Junior Year Recap

     Another school year has ended. Finally.
 
     So, let's look at how I thought it would go: My fall class schedule would've featured photography taught by Cassie, Crisis Comm taught Dr. Eversole, Newspaper Production, something else I forgot, and Susan would've been in my government class. Life would pretty much center around the BCM; Susan and I would've led SWAT together, I would've kept on playing in the worship band, the gang would get together for Flapjack Fridays with the Lunch Bunch, there'd be the basketball tournament in fall and volleyball tournament in spring. The Pancake Feed finals week. Velocity on Thursday nights, Impact on Mondays. Hanging out doing homework in the office. Naps on the softest couches on campus. Occasional coffee runs late at night when there's a lot of people's minds. Parks and Rec reruns and crying together when the show ended. Complaining about the terrible season the Thunder dragged us through. Meals would be shared, simple pleasures like watching rain and Disney singalongs would've been enjoyed, lots of shared prayer, and we'd be there for each other when they needed it. Even (especially?) because that would have involved a lot of sarcasm and insults thrown around lightly on a daily basis.
     That scenario was basically what happened. Except I was watching from afar, connected by Twitter and Facebook. But despite Deb's cancer and Justin's health problems, insanely difficult courses and goodness knows what else, they got through and things were kept running smoothly.
     As far as classwork goes; I'd probably be on track to graduate next May. I'd also likely be the editor of The Northeastern right now; it was pretty much one of those things that was known around the Media Studies department that I was one of the top candidates to replace Meredith once she moved on.
     I would've lived in the dump that is Ross, dealing with the well-documented Arctic temperatures, weekly wasp invasions, and weird smells and loud noises. It was terrible, and filled with freaks(and stoners. And drunks. But most drunks were in Logan.) But there were friends suffering as well, so mutual complaints made things tolerable. The caf would still be extremely depressing, but there's The Underground and Flo's to compensate. The campus library would still be creepy and unpleasant.
     There'd be the library to run down to occasionally when there was time, and weekly expeditions to Morgan's for cookies. And Boomerang for those times when I needed greasy food, the pleasant atmosphere of old people having conversations, and writers' inspiration in equal measure. The Galdamezes to visit once in a while, Grace Baptist to attend on Sundays it was hiking weather. Grandpa and Robbie, too. And Harry and Louise.
   
     But I didn't stick around Northeastern State and the land of the RiverHawks; because the family needed me at the house. There was a lot going on. I finished my gen eds through Tulsa Community College in about three months. Got to read stuff I wanted to when I could, which included Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, some of Cynthia Rylant's short stories, Stephen King's On Writing, William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade, Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken, and others.
     Movies seen for the first time wee The Quick and the Dead, His Girl Friday, The Karate Kid, An Affair to Remember, Sleepless in Seattle, The Breakfast Club, Guardians of the Galaxy, Serenity, Romancing the Stone, Days of Thunder and Top Gun. 
     Rewatched Space Jam, all five Air Bud movies, Captain America, the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, It's a Wonderful Life, While You Were Sleeping, The Big Green, the Iron Man trilogy, The Avengers, The Incredible Hulk, The Fox and the Hound, The Aristocats, Searching for Bobby Fischer, the Toy Story trilogy and Thor. Those are all the movies I can remember from fall. Caleb and Courtney got me hooked on the awesomeness that is Phineas and Ferb, and then of course we all rewatched the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. together, along with MacGyver. I also finished Firefly and the first season of Friday Night Lights. 
     As far as classes went - Word was almost Comp I- or nutrition-level awful, government was depressing, saddening and boring, but extremely easy; biology was tough and mostly irrelevant, with a few cool concepts(genetics!); and Photoshop was interesting, challenging and rewarding.
     Got to know Banjo the red heeler, and Rags loved me not being at college.
     Nano died, which was sad for us. But good on her end; with heaven awaiting. And she was more than ready to go.

     In January I headed to Claremore and Rogers State; Hillcat territory. It was....difficult. I seriously thought I wouldn't pass most of my courses.
     This led to long nights of staying up late writing essays or posts like this. Also, late nights of running from smoke alarms or blazing through Agent Carter, season two of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., or most of Daredevil. (I really like superheroes; okay?!) And I tracked the best quotes of season one from Agents for two reasons: A, it's written so well, and B, it was a good exercise to study dialogue pacing. As a way to stay slightly-connected to BCM folks, I blazed through all seven seasons of Parks and Recreation in six weeks. Stephen, Elizabeth, Daniel P.and Bucky love that show. Mom watched through season six in two weeks in fall, and she loved it, too. So I figured why not jump on the bandwagon? Even if it was pretty late. So I rewound after that was accomplished to recap the best quotes from the first season of Parks, too, for the same reasons listed above. Also, I really needed some comedy to de-stress, and characters to care about, even if they were fictional. Besides, there was so much textbook-reading that after a while I just couldn't deal with more letters on a page; they felt like they were just swirling around in a tornado and I didn't feel like taking the tornado apart to understand what the words said. Also, it was a good way to study camera placement and shooting technique, of which I needed all I could find in order to finish Advanced Broadcasting. The eight-week NSU run-on-instinct crash-course introduction to video production last spring really didn't prepare me very well at all for the RSU version. And having three weeks to learn an entirely new software right before classes started didn't help much, either. (The acceptable-quality-enough-to-share projects: Day in the Life of a College Student, Parks-style; Between the Sidelines; my favorite, and a short film resulting from a collision by two strange ideas; and Hillcat Spirit; a documentary-type deal on cheerleading which needed a lot better planning than I was able to do.) The instructor did a good job; it's just I lacked the experience to meet his expectations.
     Besides the ABP trouble, Media Law was nearly impossible to figure out most of the time, and the instructor would be good to know; but had a tendency to ramble a lot during lectures. And he was extremely disorganized. But he was the guy over the theater department, so...that kinda explains it. The professor for Interpersonal Communication seemed like a blend of Mrs. Boyer and Trish personality-wise, and her tests seemed designed to be unsolvable puzzles. Most of that class consisted of taking notes and not falling asleep(back-to-back classes without a lunch break is a bad idea). And I learned in that course that I can write a paper from 12-4 a.m.on the due date and still get an 89. Not at all recommended, but...anyway, that class seemed to fall into the "rather pointless" category. Creative Writing was a good course. Dr. Mackie's teaching style reminded me of Dr. Faulds or Prof. Semrow; clear directions, high expectations, and help if you ask for it.
     The Novel was disappointing. I liked the books I was familiar with; Sense and Sensibility(Jane Austen), The Great Gatsby(F. Scott Fitzgerald) and The Sun Also Rises(Ernest Hemingway), and hated everything else(The Awakening, Kate Chopin; A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce; The Stranger, Albert Camus; Go Tell It On the Mountain, James Baldwin; Sula, Toni Morrison; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera; and Blankets, Craig Thompson). I read all of those at least three times each. Middle-of-the-road were The Hunger Games(Suzanne Collins) and The Book Thief(Markus Zusak), which were read as potential profile subjects for an essay. Marvels(Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross), which I did do the profile over, The Hundred and One Dalmatians(Dodie Smith), To Kill a Mockingbird(Harper Lee) and Fahrenheit 451(Ray Bradbury), all of which I read to get the nasty required taste out of my mouth, were all very good. The professor leaned towards being a feminist(which was annoying) who stressed philosophical questions like "Do we need religion in our modern world?" or "Why should one way or finding meaning in life take precedence over another?" She was also a very firm advocate of relativism. Thus, all my papers and tests, which had a tendency to stray into defenses of concrete moral truth, made her a little mad and so she'd take away points for that reason.
     The string of A's bit the dust; with two A's in Creative Writing and Interpersonal Communication, two B's in Media Law and The Novel, and a C in Advanced Broadcasting. So my grades weren't the best. But I tried to give everything I had to each project....it's just that the energy-fuel was heavily rationed.
   
     I'm fairly convinced that there are demons on the NSU campus. But there are definitely angels stationed there as well. It's uncomfortable sometimes; knowingly being aware of the spiritual warfare going on. At RSU, there wasn't any of that. Spiritually it was just a vacuum of nothingness. There weren't really any churches nearby to go to, and the RSU BCM was a colossal disappointment, like CCF but Eversomuch Moreso, to quote Robert McCloskey's Centerburg Tales. Most of the time, the only prayer I could muster was "Lord, thanks for getting me through today. Do it again tomorrow."  

     Now, as has become kind of an annual segment of these types of posts, music that either stuck in my head often or seemed to fit the school year. (See those for high school graduation, freshman year, and sophomore year.) This year that "Often Stuck" category includes "How Firm a Foundation", "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid(why?), Delirious' Deeper, the "Friends" theme song, Mr. Mister's "Kyrie", Carrie Underwood's "Temporary Home" and Little Texas' What Might Have Been". There was also Steven Curtis Chapman's "Burn the Ships", "God is God", "Heaven in the Real World", "The Great Adventure" and "Magnificent Obsession". Brad Paisley's "Everybody's Here" and "Those Crazy Christians", in particular. He's got a ton of great material, a wonderful storyteller. Also some Relient K; "Be My Escape", "College Kids", "For the Moments I Feel Faint", "Forward Motion", "Hello McFly", "Over Thinking", "Pressing On" and "Trademark", specifically. The songs of Miranda Lambert's I speciallly remember are "Desperation" and "Love is Looking for You", but there's a ton more than I like of hers. Nothing in particular of Keith Urban's stands out, but I love his music. And Avril Lavigne's "Everybody Hurts", "I'm With You", "Mobile" and "Tomorrow". She's another great storyteller, of the Keith Urban/Taylor Swift "This is the situation; and this is as honest as I can write about how it's affecting me" type. Mouse Rat's "5,000 Candles in the Wind", "Catch Your Dream" and "The Pit", of course.

     At different times and in their own ways, Amanda, Ash, Daniel, Elizabeth, Jessica, Jon and Stephen were there to help by providing prayer, news, or simply listening and talking. Good to talk with Dylan sometimes, too. And from GBC, there were Steven and Jamie, Scotty, Mr. and Mrs. Dugas and the Steeleys. It was very helpful to get a ride to/from church from the DeSpains, very thankful for that.

     The apartment was nice; it was good to have a microwave. But there were too many mirrors; six reflective surfaces in three rooms is way too many. And the window wouldn't ever open. So when you're cooped up indoors doing homework for hours on end, not even the smell of outside...it's small things like that which stick out. Never having visitors, I never really cleaned very much, which was irritating, but when the RA's would drop by to do monthly inspections they always marveled at how this was the cleanest apartment they'd ever seen. The second day I said out loud to myself, "This would be better if there was a cat to share it with," and that was pretty much the way it worked the whole time. Much better than a prison cell, but maybe more alien.

     I don't think there's a college anywhere that I would mesh well at. There's just something about them that I seem to be violently allergic to. But another year is done, so a few months away is good, I guess.