I can’t believe I haven’t updated in almost two months! TWO MONTHS!! Wowww…time certainly flies by, doesn’t it? I told myself that I wasn’t going to abandon this blog (err…’cept I tell myself that every time I make a blog but that’s not the point), so I knew I was eventually going to have to update. But I guess I wanted to write an entry when I actually feel like doing it and not just because I feel obliged to write one, y’know what I mean? In any case, I’ve tried a few times to whip up a post during one of my breaks, but my mind either blanks out completely or I spend so much time berating my muse that I’ve frittered away my break time. For some reason, writing about how college is going seems so hard–almost pointless because college has been so similar to high school for me…

UNTIL NOW, CHYEAHH!!!

Today (well, yesterday if you want to get technical) I finally feel like I’m a college student. Seriously, I’ll remember yesterday forever, because on September 25th, I took things into my own hands and sawed myself free from the shackles of The Evil and Dastardly Pre-Calculus and Elements of Calculus Applied to Business, Economics, and Finance (yeah, repeat that 20x and 10x faster).

Now before some of you start chastising me about dropping a class and how I’m going to need to take a math class anyway and blahdiddlyblahblah, dropping this math course has been something that I’ve thought long and hard about. True, it’s common knowledge that I complain all the time about my mathematically-challenged brain (formulas boggle me), I honestly thought (as recently as last week) that I was going to put up with this class for this semester and really work hard at it. Even though I bombed the first quiz, I figured miracles could happen, and I would be able to do moderately well in the class. I figured that even though my teacher is like Thumper personified (that rabbit from Bambi who is adorable as a cartoon but definitely annoying and just plain ridiculous as a math professor), I’d be able to rely on the textbook.

I blame my delusional, prideful thoughts for not filing a pass/fail application last week. Grr.

See, there’s a difference between having confidence in my ability and just plain telling myself lies. When my teacher told us that we’ll have to start doing our homework on WebWork because he doesn’t trust us to do the textbook homework (25% of my class passed the first quiz–definitely pathetic), I began to panic. I scanned through the syllabus and felt my throat tighten at words like “matrices” and “Gauss-Jordan reduction” and “derivatives.” I remembered those words. I first heard them from Mr. Pieratti in junior year, (the year I inevitably failed pre-calculus by the way). Then when I realized that I was perhaps the only student in my class who haven’t taken a prior course in business and therefore didn’t understand any of the business applications discussed, I felt like bolting from that classroom and saying adios. As week after week passed, my class went from perhaps twenty students to a measly fifteen or ten students. I should have known some of those people weren’t absent; they were just smarter than me and dropped the class early on.

Luckily, I realized what I had to do when I was lamenting to Kaitlin about my predicament over lunch on Tuesday. She was right; an “F” in my college transcript would be like an ugly, fat monster who would scare off any potential universities I’d like to transfer to. This wasn’t high school; no one is really forcing me to take this class. Yes, I need to have a math credit under my belt, but there are plenty of easier math classes available for people like me (which I found out in detail about today in the advisor’s office; math classes especially designed for “liberal arts students.” YAY!). So if I were to stay in that class and failed, it would be no one’s fault but my own not to file for a neutral “W” and save my GPA.

After I left the advisement center yesterday, I was so happy that I felt like skipping down the street! (Which of course, I did not. Mmhmm, wouldn’t you like to see that?) I won’t have to stay in school until 5:25 on Mondays and Wednesdays anymore, and I won’t have to waste time at night poring over my applied calculus textbook, trying to understand the dense instructions that seemed more difficult to read than hieroglyphics. Strangely enough, I’m more motivated than ever to study for my other courses at the moment, because I’ll definitely have more time to read the material now that math is out of the picture for this semester! It’s truly wonderful. I don’t think I’ve ever been exempt from a math class in all my years of education…

Well, I’m certainly not going to miss it.

Note to self: Go to the bookstore or Shakespeare and Co. to try and sell Applied Calculus textbook back. Or if that doesn’t work, maybe Facebook. Oh, and don’t forget to sell brand-new TI-89 graphing calculator, too. (If anyone’s interested or knows someone who’s interested in buying either one of those things, let me know! The calculator has only been used once, and the book is still shiny and new!) <– shameless advertising.