Mis mentalidades (My Mentalities)

Writing this blog entry in word, because for some reason my computer isn’t letting me connect to the university’s wireless, even though it shows up on my computer as being connected. boo. Foreign girl’s wireless next to me is working. boo, hiss. And I had such high hopes for what I could get done in this hour between class and teaching English at 9pm, too. Well, at least this teaches me to never save a paper that I’m working on just in GoogleDocs.

So I really just have two things to say that aren’t very long, but I wanted to say them before, well, they aren’t relevant anymore.

First, Cornell pre-enroll is tomorrow at 7am, 1pm our time, and I have been LOVING picking out my classes for the fall. The first time I opened the course roster and saw all the options of classes I could take next semester… in some ways it was like I had died and gone to heaven. SO many classes in SO many different subjects designed for SO many different kinds of people. It’s not like here, where people select a track to study after high school and take classes in order only in their department with the same however many kids taking classes with really boring names, taught badly and with bad content because they won’t even use it in the real world anyway so really what’s the point. (Yes, run-on sentence on purpose.) On the Cornell roster, there was VARIETY, there were ELECTIVES, and it was a beautiful thing. Is a beautiful thing, actually. You know the “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” thing? Yeah. Amen to that. It’s like I just got told I get to go on a free trip to Disneyworld, only it’s… well, Cornell.

Tomorrow will be tight because I have a class that ends at 1pm and then I need to book it to a place with internet and get set up ASAP because some of the classes I want to take (ahem, Intro to Wines), will fill up very, very quickly.

Here’s what my rough schedule is looking like:
HADM 4430 Intro to Wines (2)
COLLS 4990 Honors Research (4)
PE 1412 Intro to Swedish Massage
SPAN 3300 Literature and The Arts (4)
FGSS 3600 Gender and Globalization (3)
EDUC 2170 Social and Political Context of American Education (4)
All of that is subject to change, but it’s my rough start. I will probably drop one of these classes, too. Just felt like sharing.

Doing pre-enroll feels good. I haven’t used pre-enroll since November of 2007. It has been awhile. Since then, Cornell has totally updated its software and the way classes are numbered, so I’m not really sure what I’m doing, but still. I’m ready for this. For change, again. For academic newness (or old newness. Or whatever).

Ok, the other thing I wanted to write about ties in very neatly to pre-enroll. I feel like I’ve outgrown the program here. I need new things, new challenges. Comparing where I am to where the semester kids are… yeah, it’s just not comparable. What used to be stimulating and interesting in many ways has become normal and slightly boring. I’m not really complaining about this—I’m very happy that I can say that I got to this point and am ready for something different, which is something I absolutely would not have said at the end of last semester—it’s more just that the Cornell program I am on can only go so far. They have been wonderful and fantastic and helped me enormously, but now I am ready for real immersion, or at least steps of real immersion. I am ready for a real Spanish network of friends, for functioning here without someone holding my hand. I don’t need the center like I needed it last semester. I don’t need that safety net. And that’s great, it’s the sign of a very well-spent year, but it’s also a bit frustrating at points. It’s April. I still have two months in Spain. It would be absolutely perfect if this moment came towards the beginning of June, making my time here good to the last drop, but it isn’t.

All of that said, I am still learning and growing, of course, in ways that I am not entirely consciously aware of. I also have a few Spanish friends. That stuff is here, it is forming, and I know it takes a long time to form. I’m still very happy to be here, but it’s different than before.

In the end, though, as hard as it is going to be to leave here (and it will be terribly, terribly hard) I’m ready for a change, and going back to Cornell as a Senior with an Honors Thesis to write and the Real World to apply to might be just what the doctor ordered. Or not. Time will tell.