After work John and I went over to the community college to check it out. It's small, just seven or eight buildings up on a lonesome hill. The fog was blowing through the gnarled, wind-sculpted pines. It was chilly and damp and eerily dark for a summer's evening. I could tell it would be spooky at night when my classes let out.
"Man, this is like Wuthering Heights: The Campus," I said, my teeth chattering. John thought it was apt.
As it turns out I won't be taking a class up on Spook Hill this semester. The Algebra course I wanted is already full, but there's an overflow site in South San Francisco and that Math 120 class has plenty of room. Tomorrow night I'll go over there after work and get the professor to sign my permission slip so I can officially register for school. Then I'll sit through my first math class in four years.
I appreciate everyone cheering me on and all, but yo, I'm depressed about it. I hate math worse than anything else in the world. It's been the source of such lifelong boredom, crushed self-esteem, anger, and frustration that I can hardly believe I'm voluntarily doing this - and paying for the privilege. You just do not know what the thought of struggling with Algebra one more time is doing to me. I'd rather take a million courses in anything else if I could just skip this one. Even Statistics sounds okay to me. I'm not worried about Statistics. But I'm going to be confronting the culmination of everything I find agonizing and incomprehensible in mathematics, and I'm going to have to pass it or be denied the chance to earn my degree.
I'm sure the suspense will be keeping you all on the edge of your seat. Or am I projecting here?
I suspect there are going to be far fewer updates until December. I'll be in class Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I'll probably only update once on the weekend and maybe on Monday nights. Athough I dunno, maybe I'll find myself writing daily as an antidote to the horrors of fractions and graphs. Could go either way.
My treat for getting through this first dreadful semester is to sign up with the Wuthering Heights Community College Choir next term. No auditions, anyone can come and sing, so there's no pressure. I'm ready to start singing again. Isn't that weird? After twenty years I feel like singing again. It's the strangest thing, but I feel something has changed recently. There's a subtle shift going on, a scuffing out and redrawing of lines. If I can get through the biggest barrier I've ever faced intellectually then I'm ready to let myself go even further. I think I might get back to exploring what makes me happy without giving a damn about what anyone thinks of it. I'm ready to shed some old, old baggage.
Who knows, I might even enjoy Algebra this time around.
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