I woke up this morning to a couple guys scraping around in the dumpster space. This was 10:00 or earlier, mind you, and every little noise they made was amplified ten times by the hollowed shape of the dormitory around them. My window was closed, but still all I could do was lay in bed with my teeth clenched, waiting for them to finish whatever business they had and be on their way. Finally, after noon rolled around and crawled past, I heard something large being dragged away along the pavement, then silence. Ah, what a feeling, to be freed from the torturous echoes of hours-long scraping and scratching! Unfortunately, less an an hour later I had to get up and ready for class at 2:00, and I was tired and restless. What a wonderful way to start the day.

Into my bag went my three-ton sociology book, my german book, the henslin paperback that's as thick as my hand is wide, and two notebooks. I hefted it onto my shoulder and could already feel my muscles complaining as I headed off to lunch at the caf. By the way, I had to carry all these until 7:00 at night, and right now I feel like the world has been lifted from my shoulders. That, and I find myself cracking my neck and back every few minutes. *crack* aaahhhhh...

So after lunch (which consisted of dry rice and "vegan" lasagna that was full of cheese) I got to German class. Boring, as usual, as the professor goes over again and again the simplest terms that I learned freshman year in high school. This is why my German notebook is full of bad sketches of dragons and people. I swear it's more art class than anything. I suppose my mind was wandering and my eyes were too tired to see things properly, because when the professor called on me, for the life of me I couldn't remember the correct form of "Sie" she was looking for. And then I mistook a brown sweater for being dark red. Well, it looked kinda muddy red to me, but then...my eyes were half-closed. This is not how a student of German for 4 years should reply in class. I guess this means I'll have to actually pay attention now.

After German I headed off to the language lab to get in an hour of the required 12 hours I need in order to pass the class. Of course, I didn't actually practice German in the lab, but read up on Sociology, my next class. The lab workbook stuff is geared toward beginners and people who really want to learn the language more than anything. Bah. I fit into neither category. It's not as if the answers aren't in the back of the book Then again, considering my poor performance in German as of late, it might be a good idea to actually try. ....naah.

Somehow it got into my head that Sociology started at 4:30 when its actual time was 4:15. Just another quirk of my brain that told me I wasn't thinking straight. I got to class around 4:20, just after it had started, and was able to take down the notes from the beginning. I thought the professor was unusually happy today, and so was the class. There was a good discussion about class systems, poverty, caste systems, and the like. What really caught my interest, though, was a film about racism and status that was a documentary of a retreat involving people of various ethnicities, including one white man who was so positive that the problem of racism only lay in the attitudes of the minority. He reminded me so much of my parents, who always talked about racism as a problem with other peoples' ideas. As these people talked among themselves, I realized that the way I've been trying to think of other ethnicities was exactly the wrong way to approach the problem. We shouldn't be 'the same', we shouldn't believe in the same things, nobody should be expected to conform to others' ideals. To be American, as the term is used today, is to fit into the society that the dominant population has specified. Those who don't, or can't, because of the way they look or because of their heritage, are persecuted, no matter how much we northerners try to ignore it. I'm almost ashamed to admit I was surprised when a black woman in front of me voiced her opinion that the white man in the film was lying, because there was no way he could believe that everything was okay, that America embraced true equality for all people. She confirmed that everything truly is not okay, and that even here in the north there is much inequality. Somehow, there must be a way to be equal and not the same, to keep our separate cultures without defining one as lower than the next. The white man on the film mentioned collecting artifacts from Native Americans. A black man retaliated by saying he'd collect artifacts from the white culture. I realized that in being fascinated by a culture and collecting souvenirs of the people is derogatory in itself, like a higher culture becomes fascinated with an inferior and obsolete way of life, or a culture that only exists for the entertainment of whites. There's something wrong going on in the States, and many of us are blind to its effects.

*sigh* Anyway...I suppose I'll need to think a bit more on that, because right now everything seems scrambled. In other news, I finally tried pineapple pizza today at dinner. I think I've found a new love