College Kid.

A couple of years ago I noticed that a certain number of business professionals had migrated from the traditional briefcase or laptop case over to something you would normally see in a busy airport: luggage with wheels. I found this to be somewhat surprising, considering that technology is suppose to be leading us toward an increasingly paperless society.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed that the luggage with wheels has become more prevalent, this time on my college campus. One of my classes is in a large lecture hall, and there is often a “crunch time” where there’s a traffic jam at the entrance to the hall as students fight to get their body and tow-behind trailers jammed through the doorway.

I’m starting to think that this is indicative of a lazy society.

I can’t think of one instance where I’d need to drag my luggage throughout the entire campus. Yes, I sport the always trendy backpack, but even if I were to carry all of my books for all of my classes at one time I wouldn’t need to pack everything in a suitcase. I simply don’t have that much crap to take to class.

When did it become acceptable to haul luggage everywhere? Are they related to the baby buggy terror mobiles? Are people becoming so lazy that they can’t carry their bag and they opt to drag it instead? I’m thinking that this is the case.

I don’t know why I’m surprised. A while back I mentioned that I was seeing ads for a drug that makes going the bathroom easier. (“It doesn’t make you go, but it does make it more comfortable”.) The number of ads for this product has increased and a competing drug company has seen the dollar signs and are now advertising their version of the same thing. (If I see a lunesta butterfly fly out someone’s ass, I’m changing the channel permanently.) You can’t watch TV Land or Lifetime without being reminded that going the bathroom the way nature had intended, and we humans have been doing for a couple of thousand of years, is now wrong and the experience should be no more difficult than pushing rose petals out your butt. I don’t know why we just don’t go all the way and buy food that we simply flush down the toilet. It takes a lot of effort to chew, you’d save a ton of calories and you wouldn’t have all that effort of squatting or sitting down and pushing.

So if going the bathroom is hard then hauling your papers or books to the office or class must be damn near impossible without a wheeled assist.

Next thing you know they’ll tell us that it takes too much effort to suck on a cough drop or something and that we need something that melts on our tongue.

Tonight I have to give my first presentation at college. It’s for my computer applications class and is to show that we have a firm grasp on using PowerPoint. The presentation is to be on a subject within our field of study. I will be speaking about the technology used to make road signs more legible for the larger elderly population we have on our roadways today.

Graphic from ClearviewHwy website

Many people think that because I was in radio for so many years that giving a presentation to a handful of people should be a piece of cake. The problem is that when I was on the radio I didn’t have dozens of sets of eyes staring at me. In the studio that task was usually limited to a surly boss and some adoring fans. Did I ever mention that I had a girl send me her underwear in the mail once? Once I was out on the radio, I had a guy send me a jock strap too.

I don’t think that’ll happen tonight.

When the semester started in January, my sociology professor informed us that we had a paper due on March 22. The task was relatively simple, we needed to find, read and critique a peer-reviewed article in an accepted sociology journal. The paper was to be four to six pages long. We’d even meet in the library for one class so that we could see how to find an appropriate article and all that.

March 22 seemed so far away back then.

I had planned on having this paper finished before Spring Break. While that didn’t happen, I did make strides and found an article and I even showed it to my professor to make sure I was on the right track. She was impressed and said to stick to it, the paper should be easy to do.

Today is March 21. Anyone want to venture a guess as to what I’m doing today?

I received my first grade of the semester in my English Composition class. I’m delighted to say that I got an “A”. My paper was about my weight loss from cycling.

I was a little concerned about my paper because I tend to write in a conversational style. I attribute this to my blog, as well as my training as an ad copy writer back in my radio broadcasting days. Nevertheless, the instructor found the paper delightful and all is well with the world. I had to submit my latest paper for the class today, which was a “process essay”. I wrote an article on how to grow a mustache. I figured I was a pretty good at it and familiar with the subject so I might as well write about it. I even invited the ladies to join in on the fun, but I doubt any of them will.

We are now under a “heavy storm warning” with three feet of snow being targeted for our little area. While I love going to school very much, I can’t help but be as giddy as a school kid at the thought of a snow day tomorrow. If classes are canceled tomorrow, the adult in me will kick in and use the opportunity to get ahead on my studies.

Especially since we’re fresh out of bon bons.

I must have lost my ability to multitask or something. When I sit down to work on homework, I must have relative silence. I can’t have the television or radio on, I can’t have the cat sitting on my lap and I certainly can’t be talking on the phone or chatting with others online. There used to be a time when I could do homework while riding the bus to school, but I’ve since lost that ability.

I’m noticing that the younger generation is very adept at multitasking. I sit next to a guy in math class that listens to his iPod for the entire class. Since it’s a math lab and there’s no lecture going on, it doesn’t really offend the instructor, but I don’t know how he can sit there and work out algebraic equations while listening to music. The numbers and letters do enough of a dance for me without adding music to the equation.

There’s also this trend of whispering during class lectures. Today in sociology I had two guys to my right (one of them sitting in my staked out seat, by the way, next time I get my seat back I’ll pee in it to mark my territory) carrying on a whispered conversation and eating Doritos and to my left I had two girls text-messaging over their cell phones and whispering amongst themselves. What happened to the days when we listened to the instructor? Would it have been rude of me to stand up and yell “shut up!”? Dare I sit in the front row of class next time?

Perhaps because I’m older I’m a little more serious about my education this time around. Or it could be that because I’m older I just can’t keep up with these young whipper-snappers.

I haven’t felt like this in a couple of decades. The weather is nasty right now. Snow is falling like crazy (we are expecting close to a foot of snow by tonight), the wind is whipping about and it is very cold, with the wind chill down around -20ºF. Most of the schools didn’t bother opening and those that did are dismissing early and canceling after school activities.

I keep checking websites to see if the college is closed today. I’m doing my “Snow Day Dance”, which I haven’t done since 1986.

Today in Sociology class we were asked to form groups of six so that we could work on a project together. Feeling like Grandpa Walton gathering the little rugrats around him, “Spin us another tale of the old days!”, the five closest classmates to me formed a group and we all exchanged introductions.

It was then that Drew said to me, “Didn’t you used to be on the radio?”

I blushed a bit and said that yes, I had been on the radio for about ten years. Darcy, sitting to my right, nodded in agreement and said she remembered me from the radio too. Shannon said that she listened to me when she was giving birth to her third child. I guess I had never thought back then that someone was listening to me while they were screaming out in pain and experiencing the miracle of birth. She said we were the only station that played Stevie B. and she remembered hearing “I Wanna Be The One”, the long version.

It was then that Drew said, “I remembered listening to you when I was little!”

Joy.

I have to wonder if I attended an elementary school where they considered students lab rats. Did the educational system say to themselves, “Let’s try something new with this class, and this class only, and see how they succeed in life!”. This statement would undoubtedly be accompanied by a sinister laugh. “Mwah ha ha ha ha ha ha”.

I’m talking about elementary math skills. Now I have a very accurate, vivid memory. It’s something that I pride myself on. And the New York State elementary educational system teaches students how to measure liquids, distances and densities in fifth and sixth grades, for the most part.

Here’s the kicker. I attended these grades from 1978-1980. And what was the United States going to do at that time? We were going to convert to the metric system. It was two kilometers to the next Service Area, we bought two liters of pop and our aspirin was being handed out in milligrams instead of tons. Therefore, my teachers apparently figured that they didn’t want to waste the time of teaching my classes the old system, since they were all about the future and the promise of flying cars and therefore, we’d all be taught the metric system.

I can convert from fahrenheit to celcius like it’s nobody’s business. I know what a decigram and a hectometer is. As a civil engineer with NYSDOT someday (cross your fingers everyone), I will be working on construction plans that are completely in metric. But, today I must take a test that proves my fluency in the English measurements. I must know how many hectares of milk are in a pound.

I’m seriously thinking of writing a temporary tattoo comprised of the conversion factors on my forearm, but I’d probably get in trouble for that. I don’t know how sexy that would be either.

I blame Miss O’Rourke and Mr. Krakowka (elementary school teachers). If they had the sense to tell us what a fluid ounce was in gallons, I’d feel more like a complete person and less like a lab rat.

In an effort to eat healthy, last Wednesday I skimped a little bit on my caloric intake for the day. Unfortunately, this caused me to what I call “bonk” in my math class: I became a little disoriented, disenchanted, disinterested and depressed. I’ve had the same thing happen to me while long-distance cycling. Back then, I approached a hill in the middle of nowhere and began to tear up at the prospect of having to climb another hill after having done the same for the past two hours. The surrounding cows were unsympathetic and continued to chew their cud.

I vowed I would not feel that way again.

Because I was bonking in class last week, I did poorly on one of my math tests. Luckily, I can retake the test. So this morning I have been running through exam simulations on the computer and studying like a madman.

After I finish up this blog entry, I’m going to go eat a protein bar so I don’t have another bonking incident.

Wikipedia’s explanation of bonk. The other type of bonking probably would have distracted me just as much, but would have made the math class much more interesting.

Today in my “Math for Dummies” class a handful of students, including me, were called up to the professor’s desk. This always makes me nervous, though I’ve been doing well and have been on-time and everything so I couldn’t imagine what this was about. Then I remembered that I’m between mandatory measles shots and perhaps they were going to make me wear a mask or something, because a 38 year old bald, bearded man in a classroom full of teenagers and early 20 somethings doesn’t stick out enough already.

Come to find out, I had been selected to take a prototype of the new placement test administered to those wishing to attend the college. This is the test I was cramming for at the beginning of the month, after achieving a dismal score back in November. Apparently the college is converting from a paper-based test to a computer administered exam.

Always in it for computer fun and looking to crash software, I volunteered to take the exam. It wouldn’t alter my placement scores nor would it exempt me from taking Math For Dummies, but it would provide valuable feedback to the college and would also make me eligible for a door prize.

So I took the exam. It looks like future college hopefuls are going to have an easier time than I did, as they will now allow calculators and there are a quarter as many questions compared to the paper-based exam I had to take. The test administrative woman wouldn’t tell me my score, but she did let out a “Wow!” when the printer spewed out my exam and score, so either I did really well or I did really poorly. I guess we’ll never know. Perhaps the mathematics professors are yukking it up once again in their private offices, not that I’m paranoid or anything. “He thinks it takes four thousands gallons of water and one hectare to slipcover New Jersey! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

Maybe I’ll win the undisclosed door prize.