At Semester’s End

I’m sitting on the stairs again. 

It has been a stormy, silvery, wintery, windy sort of fortnight and Merryweather refuses to connect to the blogosphere save when I sit here. I shake my head and whisper to myself.

I can hardly believe I’m here, people.

Do you remember that starry-eyed, dream-haze, ecstatic post about starting uni?

That was a whole semester ago. This is my last full week of school.

Exams loom. Essays are due. Ink is flowing. Fingers are sore. Binders are giving out. (I can never seem to keep those things past one semester. What’s up with that?)

This is the first time I approach Finals week with something resembling a bittersweet feeling, because I wholeheartedly enjoyed myself this semester. Ah, the dream school far made up for the pitfalls of the college.

Someday I believe I shall write about the differences I’ve discovered — the obvious and the not-so — between a large community college and a small, private, Christian university, but that day shall wait until after December 11th, the day of my last final.

These five courses have stretched me, taught me that writing essays can be an exercise in voice and composition (and not just reiterating material we’ve covered ~ who knew?! it’s so much more fun this way…).

Given me insight into how cool it can be to be a junior and taking classes meant just for me, in this discipline, at this point in my uni career.

My group and I created an entire campaign in Public Relations class.

Renaissance Literature took me traveling backwards in a time machine that creaked and crashed a couple times. Utopia was the most notable landing place, because More’s ideal commonwealth gave me the perfect blueprint for the fun story I’ve been crafting for 100 For 100.

I discovered just how much of a naysayer I am in Literary Criticism: 
I will never be a true literature lover.

I would so much rather pick up Bergren or Burch than Bunyan and I’ll leave the analysis to the scholarly. But I am thoroughly proud of my Deconstruction paper…

Anyone want to take the opposite view and tell me they prefer Mary Shelley to Shelley Gray, go right ahead. Would love to hear your thoughts in a comment. =)

I was right about one thing, though, when I wrote about the beginning of my uni adventure. I loved Journalism best. She told stories of the biz and she told it like it is and we wrote and we wrote and we wrote.

Loved it. I felt a bit like Nellie Bly.

Then there was one more English literature class that I liked because it made me a stronger writer and I laughed until I cried until I was red-faced and embarrassed almost every day.

This sums it up pretty well.

So for about a week and a half more I walk halls, climb stairs, hoist textbooks, hoard pens. Inspiring Daring may sit quiet for a while as a result. Then again, I may find myself here again, sitting on the stairs, because inspiration struck at the inopportune time when I should have been studying or at 7pm when I should be catching up on … everything.

We shall see how the ole blog fares.

That’s what’s up with me.

And you?