Week 2 and Coming Out

Well, it is Saturday morning. I had a werid night last night. We all snuck down to the basement of my complex and we did what college kids do best. No – not get high and have an orgy – watch The Lion King with Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and gummy worms.

But Im getting ahead of myself, let’s go back to where I left off.

Wednesday was a fantastic day. I went to my classes, and they let me just sleep (I didn’t, but I could have and not missed a thing).

Diff E: We went over homework problems that people didn’t get very well (if I hadn’t gotten them right before the homework was due, I would have gotten help rather than turn in a wrong answer) and so I got to just sit there and listen to them talk about things I already knew because I had just done them.

Lin Alg: She taught in class some of the concepts that were in the homework that she hadn’t covered yet. I, of course (along with most of the class) knew all of this already, having had done the homework, we had just read it in the book. Yeah, that was enthralling…

Linguistics: amazing, as usual. We talked more about the IPA and phonetics. I can now read those crazy pronunciation guides in dictionaries!!! W00t! I wanna be a crazy old man like him when I get old. I am going to emphasize how cool this class is every time, because I know how boring I make it sound...

Chemistry: the first quiz! The dreaded first quiz! How will he decide which questions to use? How hard will it be? 3 questions in 10 minutes, will we have enough time? Aaahhhh!

That was, unfortunately, about 60% of the class, and that is why 60% of the class got two of the three questions wrong (I'm estimating that one, about two thirds of the class groaned when he put the answers on the board). I did not study or prepare in any way and I got 100% with 7 minutes left to go. Because I am a genius? No. Because as with all my classes, I have studied this crap before and cuz I'm bored. So I drew on my hand for the next 25 MINUTES while he talked about the quiz questions. Then I finished it and drew it on paper too… Came up with this:

It is a rough design for a tattoo that I am planning on getting. Now before you all jump on me with “you need time to make sure a tattoo is what you really want” and I know that. Otherwise I would have gotten it already. And in addition, I’ve been working on this design for a couple months now, and I’m very close to where I want it to end up. The basic idea is this – it is a contact ball on fire. The first 2-3 rows of flame are actual flame (you know, blue, yellow, red, orange flames) but after that, they fade into green. I’m talking leaves here.

Couple bits of symbols I’m working with here.

fire into a plant: circle of life, fire goes to life. Plus, how fire is a large part of my life.

The ball in the middle is shaded in as if it was lit, but it will not be burnt: standing in the fire and come out unscathed

The flames blowing to one side: people try to extinguish your fire, but no matter how hard they may blow, I will continue to burn.

So, then we move on to Wednesday night, which was hanging out with Alyssa, Kyle, and this kid James and havin a good time. I slept really well, and due to not having classes the next day till 1:00, slept in till 11:00, which was extremely nice.

So our discussion section for linguistics was awesome. We went into more depth about vowels and consonants, and straightened out all the confusion about certain symbols. I’m really not going to go into it – because if you wern’t there, it will bore you to death.

That was pretty much the end of Thursday, to be perfectly honest.

Friday… god – I don’t do anything these days. Got up and went to class, learned the official names for some logical arguments and proved a teacher wrong with her own logic – that was a great boost of confidence in my classes.

Saturday on the other hand was a fantastic day. I got up at 10:00 to a phone call from Kat, one of the people I met at the LGBTQA trans meeting the other day. She said we were going to go to the Valley River Center and Gateway Mall to get Rose some clothes. Rose is a very new transexual (for those who don’t know, transgender is when you believe you are a girl in a boy’s body or vice versa, whereas transexual, as far as I understand it, is when you actually take measures to correct that ex: hormones, surgery etc.) and she needed some clothes to match who she really was. Shopping for a transexual is hard – you have to find clothes that emphasize all the right parts of a body – no easy task. So we made it a day (literally, we left around noon and came back around 9) and had a blast. I got some new pants (fantastic skinny jeans with horizontal tears in them – with pink tights underneath – that are fabulous) and a nice hat. I also got some more practical clothes, got some wool fingerless gloves and a winter hat/beanie. I really love living in eugene, I cannot stress that enough. Back at home I was afraid to be who I really was most of the time, except around a few people. About 90% of people in my life don’t know that I am genderqueer. And I made it that was on purpose because I was living in a town where I was afraid to be who I was in public. Some people in my life don’t even know I am bisexual. I keep these things hidden a lot of the time. For those of you who want an explanation of genderqueer as it applies to me (it is a very broad category) which would be most of my family, feel free to e-mail me and I will tell you all about it. I told my mother about it because I was tired of hiding all the time. She asked me not to tell people, I am not sure why. But I don’t care anymore. This is who I am, and now I am surrounded by people who understand it and accept it. Even encourage it. I have never met another genderqueer person or met a trans person. And it was this that made me feel alone as I did in Tucson. I found a group of people like me, really like me, for the first time in my life. I cannot express how amazing that is.

So, we got Rose a killer jacket (I found it, I am proud to say) and some shirts, a pair of jeans and we spent 8 hours laughing our asses off. Then we spent most of the night with Raven (someone else I met at the meeting) in my dorm’s lounge, just laughing and eating dinner.

A note to the three of you – I am so glad I met you. Raven, I am sorry I messed up your pronouns, it won’t happen again I promise. I know I just met you, but already you are such a positive force in my life, being able to talk to you about these things, and knowing you will understand.

Well, it is Sunday, and I just got back from breakfast a couple hours ago. Had a lovely breakfast with Kat (she stayed with me because she didn’t want to deal with her roommate last night) and then she went home to play catch up on homework.

I realize that this blog may upset some people, and I am sorry for that. There are a lot of people I know who are not as accepting as I would like them to be, and before, when I lived in Tucson, I was content just to hide those parts of myself from them in order to stay close to them.

But as the saying goes

“Those who care don’t matter, and those who matter won’t care”

I love you all, no matter how you may react to this

Peace out, have a great Sunday,

~Connor

Week 1, complete. Week 2, bring it on!

A quick note - I write these stream of consciousness, so there are several things that this blog will have that it should not - and those are spelling and grammar mistakes. It will also not have something it should, and that is linear structure. I say things as I remember them, and it's my blog, so there...

Well, the world continues to move on, day by day, no matter how much fun I may be having. Classes still are boring, but everything else I am doing is fantabulous! I made some new friends (who are roomies, even though I met them on two different occasions) and their names are Jessica and Alyssa. I pretty much see these two on a daily basis and we have such a good time. More people who will be good friends in college I think. I had a good juggling club last night, got sick last week and had a great movie night. Had an LGBTQA meeting and wasted an entire day without noticing. All in all, a good weekend.

Friday. Friday was filled with some classes (snooze) and the crazy old man known as Proffessor DeLancy, who I believe is the coolest teacher ever.

Chemistry was kinda funny though. But first, the back story. I do my best to stand out in any situation, especially the classroom. It is a good idea to have your teachers know who you are. However, in this chemistry class of about 400 people, I had decided not to even try. But on Friday, he had asked a question of how a pi bond was possible in ethene because according to the lewis structure, the 2p orbitals do not match up. And we were getting all sorts of crazy answers. Now usually, after 2 wrong answers, he answers it for us and we move on. But after four incorrect answers he was still taking hands, at which point I got bored, raised my hand and said “Molecular groups can rotate around a sigma bond”

“Perfect, couldn’t have said it better myself!”

So I saved us some time, but if I went up to him the next day, he would not even know I was in his class. Which sucks, so now I intend on going back to sitting in my seat drawing on my hand and designing my next tattoo until he says something interesting or something I didn’t learn is 9^th grade.

Well, I got out of chemistry and OMG! FREE HUGGERS!!! Yeah, 3 girls with free hugs signs (for those of you who do not know what that is, go to Free Hugs Youtube Video) and I am going to join them this Friday. So that pretty much made my day. This was followed by a 3 hour juggling practice on my part, which was cold, and I got a little sick. Which sucks. Im almost recovered now though. Later that night: movie night with Allison, Graham and Jeff. Holly stopped by for a little bit too (for those of you who know who Holly is, fantastic – if not, oh well) and everyone loved her, we all had a blast together. I slept like a rock on top of it all.

Saturday was BLOODY COLD! Saturday was a waste. I honestly cannot remember a single important thing about that day. Sunday we had the most useless hall meeting of all time, to discuss hall conduct (I had two phrases to fix everything: 1) be respectful, use good judgement and 2) if you have a problem with something or someone, talk to them yourself if you are comfortable. If not, go to the AR) One of those days I helped Alyssa who woke up feeling terrible. I made her some tea, and warmed her up. So yeah, weekend was filled with lots of chill out time. Which was needed. I did some really cool linguistics reading, which has helped me out with foreign languages a lot. For example, the English “d” is hard. Say “d” and feel where your tongue is. The tip should be touching the spot on the roof of your mouth just behind the tops of your teeth. This is called an alveolar stop. Now, do the same thing but with your tongue on the backs of your teeth. This is known as a “soft d” and is what all d’s are like in spanish. I have tried to explain it as a cross between a “d” and a “th” because “th”s are done with the tongue on the teeth. W00T LINGUISTICS.

MOONDAY. Day of the moon, and the bloody cold, made colder by sick. I got to meet my Diff E Professor. His name is Boris Botvinnik, a very russian name indeed. And I was wondering the whole first week “so, is he actually russian, or is that just his name?”

Verdict: HE IS SO RUSSIAN!

I continue my streak of never having had a native english speaking math teacher in my life (slovak, czech, chinese, russian). Yay me. Well had an LGBTQA meeting for trans people (I am not transgender or transexual, but I wanted to get involved. For those of you who know the longer story behind that, fill it in here) and it was amazing. Meeting these amazing people, and one of them is the leader of the juggling club! What a cool thing, eh? Ian is the name there. When we introduced ourselves in the meeting, we had three questions.

name (duh)

Preferred pronouns to be used for you

Board game that describes you (two people said black box, which I didn’t know – Kat is going to show me – Kat who is a girl and identifies as male or female depending on the day)

Ian answered as following “Hi, my name is Ian. Erm, I’m not sure at the moment, so if we could use gender neutral pronouns or just avoid pronouns alltogether that would be great.” I don’t remember his board game. Raven said candyland though, and we all had a good laugh about it when she said “how do you win that one again? I just liked looking at the pretty pictures”

So, Ian is an expert juggler and ze (not a misspelling, it’s one of those gender neutral pronouns) is a pretty decent sort of person too. Very shy though.

Tuesday (today) went to class and got help with some ridiculous problems in the homework, then spent 3 hours tutoring a guy in my class who overslept and missed the help session. He owes me coffee.

So that was my weekend – yes, it was boring by my standards.

Future: quiz tomorrow in chem, homework due in both math classes, circus on Thursday (I am going to assist with the silks class) and due to the not having any classes on Thursday, Alyssa, Kyle, and I are gonna hang out on Wednesday night. So that should be fun.

Let the classes begin!

U of O Entry 4

Let the classes begin!

I left you on Saturday night with shopping with my new friend Allison. In this blog I promised you juggling club and fantabulous nonsense, first class and the coffee I was drinking. Since then there have been more classes, chores, more shopping, and my more friends!

So, to be perfectly honest with you, I have no recollection whatsoever of what happened on Sunday night. The university put on some event that was fun, but not fun enough to be worth mentioning. I did some partying, followed by an insanely long walk (long because people learned to hold parties further from the university after 8 parties got broken up by the cops within 1 mile of campus after the big UO win against Cal, 42-3 for those who don’t pay attention). This was followed by the movie watching in the previous blog, which was in turn followed by sleep. Lots of sleep.

Monday! Which for some reason my computer won’t let me type in all CAPS because it is too smart for me to take literary license with my blogs. Side note: The Ting Tings are fantastic for writing to. Monday I did some more organizing, some more shopping for school supplies, and a whole lot of doing nothing. Went to dunch/binner with Andy before juggling club. But do I go to juggling club on my bike? No. On my own two feet? No. On an aero-plane? Hell no. I jogged… on my stilts. For those of you who have never been to the university of oregon, it is very hilly – so as to say that when you are running down hill in jumping stilts, you can clear about 20 ft. in a single stride. And let me tell you, if you think you’ve gotten weird looks for how you dress or talk, you know nothing as to the looks I got taking strides bigger than an elephant is long. Friggen’ awesome. Well, juggling was a blast, I got to see some familiar faces from introDUCKtion, and some new ones too. I am not the best by any means in any discipline (except contact juggling, I am the expert, w00t) but I brought up the idea of a professional company and one of the guys (Dan) was really interested in that, and wanted to learn acro. So we are going to base each other and start the company! Exciting times. AND!!!! I learned how to pass 7 clubs with Dan. For the jugglers reading this (nobody really) you do a split timing 2’s pattern with doubles. Code for “pass every other club, throw it very high, and throw it as soon as you get the club into that hand. And if you see a club coming you can’t catch perfectly, don’t try – just duck. And run, and cry when it lands on your head (been there, done that). Then I jogged back on my stilts, and promptly died of exhaustion. And even though I was exited and exhausted I did not forget to set my alarm, and I got up exactly when I needed to (7:30) without anyone else’s help (yeah, Mom. I told you I could!)

MARTES! A day which had nothing spanish in particular about it except a girl’s phone went off in class and she told someone not to call her during class, and she said it in spanish (¡no llamame cuando estoy en clase!) and I just felt like yelling across the room ¡No traegalo el telefono a la clase! (for those of you who don’t understand that, it was don’t bring your phone to class).

I only had one class on Tuesday, and it was Differential Equations at eight bloody ay em. And then I was done.

For those who have not taken Diff E, it is fucking hard, and takes a lot of energy to understand the semi-abstract concepts presented in this class. For those of us who have taken 6 months of Diff E before, it is going to be the biggest snooze fest. The first two thirds of the course is review. Yeah. Easy as pie, one might say.

For the rest of Tuesday I went to lunch with Allison when she had a break and… well, God, I don’t do anything these days. Or I do and then I forget about it. AH! I did laundry, yes I did. I did laundry and did my homework that isn’t due till next Wednesday. The teacher (who is a sub, because our prof gets back in town on Monday – great vote of confidence for this guy, misses the first week of classes) told us that we would learn how to do these problems over the next week. Well, I had two hours to kill for laundry, and so I just did a little reading for some of the harder problems, and I did it all. Because I am that smart. No, in reality, because Ms. Kolesikova kicks such a large quantity of ass as a math teacher. Cheers to you.

I still need a good name for my dragon picture, so if you have any good ideas for dragon names, please do tell me. And I need help with a puzzle. When you have a 4x3 poster (too heavy for sticky tac) and your walls are made of concrete (no push pins) and you arn’t allowed to use the ceiling to hang things, how do you hang up said poster. I am accepting all suggestions. Because right now my amazing favorite poster of Van Goghs sunflowers is sitting under my bed getting flattened (on purpose, but it would do a much better job on my wall…)

MERCREDI! There was absolutely nothing french about Wednesday, none of my friends are taking french, except for the fact that after *sprinting* from one class to the other because I didn’t know exactly where they were and twice went into the wrong building, if someone had asked a favor of me, I would have responded with “but I am le tired…”

If that person had said “well, take a nap, ZEN FIRE ZEE MISSILES!” it would have made my day. Well, now I know where all my classes are, so I will simply be walking quickly instead of sprinting (getting the building right on the first try will help).

Class 1: Diff E, same story as yesterday. Cept he had us do some problems on the board, and when I didn’t go up to try them out, he asked me “you not want to problem on board?” (he is Chinese, in keeping with my tradition of learning math with non-native english speakers – the proffession is hardcore Russian too…) and I responded “oh, I already did them yesterday.”

“Oh, well… Sih- here an sure ever-one elz dus right”

I can understand Czech accents like they are not an accent at all, but you put a chinese accent in front of me, and I take the next 30 seconds decoding it… I hope I can do better with Russian, because if this guy tried to teach me something I didn’t already know, I would be f*%ked.

Class 2: Elementary Linear Algebra. I don’t really know what I expected of this class, to be perfectly honest. I think when they designed the class name they said “what is the most complicated way to say ‘math designed around linear equations?’” Yeah. Linear Equations. As in, no square roots, no multiplication of variables, no squaring variables. Just linear variables and (for the most part) whole number coefficients. The most complicated it is gonna get before November is solving systems of three equations and graphing two equations at inequalities. To anyone at BASIS: didn’t we finish that class in like 8^th grade?

Class 3: Linguistics. In 2 words: seriously cool. The proffessor is Prof. DeLancy, and he is a crazy old man with long hair and a crazy old man beard. And he uses sound effects in his lectures. He is fantastic, excited about everything, and has a serious sense of humor. I’ll come back to linguistics in a bit.

Class 4: Organic Chemistry. Yes, I took this class already too – in 9^th grade and 10^th grade. I read through the book in a skip reading fashion, and the syllabus and I will not learn anything new for a month and a half. We are going to spend 3 weeks alone on naming and Lewis dot structures. In addition, the number of people in this class is >300. Pardon me if I didn’t take the time to count. But he said “all… well, more than 300 of you, have taken Gen Chem before yadayadayada.”

I looked at one of his homework assignments, and it will be an easy class.

We all looked at my schedule before I left for college and said “wow, you are gonna have no free time”

Well, it is the opposite. At least for the first time, I am gonna have SO MUCH FREE TIME!

And now, for the irony of the whole situation. Is it not sad that the most interesting class, and the one that is teaching me things from day 1 I didn’t know is the only class that does not contribute worth a damn towards my major?

So, more on linguistics. Linguistics, for those who don’t know, is the scientific study of language. So now that we’ve got that cleared up, we can start learning. That was what Mr. DeLancy said, and followed it with “but honestly, what the hell does that even mean ‘the scientific study of language?’” So we defined some terms, laughed at his drawing skills (he started it) and really defined linguistics, and why we study it. We talked about how human language (spoken) is different and superior to human language (written) is different and superior to animal language. I would love to explain all of this to you, but I do not have a 50 minute lecture’s worth of time to write. I’ll do it in person if you ask. It is complicated. When it takes 50 minutes to explain what the title of the course means, you know the class is gonna be complicated and therefore fun as hell (if you are like me and love learning).

So, bright future in classes one fourth. Hopefully I’ll get into better ones for winter quarter.

However, due to increased time, I accepted the job working at Bounce Gymnastics, and I am drinking some coffee at the Eugene equivalent of Café Milano (but way cheaper) called Café Perugino, and it has free (fast) internet and amazing coffee, which I have been enjoying for the last hour. Around 5:45, I will hop back on the old cycle, and pedal myself over to Bounce, where they are going to hang up my trapeze in the only place they have room: OVER A BLOODY TRAMPOLINE!!! CAN YOU IMAGINE THE CRAZY S*%T I AM CONSIDERING DOING WITH THAT?!?!?! And then my trap will live there in peace and harmony and I will never have to carabiner it to my backpack ever again. Thank God – that is tough to do while on a bike…

So, that’s all in terms of updates except the plans for a vampire movie night with Allison tomorrow night (Interview with The Vampire or True Blood, season 1 – we havn’t decided which yet) and the new friends. I met a girl named Tina Foley who reminds me in a somewhat creeepy way of Sarah W. from BASIS, and she is fantastic. And I met one of Evan’s friends whose name is Callie, and she is fantastic. I am including a picture of Evan taken from his facebook so you all can see what he looks like.

Thats it for me folks, sorry that was so obscenely long, I’m sure not even my own family will make it through this one without falling asleep…

Until next time – be safe, have fun, and LEARN MORE THAN I AM GOING TO! PLEASE!