Somber Today

I spent today making it through the last few hours of my classes. You would think that professors want to just give you the information in a nutshell so that you can make use of it, but rather, they just kept teaching until the class was over and then some. I would say that they had an enthusiasm for what they taught, but they were teaching the topics in such repetitive depth that I think that they were trying more to give us a hard time rather than to help us get the gist of what they wanted us to learn. I’d also toss the insult that perhaps they enjoyed hearing themselves speak more than teaching us, but the words they spewed out might as well have been vomit because our class (myself included) was not interested in hearing it.

Anyway, I am closing up shop here. I am exhausted and I am burned out from all the culture, the shoving, and the torment we’ve been given these past five weeks. Although this was a hardcore summer program, I don’t know that I made it out unscathed. I have uncertainties whether I’ll pass all the classes. And it is not that I went out and partied and that I didn’t do the readings – there were so many times this summer that I felt that two of the four professors didn’t care whether we were grasping what they were talking about. Instead, they just lectured in front of the class. Can you tell how much disdain I have for this program? There’s more beneath the surface to my frustration; I’ll explain.

On a more personal note, I saw the class picture today. I wasn’t in it. In fact, I did not even know that they took the picture. I showed up the first time they announced that they would be taking it, but that time got cancelled. The message conveying the second photo shoot must not have happened except by word of mouth, and I was left out from that among other announcements and events. I ask myself whether it was how I looked, or whether it was the fact that I wasn’t on the Saturday weekend bonding trips or at the non-kosher meals the program hosted from time to time. Nevertheless, I was estranged from the program from the first day and they made no attempts to accommodate me, despite my efforts to stay in gear with what was going on. I mean I was always asking what is happening because I never got the messages because I wasn’t part of the program’s nightlife. I even missed the various Sunday trips because nobody told me about them when I asked around. Well, I was told about two trips, but when I showed up on time for both of them, I was the only one there.

So now I am in my new hotel room which has no broadband access and so I am incommunicado. I don’t even have a way to contact my family to let them know I am okay or to confirm my flight to let them know I am still flying and that I want a kosher meal. Apparently, I was told that we need to confirm or sometimes the airlines will give away our seats. China logic. I will need to make these calls tomorrow when I buy a phone card for $2.99 per minute. I am starting to feel jaded, and I am feeling homesick, and I want to come home. Again, like so many things in my life, I will do the studying for these four upcoming finals once, and then I will never look back again. This will be another experience which I file in my mind under the category of “get through it just once” experiences.