school's in

It's almost fall, which means school is starting again, which means time for nine more months of hilarious schoolyard antics bottled and marketed for your enjoyment. At least that's what I wish it meant. In reality, it means marathon novel reading, major research, and a lot more writing than I've been doing over the summer.

Today, for example (officially the first days of fall classes, but like last year, Tuesdays are my day of rest), I spent about seven hours researching, compiling, summarizing, and shortening about 7000 years of Chinese history into a 20 minute lecture for my Friday class. How can this be done, you ask? Answer: It can't. Basically, it became a five-track sampler called Greatest Hits of Chinese Thought, briefly discussing Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and the revolutions of the early 20th century (just before the Communists came to power). It's ridiculously watered down, but since I just want them to have some background, I think it'll be ok. On Wednesday I'll cover Communism in more depth. See, the problem I have--and why this all takes so long--is that in reality this is my first time studying Chinese history. So I have to read a lot more than I'm going to talk about to make it sound like I'm some kind of expert. Once we get into more literature, I think it'll be good, but today was just a long day.

In other news, I finally made the switch to NetFlix. So far, I'm not converted. It took something like 4 days to switch out our first disc (two days there, two days back) which seems awful slow. Yeah, I had due dates at the video store, but as I've mentioned, the video store is only half a mile away. It sucked late at night some nights, but overall, not a bad price to pay. I'll keep it going for a month or two and see if I grow to like it--and I'm sure part of it is just the fact that we live in the country--but so far, meh.

OK, tomorrow is the first day of class. Wacky stories coming soon.