having the room totally to themselves half the time to our roommates.
Well, that’s all for now!
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