June 16, 17, and 18: Days 3, 4, and 5
Waiting in line for a Casablanca showing.
Preemptive Post Script: It’s a sad but insurmountable paradox that the moments in life in the most need of chronicling are also the ones that allow the least time for it. That’s fancy pants talk for “sorry I haven’t updated my blog, shift+6 shift+6 semicolon.”
In keeping with my habitual newspaper style, I suppose I’d best begin the days’ tale with a mere chronological recollection, sparing the philosophical, cathartic reflection for a section further removed.
Tuesday began simply enough, with majors continuing much as they began the day before, a theme that the latter two days repeated with all the fervor of an AP journalist (though this is one case where repetition really isn’t all that bad).
My minor, however, is much considerably more interesting (and also considerably more time-consuming). Effectively, the poor computer minors (as one of three Communicative Arts majors and Computer minors, I’m either a Com2 (Com*Com) or an inverse p (Com/Comp)) are expected to put together the GHP website for next year. This is a relatively monumental class for high schoolers with practically no site-building experience (to see how fantastically other years have failed, visit www.vsu.edu/ghp). Fortunately, our teachers (whom we are to address as Marsh and Brian) are excellent, and my classmates and I are very motivated. I have already volunteered myself as copy editor, and, despite my candid acknowledgement of my computing ignorance, I seem to have become something of a leader in the design half of the class (the other half being the programmers, or oompa-loompas of web design, to paraphrase a great man). All told, I really look forward to the cessation of instruction and the beginning of actual work (which will happen in just a few days; expect a shell of a site to be up at the old address by next Friday).
But now on to the social portion of GHP: the real drain on my time. I’ve met some truly exceptional people here, though in the strictly denotative sense; they inhabit both ends of the spectrum of fantastic-ness. Since Tuesday morning, I’ve played two games of freeze tag, attended one showing of Casablanca (where the belated opening of the theater doors and the kindness of one bored moviegoer produced a certain picture requested by popular demand of the most wonderful sort), a how-to session for role-playing games (think Dungeons & Dragons, not Final Fantasy), a surprisingly militant game of red rover, and dozens of other sundry activities. I actually just finished planning a showing of My Neighbor Totoro for about two dozen people for tomorrow night. Though I think that some of my friends are growing a tad tired of hearing me babble about my fantastic girlfriend… Ah well, their loss. ^^ Truth be told, this program’s social ramifications are so much profound than its educational ones, if my little experience is any indicator. GHP’s classes seem more designed for their shock value than their educational content (they show us that education is not just the boring pap that we’ve been force-fed thus far rather than teach us life-altering material directly), while the social interactions are providing us with valid examples of how to interact with intellectual equals.
Whew. Yaaay, catharsis! ^^ So yeah, the program is going swimmingly (a lovely adjective that I’d horribly abandoned until just recently), and I look forward to talking to all of you at some point in the days to come!
