Campus Shenanigans

I decided I wanted to take a class again this semester. I took nothing at all last year, as much of the time I was barely functioning well enough to teach. Naturally, this meant that they'd managed to do something screwy with my account. When I went to try and register for the class on-line, it said "Admission Pending." This would make perfect sense for a completely new student and/or faculty member, but not for me. So I went over to the registrar to find out what was going on. She told me that my status was listed as "Master's: non-degree seeking," whatever THAT means, and that only the grad-student office could fix it. The grad student office did fix it, and the lady there had no idea why my status had been mixed up in the first place. So, I'm registered now for "Philosophical Issues in Religion." ^!^

That was one of three classes that I considered. The others were Elementary Japanese and Physical Geology. I wandered over to the bookstore to compare books before deciding. Thumbing through the Physical Geology book nearly put me to sleep; I hated to imagine what actually reading it would do to me. The Japanese class had two somewhat expensive texts, which did look interesting, but that class also meets on MTThF, and my T/Th are already rather packed. Also, I had already leaned towards the Philosophy class after seeing that the Tao te Ching and Bhagavad Gita were two of the required texts. Unfortunately, they were not translations that I already had. My two favorites are the Ursula K. LeGuin version, and the Red Pine translation. LeGuin did not translate it, per se: she compared a lot of translations and compared various meanings for the Chinese characters. It's more a transliteration, but the words in it flow beautifully.

The other texts are a novella that seems to be about Westerners encountering Eastern Thought for the very first time, a comparative religion textbook, a book by Freud, and a book by Hume. Hopefully the class will be as interesting as its required texts...four of which I had to order through Amazon, as they don't seem to have made it into the bookstore yet.