Stressful Week

The primary reason this semester is so stressful is my class schedule - most days I start school at 1pm, but on Monday and Thursday I have class at 9am. The irregularity throws off my sleep schedule and inevitably I stay up Sunday night until 4am, get up at 8am and go to school; however, on Monday I also have a German class in the late afternoon, after a three hour break.

I'm required to take 2 years of a foreign language because I didn't study a foreign language as part of my under-graduate degree. It doesn't seem to matter that I already speak Spanish, and quite a bit of German and Chinese. (Chinese, incidentally, doesn't count for this requirement because it isn't "foreign". Japanese would have been too hard because of the characters, so I chose German). The credit doesn't count for a grade, I only need to have a "Pass" mark...and because I've studied German before (a year in high school and six months with Inga, my German girlfriend I met in Malta), the class is pretty easy for me. For all these reasons combined, and because this Monday I was also sick, I missed German class for the 3rd time this semester. The teacher told my classmate to tell me that, as she'd warned us at the beginning of the semester, my three absences forbade me from taking the final exam.

I could go off on a long tangent about the futility of "attendance"...I know, I know, 90% of life is just showing up...but give me a break - showing up to class is an imprisonment. I trade two hours a week of my physical presence, practicing what I don't need to practice, for a language ability requirement that has nothing to do with my actual language abilities. And if I miss too many episodes (even if I score higher than everyone else on the tests) I'm forbidden the credit. What is education? What should be rewarded - knowledge, talent, or effort? Should those students who try very very hard get a higher grade than those students who don't need to try hard, who learn easily and effortlessly?

At any rate - you can't beat the system. If I don't have that credit, I'll have to retake it next year. So I tracked my professor down and apologized to her and asked her about make-up work - luckily, I caught her in the middle of teaching another German class, which she let me sit in on for the day, and now everything is square. (I'm lucky, because it was an easy solution to a big problem.)

Last night, I got an email saying I still owed tuition (which I thought I'd already paid). Apparently there was a 'tuition' and a 'course fee' - I didn't know that I was paying per class rather than a flat fee. So I owe $600usd. That doesn't sound like a lot, but its $20,000nt in Taiwan, which is how much a lot of people earn in a month. I was trying hard to save up to pay tuition NEXT semester, so this came as somewhat of a blow.....but then I also found out today that I will probably get my scholarship through the summer, which is really, really great news and far outweighs the extra tuition.

I don't know why I'm rambling about my problems. My brain feels too full recently, there's too much going on, too much to do and too much to think about. I've been reading "Life and Times of Michael K", a fascinating book about a guy who just wants to be left alone, who goes and hides in a cave and grows pumpkins to live on and nearly starves himself to death because he just wants to lay down and do absolutely nothing all the time. Right now that's sounding pretty good to me. However, I've got to finish this semester first. I noticed in class today, I'm starting to "Mimic" the academic language myself, which is pretty good. It makes it sound like I know what I'm talking about - and maybe I do. Today I brought up Wittgenstein's theory of DaSein in a discussion about being, and correctly used the term "Symbolic Order", an overused expression in literary criticism which comes from Lacanian Psychoanalysis, and refers to the organizing effects of language.