The Daily Minutiae: college

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Fall Quarter '08: Nostalgia

"I know what you're thinking ... a twelve-by-twelve area isn't that much to work with, but what a lot of students do something called 'lofting;' that's where they make their bed a bunk-bed and put stuff under it. It's like putting your bed on stilts..."

"And now we're coming into East Green."

"I'm sorry, which one?"

"East."

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These are two of the several lines I've heard lately spewing from the mouths of tour guides as they take their groups through the safari of college life.

High schoolers shuffle around behind their guide with their parents; their eyes strafe the faces they pass. Few of them have anything to say. Every once in a while I'll spot one like me, with his or her college-app-filling, greedy little high school eyes daydreaming how they're going to conquer OU. I guess you could say it's a change of times, but I don't see many like those.

A close friend of mine and I were reminiscing about junior year. That was my favorite in high school and hers too. As ages go though, I've heard a line about growing up that says "17 is a test." This underrates 18 by far, I think. Senior year, prom, graduation, being a "leader," responsibility. That was all before the summer; then came work, college planning, shopping. Then comes "Kristallnacht," that night every soon-t0-be Bobcat has when they good-bye to their best friends as they wait another two weeks for school to start.

Do we need to get into adjusting to the college?

Wait --change of times?

It was a year ago that I was learning about lofting. A year ago I never thought I'd have my greens down, much less know what a green actually was.

I feel like polling visiting students to see if they're in the same kind of awe that I was in just a year ago. (Just a year? Did I really look that lost a year ago?) What did they want out of college? Where else are they looking? How the hell is high school?

Having gotten this off my chest has put me in that same feeling that I get when I linger around to watch the tour groups leave. I sigh, shrug my shoulders, think about my truncated high school years, and write it off as just feeling old.

Fall Quarter '08: Midnight

⊆ 12:39 AM by A. Liebendorfer | college , life , lucy liu , midnight , ohio university . | ˜ 0 comments »

There are interesting phenomena among college freshmen. The first is how easy they are to spot the first week: traveling in herds, visible lanyards, copious college apparel. The second is how they disappear in the second week. Suddenly the most straight-laced of freshmen emerge with body piercing and some start tattoo tableaus on their backs.

I got out of my shift at The Post tonight at midnight. I can't put my finger on it but there's something whimsical about midnight walks home. Only the Asians walk the streets that late at night, skirting back from their midnight classes. It's an inherently reflective time of day.

I couldn't help but ponder all this self-reinvention going on, and I couldn't help but feeling I'm squandering this opportunity. It's amazing how I'm with the same friends in different skins. I still eat more than I should, not exercise enough, not read enough.

I opened the door to my musty room. "This is the base of operations" was what came to my mind.

Now the question. What am I going to change?

Fall Quarter '08: Voseo

⊆ 10:28 PM by A. Liebendorfer | college , fall , life , school , spanish , terry hatcher , voseo . | ˜ 3 comments »

I'm trying to think of a euphemism. I had a lofty opinion of myself in high school Spanish class, especially the last year. So much that I wasn't surprised in the least to learn I tested into Spanish 341. I was kind of cocky about it, really. I still am.

But every Tuesday and Friday, Professor Porter tears me a new one in Gordy Hall. I consulted my old friend and Spanish teacher this summer, and she said to expect what I now call The Rapture. But thus my latent fuego for Spanish has been rekindled.

The voseo was a ghost in my Spanish studies. To make it brief, many European languages deal with their verbs by sticking on suffixes on roots to show who's doing what and when they're doing it. This goes without saying that it's much --MUCH-- more complicated. Well, Spanish has a dialect in Latin America that uses another word instead of the normal "tú" for you, and that is "vos." What's so weird about it is that how it's used changes from country to country but it still has its own rules. I spent a week searching for the rules to get a straight answer and still nothing.

Then one day last week, I was sitting at the end of a test. I was exhausted and irritated. I had studied until wee hours for that test and I knew the best I could hope for would be a low A. I did what I always do and started flipping through pages. Then, de repente, there it was. A full two pages on el voseo right there in the text book.

A NOTE FOR ANY INTERESTED: The conjugation of the pronoun "vos" varies from country to country, but mostly it is conjugated like Spain's "vosotros" just without the "i." This is different in Chile and Venezuela mostly. In Chile, -ar verbs take of the "s" on the end of the vosotros form and -er and -ir verbs only have "ís." Venezuelan Spanish is faux-Castillian. Vosotros isn't used but vos is conjugated like it. All other tenses are conjugated the same way (but subjunctive uses the opposite vos) and direct and indirect object pronouns are "te."

So while the professor was up there, turning my head upside down about preterit and imperfect, I kept day dreaming about saying "vos." Ok, that's a little extreme, but really, Spanish is bottomless. And my basic understanding of past tenses in Spanish just got thrown into the creek.

So, what's next week?

Who will ever read this and get as much of a kick I would if I had read this, I don't know.

Thoughts: Making Lemonade on The Wall

⊆ 6:45 PM by A. Liebendorfer | college , college campus , Facebook , goo goo dolls , good idea , Heidi Klum , internet , technology . | ˜ 0 comments »

I hope an enterprising IT major finds this.

To state the obvious, Facebook has taken the world by storm. Once frequented by impulsive college kids, the website has ballooned to over 100 million.

I’ve been trying to keep up with the New York Times lately and on more than one occasion Facebook has wiggled into the headlines. Years from now, people will be looking at Facebook the same way we look at flagpole sitting, the Macarena, and Tomagotchi pets.

If Facebook has become synonymous with college procrastination, college websites have become tokens of unkempt, unwieldy web space. I searched on the OU site my first weekend here for the welcome weekend schedule. I found a schedule and went to where a parade was supposed to start. The parking lot was empty, but three years ago, a parade started on that first Saturday.

Is my train of thought obvious yet, or is eight years of twenty-first century thinking still not enough?

Why doesn’t someone get with Facebook and find a way to mandate Facebook accounts and use that as a way to disseminate information to college students. You could have applications where you log in and find assignments and track your grades. Or you could just model a non-profit private network to allow professors answer questions via the infamous Wall –or something like it— and post syllabi and all that good stuff that keeps the college money machine churning.

All it would take would be one talented upperclassman, an independent study, school administrators, some money flowing, and there you go –the world’s changed again.

A world that’s a little smaller, yeah?

Impressions: How Am I Even Writing This?

⊆ 11:52 PM by A. Liebendorfer | classes , college , textbook . | ˜ 5 comments »

The rush and rapture of the college life has come and, almost, passed.

I'm finally getting that swamped feeling with all this reading we have to do and frankly, I'm a little peeved at the professors. Some of them have a rhyme or reason behind what they're having us read, like the single textbook for journalism 101. For other classes, however, the reading is disjointed, superfluous, and really a waste of time.

My old high school strategies are changing. Over are the days of reading a chapter for comprehension. Take Public Speaking, for example. The dual set of textbooks we have for that mess are by far the worst textbooks I've ever read. They're abominable, especially the one, i Speak, where they over- and restate things several dozen times within a chapter. And to think, I actually wanted to learn public speaking before all of that.

While the rest of my floor mates are in constant Nerf gun melees, I realized that I really did take a hard schedule this quarter. And it's kind of got me bummed.

I had it all planned out: I was going to be on The Post, the Speakeasy, Backdrop, and maybe poke my head in at Brick City Records this fall. But with 100-plus pages to read every night and classes that I don't need to take (UC190) and things I never wanted to do in the first place (five hours worth of mandatory study tables) I'll be lucky to scratch up regular attendance with the triathlon club.

So in these rare circumstances, I'm actually very thankful a sorority girl decided to wake me up from the hall. She hollered my name in a thick, northern Ohio accent -or rather "aaaccent"- and I sprung awake and went right back to the fifty some pages I had left for "Religion, Gender, and Sexuality."

Fall Quarter '08: Images of Home

⊆ 4:05 PM by A. Liebendorfer | athens , campus , college , ohio , ohio university , shakira . | ˜ 0 comments »

Leading up to my leaving for college and he being an empty-nester, there were times, say, when it we were coming home late and it was raining, or at sunset when we were calling it a day in the yard, that Dad would turn to me and let me know how good of a fit Athens would be for me.

It didn't take long after I came here to realize some of the things I would look back on way down the road.

Like outside Washington, with its endless green lawns and damn red oaks, throwing the football with at first my roommate and then whoever wanted to enliven the game for a couple of spare minutes. Throwing, throwing until our arms weren't sore anymore and the spirals we had back at home came back.

Or walking The Mile. Leaving State Street with the same clothes I had when I left but now a little more wrinkled, with a couple unaccounted stains, carrying a Gatorade and wearing a you-caught-me face. Stepping over half-digested Burrito Buggy burritos drying on the warming afternoon sidewalk, only able to pray I won't be next.

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