Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "writeback" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+writeback" bit from the end of the URL.

Mon, 18 Jun 2007

This ain't no Pushcart Derby

So school is in session, and my short love affair with public transit is, sadly, over. At first, taking the bus from Olathe to Lawrence was all right; in fact the novelty of it was kind of exciting. I also felt pretty good about the money I was saving. This ended on Friday when I drove to campus for the first time. There was a test on Friday, and I knew I wasn't going to want to hang around for a few hours on campus without homework to do, so I drove and paid to park. I suppose that since I hadn't yet provided myself with any basis for comparison, the bus seemed like a good option. Now that I've seen the other end of things, however, I have a hard time condemning myself to the restriction of movement and the huge loss of time that bus travel represents. If I drive, I can wake up 30 minutes later, still have time for breakfast, and I get home a full hour earlier. So now I'm trying to decide how much my time is worth; whether I can afford to spend two to three times as much weekly on my commute. Realistically, though, things are not looking good for all this bus nonsense.

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Calculus has been an interesting experience. It has been about eight years since I've had to think about math any more complicated than arithmetic, so taking the engineering calculus was kind of a gamble. My other option was to take a pair of lower level calculus courses, which would add another year onto the time I have left. So I decided to bet on an ability of which I've never shown myself that capable, the ability to actually put my nose to the grindstone. I've been pretty pleased with the results so far; this class has at once made me feel smarter and stupider than I have in quite some time.

The calculus experiment was also a sort of precursor to returning to school full time. I started out by taking the class that arguably will be the hardest for me, to see whether I could actually become serious about graduating. As of now, I remain cautiously optimistic.

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I went to see Megan and Sara at their roller derby bout on Saturday. I will admit that I really did not want to be there, but Megan and Sara started in on this almost a year ago, and it's important to them, and I'm a huge sap with no ability to control my own (extremely limited) free time, etc. Really, though, I was planning on making some bullshit excuse but Alex called and said that he was going to be stranded in KC for two hours because Megan had to get to the arena earlier than they would let him in, so I caved. Alex and I got to the arena pretty early, so we had a lot of waiting to do. I commented that this is probably how fathers feel, dragged to whatever ridiculous performance hobbies their kids are into. Alex agreed.

Once the bout actually started, however, I discovered that roller derby is actually pretty fun to watch. It doesn't hurt that it was effectively a number of pretty hot women throwing each other around for my amusement, but the "sport" of roller derby is also pretty damn exciting. It took a while for me to pick up the rules and scoring, but once I understood the basics, I appreciated the game.

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