First Day of School

I felt like a first-grader, the new kid, walking into school yesterday. I suppose we all did, except I was the OLDEST first-grader in my class. (Well, there is one guy who looks to me my age, and when I was talking to one of my classmates later, she said, "Wow. I thought you were my age." "How old are you?" I asked. "Twenty-five." Awwwwww.) I arrived at the building almost twenty minutes early, and decided to try to find a nearby store where I could buy a notebook. Notebooks are up to $9.49 at Walgreens in downtown Chicago. So I nixed that plan, as that would have taken a quarter of what I have left in my checking account. (Still haven't received my refund. *taps foot impatiently*) Wrote on a notebook I carry around with me for writing stories.

It was a loooong day. Nearly all my classes ran way over, leaving about a ten-minute break between each class, instead of the 40-minute and hour-long breaks that were scheduled. I'm not complaining; took me back to the undergraduate days when dinner was a granola bar and an apple juice. And it's only one day a week. One of my professors rescheduled one of our classes, so now I have classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays only. Which is nice, as my commute is an hour.

The classes are very interesting, and I like my professors.

It used to be, I'm ashamed to say, I would find myself inwardly rolling my eyes at D whenever he would start pontificating on film history. Boy, did that change yesterday. Yesterday I found myself very glad D is a history buff/historian with a huge collection of DVDs. I'm looking forward to sharing what I've learned with him. Naturally, I'm also looking forward to using his DVD collection. It's possible I won't have to check out much from the library, depending on what our assignments will be. We'll see. Next week we'll start German Expressionism, and D has a whole box of DVDs about that. Not to mention, he has plenty of films by Alfred Hitchcock and Akiro Kurosawa, two of our choices of directors we'll be assigned to write about. I don't know whether he has anything by Luis Bunuel, Fritz Lang, or Francois Truffaut, though.

Not to be overly-confident, but it struck me yesterday that I'm walking into this with a lot of real-world experience, which I expect to apply to my studies. Even my experience in educational publishing should come in handy, with all the writing and editing I've done.

I finally feel as if I'm in my niche. Let's hope I'm not wrong.