Okay, Im feeling sometimes that Im just wasting my time with college. The classes are better this semester, only one is actually one I dislike, the others I wish I could get more of. I wish that my anthro and geography classes were longer, hell Id stick around for a three hour lecture; the stuff is really fascinating. It just pisses me off that there are so many furloughs, which are cutting deep into our schedules. Then theres my linguistics class, which is a horrid waste of time. Linguistics, from what Ive observed, is mostly reconstitued nebular material that attention seeking professors pull out of their asses and shove down our throats.
Examples:
-A linguistic study of how elementary school girls talk in hopscotch games (Im not making this up, it was also to demonstrate that girls are indeed very competitive, and raise their voice pitch to add emphasis. I dont need a 20 page paper with fancy sound meter graphs and phonetic sentence transcriptions to tell me that though!
-Verbose studies detailing everything in how variations of English are pronounced, including details such as the position of the tongue, how words are arranged in sentences... The sort of things you see on TV and hear from other people.
- 40 minute lectures in which the only important thing to learn is that Corsican is more closely related to Italian than to French.
Excessive verbiage ad infinitum...

Agh, Im only taking this class because of school requirements. Id rather learn more about foreign cultures and languages, not disjointed and borderline meaningless drivel. Im eventually hoping on getting into the Red Cross or perhaps the Peace Corps, sometimes I wish I could just opt out of college and just join them and do something more helpful productive with my life. I dont feel that linguistics isnt giving me any practical knowledge there.

NOTE: This is a bit of a rant, so if you have no interest in my opinions, dont read this.
Ah, a new semester in school. I like the classes, and the professors by and large are pretty cool.
Every professor has been talking about the current budget crisis in California, and the furloughs in particular.
Sure enough, the ENTIRE school is being shut down for a few days every month, some professors simply arent getting paid on a few other days, while they have been raising fees over 20%, both for future students and retroactively.
In short, Im paying more for less of an education. Whats more, the textbooks are a joke in that we're paying $80 for books which at Barnes & Noble you could get for $25. Its simply extortion, as you HAVE to buy these books to be in class. Im really angry about it this year though, because one of the books I need is literally the size of an elementary school picture book... and costs like $80. Why isnt the state renegotiating prices, cuz right now, knowledge is becoming VERY expensive, when it should NEVER have become a serious commodotity in the first place. Whats more, the education system is essentially responsible for training the next generations workforce, in short, our future economy.

Ive just spent a week in Newfoundland with some relatives and friends. Gotta say its much, much nicer than LA; no smog, hardly any crime or creeps to speak of. It was so great to be away from it all for a while, and coming home so refreshed...

Anyway, Im glad to be back. School is startin up soon, and Im planning on hitting the ground running, and not screwing up like last semester (where I was demoralized by lackluster professors, and unfulfilling, no soul draining classes which have lately made me question my plans for the future). Need to hook back up with friends too. Gotta pray for as he's off to serve his country right now
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Maybe Ill get another chance to visit the beach with some friends, this time in warmer (and dirtier) water without jellyfish! Ill see if I can keep working on developing my art, though I wouldnt hold my breath. Im thinking of using some pictures for reference, especially for drawing perspective and structures.

Well, I just got back from an impromptu trip to the Grand Canyon. My dad had always wanted to take me there, and with a few days off from work, we abruptly decided to take a drive off to pay it a visit.
Ive gotta say, I wish I was out there longer. The Canyon itself was WAAAYY larger than I thought it would be (the photos and movies dont do it any justice), and if we had more time, I wouldve loved to take a hiking trip down to the bottom (which is 3 to 4 thousand feet down!).
We only had a day though, so we were stuck along the top rim, staring down into this insanely vast gorge.
Now that Im back, I can sum up my experience by saying that LA is overrated, and so is California in general. There wasnt the overdevelopment in Arizona that we see in California, which makes ugly monotone landscapes of housing. Much of the state is true wilderness, and the farmers there dont do cattle ranching or agriculture like they do in the central valley of California (which is factory style cattle raising and farming, very unpleasant).
It was also nice to get out of town so that I didnt have to be bombarded by news of Michael Jackson (I think the guy was being deified by the media and his acolytes in the Staples Center, who seemed to forget that the guys behavior was down right creepy, and I sure as hell wouldnt let my kids anywhere near him).