Well, at least I wasn't bored...

I am home for winter break. It's wonderful, and weird. I am surrounded by the people I love most in the whole world, but I repeatedly find myself wishing I was elsewhere. Besides this being a bizarre transitional half-child, half-adult phase of my life, I believe it also comes from having to compartmentalize my life into school v.s. home, with social squeezed somewhere in-between the two.

Happy Holidays, everyone! :)

I was going to leave it there, but I guess I'll follow Kurt and summarize my classes:

1. I'll start with the easiest: Ancient and Medieval philosophy. The professor is prone to long, rambling stories and argues with most of what you say, but this is just a cover for being an avuncular, caring guy who actually gives a shit about us as actual people, not just people who get to listen to him pontificate. He can be a little aggressive and inflexible at times, but mostly he's a stand-up guy. There was a lot of reading, but you only need to do half to survive (if you're me, anyway). Three papers that kept my writing skills up to snuff without being too stressful. As for the course material, it was more interesting than I expected for a discussion course on Pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, plus a few Stoics and Cynics at the end. Plus our prof knows ancient Greek, so we got a Greek history/etymology lesson for free with every class! A-

2. Next up: "Critical Thinking" which is different each year depending on who teaches it. This year it was an introduction to formal logic. We learned truth tables, Boolean notation, proofs, fallacies, and other lovely things. I was surprised how fun the proofs turned out to be, lovely little puzzles, except for the 20+ step ones (which thankfully were on none of the tests). The best unit though was fallacies; now when someone slips up I can call 'em on it. And I do, especially in A&M, which I had immediately after C.T. :) B

3. Now on to the really hard stuff. Next hardest would have to be Bio Lab (105). Conceptually simple, but for someone like me whose most rigorous science class had been AP EnviroSci, formatting and procedural accuracy were difficult. Not to mention time consuming! I did enjoy playing with E.coli and Staph, and I was proud of our final project because it addressed relevant issues in agrotechnology. Agrotechnologists (er, food scientists?) have trouble keeping food fresh and edible while it's being shipped where it needs to go, especially when it's traveling long distances to impoverished communities. Polyphenol oxidase (PPO) is the enzyme responsible for certain foods going brown when exposed to oxygen. We found one study about PPO gene inhibitors, and another that showed elevated PPO activity in young peaches, so we figured that it'd be neat to test PPO activity for age (green, yellow, and brown bananas). Then maybe researchers would know when it would be best to introduce the inhibitor. B

4. The next two were a tie, but I'll start with Bio Lecture (105). This was absolutely fascinating, but an exhausting shitton of work. I came out of it okay, but there was an embarrassing decline in effort put in as time went by. Other issues came up outside of class that made this class extra difficult, and though I still feel that I could have done more, I learned a lot, so I won't complain. Did you know that without the electron transport chain in your mitochondira, you would explode? This is because it allows us to control how and when we release energy from food, instead of breaking all the electrical bonds at once and spontaneously combusting! B-

5. And last but not least, Modern Japanese Philosophy. It was taught by one of my very favorite professors. He speaks fluent Japanese and has spent lots of time in Japan, so again I got Japanese language/culture lessons for free. He's also very understanding, more than any professor I've ever met. He won't take shit from people, but he knows that the material is difficult to understand and he's very patient (imagine reading Kitaro Nishida's ideas in English translated from Japanese, and many of his ideas were taken from German philosophers in the first place.) We read three books total, by Nishida, Tetsuro Watsuji, and Keiji Nishitani, plus a few essays by Shin'ichi Hisamatsu. This was probably my favorite class, but also the most challenging. It involved a LOT of reading (close to 50 pages for some classes), three very challenging synthesis/reaction papers, plus a 10-15 page research paper, for a topic of our own choosing. For a while this class took the brunt of my mid-winter slump, but thanks to the generosity of my professor, I pulled through all-right. B+

Now enough about me... how bout y'all?

P.S. My MJP prof is gonna be a daddy soon! :)

As always, walk in beauty.