The Inauguration

As is customary for the inaugural, if belated, post of the year, a quick overview of this semester's schedule:

BIOL 214 - Cell and Molecular Biology Lab

So far, this has been a lot of working with Salmonella bacteria and also blood.

CAST 337 - Global Health Emergencies

This is probably the culmination of all I've been looking for as a double major (if I didn't mention this in a previous post, the majors in question are NSCI and CRWR): an interdisciplinary, as-holistic-as-it's getting look at medicine and health. Capitalism and certain American foreign policies (google "structural adjustment") are major downers, by the way.

CRWR 340 - Nonfiction Workshop

For someone who journals, I'm surprised how much I prefer subject-driven essays to memoirs. This is likely due to the fact that a pivotal definition of "journal" (as I define it anyway) is that it's never going to be read (cause I am certainly not going to go back and read it in the near future) and therefore I have license to write whatever I want, in what my student calls "super-slanted handwriting". (This is true. I sort of write with the page horizontal, so that my words, in English, go vertically up the page. Thus the slant.)

Incidentally, when I was doing my reading responses for this class, a HUGE spider - with a diameter equal to the width of my cell phone - skittered out disturbingly close to my feet, and I had to take a brief hiatus from typing in order to (1) freak out and (2) take my shoe and smash it. Unfortunately, this has some repercussions, because it is smashed in the most disturbing shape imaginable - sort of the legs at weird angles on one side, and the body slumped over directly opposite. All you neuro folk out there: it looks like an astrocyte. It's also really creeping me out, to the point that I'm hesitant to even maneuver it onto a piece of paper and dispose of it. So I'm going to hope it disintegrates soon. (Yes, I'm a coward when it comes to non-crustacean things that have exoskeletons. Insects mostly, and arachnids - obviously, and silverfish, the sights of which give me that nails-on-chalkboard feeling.)

HISP 101 - Spanish Level 1

I'm auditing this, and as someone who is studying multiple languages at once I've found it's really fun to see how the ways in which language is taught necessarily changed based on the level. I hope this makes sense, considering I'm typing this at 7:37AM having not slept yet from the previous night. And considering that last week, I had a brief panic when I found that for a good thirty-five minutes I could not express myself articulately in any of the languages I know, or half-know, or quarter-know.

By the way, 100 level languages are really, really fun. Um, es muy divertido. I really hope that's not grammatically flawed.

NSCI 325 - Neuropharmacology

How drugs act on the brain actually makes for a very interesting topic. Cool case study - how come humans can eat game hunted with toxic curare-tipped arrows? It's an ionization thing, but I won't go into detail lest I get some crucial fact wrong and mislead you people.

PHYS 103 - well, this is Physics 103. I'm not sure what else I can call it.

One word: iClickers.

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Happy Monday, everyone!