Lazy days

Ahh … nothing better than a long chain of lazy days. I’ve spent the last two days in bed, watching TV or just browsing websites (thank you, StumbleUpon, thank you).

After next week, my staycation vacation will officially start, and most of that time will be lazy time. My homepage will see a redesign, sure. I’ll get that much-needed haircut, yes. But, oh, the mere thought of spending a long time doing nothing (after three weeks of doing everything) makes me wish I could fast-forward the upcoming week and be done with those two final exams and the graphic design presentation that are just getting in the way.

Next term, I’ll only have three classes. The final three. Easiest thing ever, I hope. I’ll have to take a couple of courses to make the rest of the required 60 hours in order to graduate and be done with the whole college thing. I can’t wait to see that time when my family will not have to bug me about getting an education, because school sucked for the most part, college is sort of meh and, if I’d had a choice, I would have liked to start working right away. But now, I’m tied down by student credit, which I’ll have to start paying after graduation.

Anyway, back to the whole lazy thing. This is the “Holy Week”, as they call it. Back in school, we’d get the whole week off, but all I get now is a four-day holiday starting Thursday (yesterday). Not sure if the school kids still have it the same, but they’re already lucky to have a whole summer of doing nothing, if they so desire.

I’m wondering what I’ll do following the upcoming term. I can’t do my final project thing until January (something about the September-December term being too short), so I’ll have four months for doing whatever my family wants I want. I hope I can use that time to become better at everything I want to become better at (especially Blender, because it seems I’m perpetually rusty when it comes to it), and use the remaining time to get a well-deserved rest of around 19 years of “education”. Too many years, in my opinion, and not everything (especially what was actually necessary) was well-taught.

As for reading, I haven’t done much of it since The Magic Mountain. Nothing of it, in fact. My motivation has suffered greatly with much of it (and my time) spent on college work, and some lazy time is just what I need, to allow it to replenish, as slowly as it ever does. Maybe after next week I’ll have enough motivation to pick up a pocket book or something.

I’ll see if I can take advantage of the city/town/thing being empty (everyone’s making the most of their long weekend) to take a nice long walk and get some photos. Photos are good. It’s the stuff of memories, second only to the mind (but even that fails sometimes).

Until then (if it does happen) go read some other blogs. They also want to be read, you know!

Class until seven

Yes, there’s a class here. Until 7:00.

The above is a phrase that comes up often every Monday and Thursday when I’m in college. During my art history class (the only class of the day for me), someone, be it a teacher or a student, will pop his/her head in. It’s happened so many times, we all (or at least most of us) automatically go “Yes, there’s a class here. Until 7:00″.

It has sort of become a running gag on the already fun class, that consists of the teacher and no more than eight students. This small amount is usual for Graphic Design students, so it’s no surprise if the class doesn’t go beyond four or five.

Anyway, the workload has become rather light in the last few weeks, with one major exception (illustration, but that’s a subject for another day). Most classes are fun, not because the contents are interesting, but because the people teaching them aren’t dead on the inside. The class-until-seven is but one example of ways to make education not consist on a Brave-New-World-esque session of repeated phrases and information that one has to memorize and reproduce in written form in time of tests.

This isn’t the 17th century. Don’t expect right posture, full manners and high-class vocabulary while addressing, or being addressed by, some middle-aged (or older) living statue that does no more but hope that you engrave some generally-accepted piece of data into a small corner of your brain, so as to prevent you from being a total waste of skin and oxygen. You see it in period pieces… movies, I mean, about the 16th-through-19th century. Oh, how painfully strict and boring those schools must’ve been!

Now, you can sit in class, learn things, and talk. Not just about the class subject, where you can already see tons of real-life examples of it being applied, and even fun comparisons, but also about life. There’s plenty of time to teach, with the one, two or three hours given to the class on its assigned day of the week, but there is also plenty of time to discuss recent events, to expand upon a certain subject that may or may not necessarily relate to the day’s subject, or even joke around.

All, of course, until 7:00.