MYRONMAN HATES EVERYTHING

So yesterday I logged into my first grad school class and found that there was a lot of work to do. Well, there wasn’t very much actual work to do towards the program, but lots of work to do to set myself up for the class.

There’s a wiki, a normal login account, and a virtual classroom account login. It took me about 5 hours of reading to get everything setup and I’d actually used shit like this before. I hope that the rest of the students with different backgrounds have as easy a time setting themselves up, but I doubt it. The teacher said that it was going to be overwhelming at first, but if we all keep at it, we’ll get used to it "soon enough"

I don’t really know how they could have done things differently, but I think that when I design things/classes, I’d consider it a FAIL if the adjective people described it as was "overwhelming" For example, would you buy any of these items:

overwhelming toaster?

overwhelming foreman grill?

overwhelming condom?

overwhelming shoes?

overwhelming glasses?

I think not.

I don’t know what the alternative is for teaching an online class, so I’ll just leave that up to the pros.

I’m taking this Fiction Writing class for my final semester at Columbia College. I took the class initially because it was a 4 credit hour class and that would allow me to get my 13 credit hours that I need to graduate. I assumed that it would be “challenging, with a lot of writing”. I also assumed that “even though there will be a lot of writing, I enjoy telling stories. Especially ones that I get to make up, or completely control. As opposed to writing term papers or critical essays for some bullshit that happened a thousand years ago”.

This class is hard work.

I fucking love it.

I love to tell stories. This class has been incredibly challenging, as well as incredibly fulfilling. The things we do in this class are a lot of fun. Right now, we’re working on how to write a scene. I’ll demonstrate the kind of shit I’ve learned about writing a scene so far by describing the class:

He (Myron) walks into the classroom about an hour before the class. The white door with security lock makes him assume that this will be a computer-lab like room, like the other classrooms he passed by before coming here. See, he never takes the time to find out where the classes are at when he needs to go there. He always walks around in circles asking people if they are in his class, where it’s at and finally if that doesn’t work, he goes to the department office and asks them.

The door glides open effortlessly as a student that was there earlier than he was opens the door to leave just as he begins to enter. “Hi”, he says as he sees a semi-circle of chairs in front of the chalkboard. The arrangement of the room looks “off” to him because there are also chairs all along the walls outside of the semi-circle.

“The chairs will be comfortable for this class. Fuck, I might have a hard time using my laptop for notes in this class”, he thinks as he finds an old brown and beaten down desk to put his oversized over-heavy backpack on. He picked that backpack a while ago because he liked the color and the organization of the pockets for gadgets, books, and computer equipment. Jet black nylon with white outlines. He wishes that he never got that backpack, how heavy things seem on his back as he lugs the bag around day in and day out.

He spots a few of the chairs that are “incredibly uncomfortable” for him. Being a very large fellow, he tends to feel like a Sardine in a can with too many of his closest friends, the moving of raising the “desk” arm over his lap always clamping down the circulation of his leg and stomach like a vice.

He sits in one of the comfortable chairs behind the desk and begins to power up his laptop. He loves this laptop, it’s silver and black color, its size, weight, all the perfect size for him. Dell calls this their tuxedo color scheme for laptops. He doesn’t care about titles, he just like the way it looks, feels, and plays.

In come countless students into the class. After some time the students sit there and wait for their instructor. He in the corner, and the rest of the students sitting – instinctively – in the circle.

A classmate finally turns to him and asks “Dude, are you the teacher?”.

So, a few things… I have two main problems that I’m working on now:

1. Bringing the reader into the scene. How do I strike the balance between describing enough for the reader to understand where the scene takes place in a way that is significant to the characters in the scene and describing too much.
2. Being more subtle in my descriptions so that the reader draws the conclusions versus me saying something like “he likes rain because his skin is usually sunburned in the summer. He’s stupid like that”. I have to learn how to work the fact that the’s always sunburned into the story so that the reader knows the character and is able to come to that fact. The difference between saying “harry potter doesn’t like Voldemort” and the reader just Knowing that harry potter does not like Voldemort, based on how the character reacts to him in the story.

After I work those things out, I guess I’ll have some more difficult shit to work through.

Hey lady on the cell phone, the bus driver honked at you because:

• He didn’t want to kill you while trying to make the turn.
• You weren’t paying attention.
• You decided that you needed to walk across the street at a crosswalk in front of a bus full of people because you had the right of way.
• You were on a cell phone.
• Who the fuck were YOU talking to?
• You should probably forego your pedestrian rights in situations that can kill you.
• You don’t get a free second life because it was *someone else’s fault* you died.

People are stupid.