sad and happy...

Bad news first:
1. It seems God and all creation just doesn't want me to be a humanist and help others. Every effort I make to do a humanitarian program gets thwarted. I really, really wanted to take this class at my school that works on projects in developing countries and then goes to these countries for all of January to implement the projects. Unfortunately the class is always massively over-enrolled. This time they accepted about 40% of enrolled students, and I was not one of them. This is very frustrating to me because I can't seem to find the resources or connections to do the volunteer work that I want to do. Now I am left with just my peer mentoring program I'm doing, which is good yes, but not quite the same. At this rate, I'll get denied the funding to go work in India this summer that I'm fighting for. But I won't give up yet!

2. This is going to most likely annihilate any of my geographical anonymity, but it's just so freaking amazing that I have to brag. One of my classes is taught by Alan Guth!!!! If you are leading a sorry enough existence to not recognize that name immediately, I will tell you that he is the father of the modern inflationary theory that is currently held to best explain the phenomena manifested from the very early stages of the universe. (See wikipedia article.) I expected like Stephen Hawking, and he is somewhat like Stephen Hawking, but he can talk and walk and stuff (hopefully that doesn't sound offensive; it is true), and he's actually quite a good lecturer. Today wasn't that bad because it was a cosmology overview, and because I am an avid modern physics fan fiction reader, I was up to date. But as soon as we have to start doing calculations and (Zeus forbid) using differential equations, I'm doomed.

I also was thrown rudely into electromagnetism today during my computational neuroscience lab which I think I will drop as the teacher started scribbling differential equations describing different models for neurons in very small handwriting. I think the class would be really interesting, but I just don't want to put myself through it if I can take the much easier neurophysiology of memory class I am also signed up for. And, the one benefit of not getting into the development lab is that I only have to take five classes now instead of the original suicidal six.

Random other note- my philosophy of film teacher is legitimately deaf. He spent the first thirty minutes of his lecture last night trying to get his hearing aids to work. Without success.