academics and friends.

I've been neglecting my writing, but then again all of my online instructors decided that they should give their exams in the same week. I've been studying and it is certainly paying off. I have an A in math, probably for the first time in my life. Maybe since elementary school. Either way, it's awesome. Usually by the first test I'm down to a D and trying to work my way up to at least a C. It's different this time I think because my GED teacher actually worked with me, and the instuctor I have now is really great. It's all pretty much a review for me since what I'm doing now is around the ninth grade level and I had to learn it to pass the GED.

It's cool. I'm not even using a calculator because Ms. Black won't let us. She said it won't help in the next course we take, but I'm hoping I can just test out of that one. I never knew how to do fractions and now they're surprisingly easy to understand. The process is tedious and boring, but it's not hard. I resent the amount of time I spend on it because there are a lot of other things I can do with the hours I spend doing the homework, but that's okay. I feel kind of good about knowing how to do this stuff.

It's not just math that's been keeping me busy. Art History, which I thought would be much more interesting than it is, is a lot of reading. I'm not an art nerd. I appreciate visual art (paintings, sketches, sculpture, photography, etc) for its beauty and the passion an artist puts into her work, but I have always been partial to words and sounds. I find studying famous authors and listening to Beethoven far more interesting than reading about why the artist put a bit of coral pink paint on Jesus' thumb, or the symbolism of a certain hair cut. It's easy, but I'd rather learn guitar.

Adolescent psych is okay. The chapters in the book are quick to read and have some good insight on the way the average teenager's mind works, but it bothers me that there's no mention of chemical imbalances or any kind of psychiatric disorder other than typical teenage depression. It's as if the people who wrote the book failed to observe that teenagers can have psychiatric illnesses as well, and I would think that adolescent psychology textbook would address this issue. In the section about eating disorders, they only included anorexia and bulimia, completely ignoring binge-eating. Bulimia does have binge-eating, of course, but it's almost always followed by purging. Binge-eating by itself is very different. I'm going to have to take this course over again, as the credit doesn't transfer to LSU-S, so perhaps it will be different there.

And, lastly, there is History 101, which is Western Civilization I. We study civilization from the beginning of time to the renaissance. I'm quite into to history, especially the kind that doesn't get written into the textbooks and was hushed up for a long time before someone decided that writing a book about it would probably make a lot of money. While I like the subject, this particular course leaves something to be desired. When we studied the Greeks, the only mention of Greek mythology was a list of their gods with no explanation of what they were the gods of, nor any ancient Greek beliefs. The reasoning for this is that there are whole courses devoted to Greek mythology so if we want to learn about it we should go take one of those. This is stupid reasoning as there is no Greek mythology course of any kind at BPCC.

Other than school, I've been trying to make my room more aesthetically pleasing and hanging out with friends a lot more than I have in a while. My cell phone actually needs to be charged on a regular basis, which is an accomplishment because I used to only charge it maybe once a week. It's mostly been Megan aka Meru or Mike (and usually whoever is over at his apartment, like his brother or random other people) that I've been hanging out with. Life has actually been quite pleasant, other than the god-awful PMS I had for at least two weeks. My period finally came today, and I realllly hope it doesn't last for more than seven days. Despite the PMS of doom, Mom says my moods have been better than when I was on birth control. Odd.

More later.