ALL THE HAPPY
voice lessons
intro to islam
financial accounting
oceans, atmospheres, and climate
seminar: the art of performing
jazz band
yoga
and auditing choir
islam, accounting, and climate classes are all monday, wednesday, friday
music and yoga tuesday and thursday
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful
i have an open-ended 3-page essay due tomorrow about my “sense of place” or “ecological address.”
here are my problems:
1) i do not identify with any one particular place. i’ve traveled a lot and have so much love for so many places for so many different reasons. my strongest sense of place is actually vicariously attained— Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, and Steinbeck’s East of Eden resonate so strongly with me.
2) we’re supposed to include quotes from and references to four readings about the idea of connecting to places and environments. there are specific questions we’re supposed to answer, along with describing our personal connection to an environment. i don’t know if i can do that in three pages.
3) i think this is what’s bothering me the most: we have to read them in front of the class tomorrow. it’s our introduction to the class and to the professor. in high school i probably wouldn’t have cared— i was a smart kid and a good writer and i didn’t have any trouble speaking in front of people and sharing my work. but in college i’m pretty much just average, or even below average here, and i don’t really feel like baring my soul to 30 strangers. i was raised in a school system that was incredibly competitive, and i was always at the top without really having to try, and now being somewhere in the middle i just have this awful inferiority complex and i get really anxious about this sort of thing.
okay. venting over. i just need to write the essay and read it and, you know, it’s just one little moment in life. grit my teeth and get through it; in the end, it’s not a big deal.
