so i decided to go back to school and finish up my degree. which is really not so much finishing as it is doing, since i’ve only got about 35 credit hours to my name so far, of 120.

after spending a bunch of quality time doing some research, the plan i’ve tentatively decided on is to finish up the work for an associate’s degree at the local community college — harold washington college, one of the city colleges of chicago — before moving on to a four-year institution, most likely the online liberal arts program at the university of illinois at springfield. UIS has the advantage of being a real school and so there’s none of that “but your online degree from ${PLACE_I_SEE_BANNER_ADS_FOR_EVERYWHERE} isn’t really a degree” crap, plus it’s a whole lot cheaper, with in-state tuition. but first, the tedious froshy requirements.

so wednesday i decided to head over there to meet up with an adviser and talk about planning this whole scheme of mine out. what i didn’t anticipate was that wednesday was Banking Day, evidently the day that financial aid comes in and people using it get to register. in other words, instead of drifting into an office and leisurely spending some time talking about coursework, i stood in lines a bunch, and eventually got hustled in to a computer lab, where advisers were hurriedly assisting people to pick out courses, then shuffling us on to the business office to pay the bills. i picked out a film course that meets on wednesdays to check off a humanities box, but then decided to go take the math placement exam, since i wanted to also take a math class — might as well get the most dreaded stuff out of the way early in this process, since if i’m going part time i figure it’s going to take me five years to finish this degree, and knowing the way i don’t actually like school and really don’t like doing homework, there’s a good chance i might fail math class, so i need all the time i can to get through that (especially if i was going to place into a non-credit math class due to forgetting of everything). so i took the exam, and to my amazement actually placed into for-credit math. yay!

so then i went back to the advising queue and saw another adviser and we discovered that my math class’s only evening section conflicted with the film class, as it meets mondays and wednesdays (ugh), so i dropped the film class and signed on for math torture instead. then, since i wanted to take two classes per semester (to get this thing done in anything resembling less than an entire lifetime), i picked out intro biology as well. i only need one lab science plus another science class, and i loathe chemistry with a singular hate (mostly because they take all the fun out of it by adding math), so bio it is. the thing with the bio class is that it’s kind of a drag, because the only section that worked for me meets from 9AM until 1:40PM on saturdays — five straight hours. with no lunch break, but that’s probably okay if there’s going to be dissection going on, because yuck. and, annoyingly, ‘s going to basically make it impossible for me to take any little weekend getaways for the entire spring semester. so this semester is going to pretty much suck by default, but on the bright side, at least by the end i’ll have gotten my two most-dreaded requirements out of the way and can basically fill up the rest of the time with fun stuff.

so that’s that. it’ll kind of derail my french classes at alliance-française, as i doubt i’m going to want to take classes on my few remaining free evenings (not to mention af is un petit peu cher), but we’ll see — especially since i actually enjoy french class. but for now, i am $681 poorer (another surprise from wednesday night, since i wasn’t really going in there with plans any more firm than talking about registering for classes, but oh well), and my january vacation plans are pretty thoroughly screwed up, and i have to make sense of what this means for Brainiversary 4, but i guess this is, on the whole, a good thing.

i wish i liked school so this was actually something to look forward to. as it is, my best attempt at motivating myself is reminding myself that this is one step closer to a uk visa and, at least, tuition is tax-deductible. whee.