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September 5th 2008 by E..

At the end of the first week of a new school year, it’s hard to make assumptions as to how I will fare this semester…sure, all my classes seem enjoyable enough, but it’s still only the first week of about fourteen…the most we’ve done in any class is go over the syllabus and briefly talk about what we’re going to be doing over the next few months…then again, I can already tell which I’ll really enjoy and which are just going to fulfill requirements…

First off, let me tell you which classes I have:

America In The 1950’s
Youth Cultures
Light, Art & Nature (a very deceptive name)
Intro to Broadcast Performance

Immediately, you can probably guess my favorite…not only is it taught by the same professor as my Intro to Radio class from last year (and many of the people who were in that class are in this one, too), Intro to Broadcast Performance looks like it’s going to be a great time…our first assignment is to bring in a poem or song lyrics so we can record ourselves reading them and figure out what we each need to work on over the semester…the first song I thought of that would give me a good vocal workout is “Life Is A Rock (But The Radio Rolled Me)” by Reunion…Like Intro to Radio, this class has a series of audio projects, the last of which being a five minute-long radio drama…oh yes, it will be old-timey…

Speaking of old-timey, America In The 1950’s is also looking to be rather interesting…though we have spent the first two classes talking about events that happened before the ’50s started (to get all the non-American History majors caught up), once we get into the ’50s themselves, it should be neat…incidentally, I was watching “12 Angry Men” the other day, and Dad commented that it’s interesting that that movie and “Leave It To Beaver” both came out the same year and are so different in their portrayals of the people of the era…I wonder if that will come up in class…if it does, I’ll have to ask how it is that an upstanding young man like Wally could have a friend in an asshole like Eddie Haskell…

Youth Cultures (go ahead, make your They Might Be Giants reference now and get it over with) is also looking to be pretty interesting…on our first day, we were given a list of various subcultures and asked to rank our familiarity with them…they ranged from things I am quite familiar with (punk, goth, Deadhead) to things I wasn’t sure I knew the definition (Furry fandom, Slash fiction)…I’m intrigued to find out more about these cultures, especially how subculture youths change as they enter adulthood…

Finally, there’s Light Art & Nature, which is really a Physics class…the class is held at the Tyler campus, which is Temple’s art school…it’s mostly about light science and how science and art work together…unfortunately, there is going to be some math involved in this class, and the whole thing comes off as pretty tedious…at least it’s the last science class I’ll ever have to take ever…

Aside from the one class at Tyler, all of my classes are on Temple’s Main Campus…as I’ve probably mentioned, I’m no longer living in the dorms at the Ambler Campus…rather, I’m living at home and taking the train each day (and walking to Tyler until I get a bicycle in working order)…the other big difference (and this I had no control over) is that there are very few books associated with my selected classes…America In The 1950’s requires a textbook and a copy of Death Of A Salesman (which I’ve had since I had to read it in 9th or 10th grade), Youth Cultures and Light Art & Nature have one textbook each, and Intro to Broadcast Performance has no textbook at all!…talk about a light traveling load…then again, I’m sure my classes for next semester will require me to get a hand-truck to carry my books around…I could use the exercise…

Tomorrow is Y-Rock time, and then at night I’m seeing Liam Finn and The Veils with

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