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Day’s Verse:
I lay down and slept; I awoke, for the Lord sustains me.
Psalm 3:5
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I thought of the following joke as I inaugurated this D-term by scrubbing out our bathtub yesterday (the scrubbing was to say “Welcome, D-term, and may these seven weeks bring many more hours of bonding with the tub”). The joke:

A man walked into a psychologist’s office wrapped only in celophane. The psychologist said, “I can see clearly your nuts.”

Speaking of nuts, last night Ian and I had a truly strange conversation:

Me: I’m in such a conundrum. All the healthy, tasty bread is so expensive! My strong desire to be healthy is directly in conflict with my equally strong desire to be as chintzy on bread as possible since we have no income. Ack! How do I decide what kind of bread to buy?

That’s when he looked at me and said,

Him: You need to think about this as an engineering problem. Engineering teaches us that you can usually achieve only two of your three objectives. For instance, you can have cheap, tasty bread, but it’ll have to be Wonder Bread. Or you can have gross, healthy bread—that’d be eating celery, basically. Or you could have tasty, healthy bread but it’ll cost your firstborn child. So you see, you have to balance these three things and decide which of the three objectives you seek are most important.

I’m not sure that helped much, but it just goes to show that a good education can be useful for more than just your field of study.

Did I mention that classes start today? My classes are Peer Tutoring in Writing, Rhetoric of Visual Design (decriptions here), and Environmental Biology, which is a very low-level bio class that I am half-ashamed to be taking as a junior in college. I still intend to make the best of it and learn as much as I can of the 21 chapters we’ll cover in these seven weeks. The two writing classes only meet twice a week for two hours per class and will certainly entail a ton of reading and a fair chunk of writing. None of my classes begin before 11:00. I think it’s more important to work hard and learn material than earn good grades; this puzzles my friends, who once they have an A nailed really back off on the amount of work they do. I believe, though, that I’m paying full tuition here and I’m darn well going to get every last ounce of knowledge I can out of each class. No slacking this term – which isn’t even my last term of the year, since I’m doing E-term as well. Keep ’er comin’.

– KF –

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