I like Mondays this semester. The pace is perfect – slow and easy in the morning, then there’s a tiny pickup in the afternoon, and then it all winds down nicely in the evening. Mondays are better than Tuesdays or Thursdays because there are fewer gaps in my schedule. I hate having one or two hour blocks of nothing between classes. They’re too short to get any real work done… but long enough that I know better than to waste it on Facebook. Mondays are also better than Wednesdays. Although I have the same classes on both days, they’re different because I don’t get to tutor my little seventh grade munchkin on Wednesdays. I wish every day was a Monday. Huzzah!
6:00am-9:00am Sallie Tiernan Field House
The day starts at 5:45am for me (I’m kind of a morning person). I like my job at the Field House. It’s a pretty sweet deal. And the music you hear at the pool? Yeah, we at the front desk take care of that too. Sorry if you don’t like Ellie Goulding. You’ll never have a job quite like your college work-study job. Your boss is a saint, your co-workers are actually your friends, and the patrons aka your classmates are always forgiving and patient. Have a great day and sorry for occasionally swiping your card backwards!
9:00am-12:00pm Clark Humanities Museum
People think I’m so cool when they find out I’m a museum assistant. This is probably because they think I guide tours or decode ancient hieroglyphics on the job. The truth is my job is pretty cool, but I generally don’t do either of those things. Sometimes, I’m more like the museum secretary. I sit at Karen’s desk, answer calls, and shuffle papers. Other times I do more arbitrary tasks. Do you know how to polish silver? I didn’t know until last week. I spent approximately six hours cleaning and polishing French porcelain and silverware for a private event this weekend (see my handiwork below). Am I qualified to run a vintage boutique yet?
12:00pm-1:10pm British Literature / 1:15pm-3:45pm Drawing
When I was younger, my favorite subjects in school were English and Art. As I grew older, I fell out of the habit of writing and drawing in my free time. I moved three times during middle school and, quite frankly, I was more preoccupied with fitting in and making friends than pursuing something that “wasn’t going to get you anywhere”. I just now got back into writing and drawing regularly. Sometimes, when I frown at the glaring comma splices on my Mac screen, when I sigh at the distorted charcoal lines on my paper, I wonder if things would be different if I hadn’t stopped. Sometimes, this makes me sad. Sure, art is not “useful” like business or engineering or medicine. The dean of students in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man once said, “We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts.” I don’t like the useful arts. I’m not very good that them either (I have a feeling these two things are correlated). But I like the liberal arts. In high school, I learned to love history and politics. In college, I rekindled my love for literature and art. This semester, I’m taking a sociology class at Pitzer and I like that too. I wonder what else I never knew I couldn’t live without. Good thing I have four more years to find out.
4:00pm-5:00pm Tutoring
Have you ever tutored a kid one-on-one before? If you haven’t, you should. You’ll teach him a thing or two, but you’ll probably learn more from him. Kids are amazing because they’re not jaded or worn down by the world yet. After a few tutoring sessions, even without being prompted, they’ll start opening up to you. They’ll tell you about their plans to travel the world, build rockets, and join the Chilean football team. And you can’t tell them they can’t because they’ll tell you that they’ll prove you wrong. Kids remind us that we need to stay passionate about what we believe in and continue fighting the odds. Cheers to that.