Having spent way too much time trying to do math problems for two of my four classes this weekend, I spent little time noticing the ice, rain and snow outside my windows.  It was a long weekend for some people.  This semester I have a long weekend every week with no classes on Mondays.  Sometimes that means I have lots of time for other things.  This weekend all my time was absorbed into the foreign world of math, graphs, story problems and fear.  Fear that I’ll never figure this stuff out.  Fear that maybe this stuff is important and I don’t get why.

So..after spending more time chopping my car out of it’s ice shell this morning than actually driving to Ann Arbor I was in a pretty poor mood as I climbed aboard the bus. My homework wasn’t finished and worse, I didn’t even understand some of it.  But as we rounded the corner of Green Road and Nixon Road, the sun came out and a row of maple trees that in the fall are a full blaze of orange were today glowing with their iced branches catching the sun.  There were maybe 14 of them, all the same size, all similarly silvered with ice.  They looked like the fabric on the dresses of some of the Golden Globe celebrities last night.  They made me smile.  This semester will, after all, end in April, regardless of whether or not I figure out all the nuances of logs or calculus. 

When I get out of school and am working in a public library somewhere, doing what I’ve dreamed of doing, I hope what I remember from this day is the ice in the sunlight and not the fear of the math. 

In a lecture this week a professor spent considerable time explaining sunk costs.  Those are costs that a person has already spent, and regardless of what their next decision is, those costs will not be reimbursed, and hence should have no effect on the next decision.  One example was a person who had purchased a ticket to an event when something else comes along that the person would rather do.  The professor said that if the person were a rational decision maker they would make the decision about going to the event with the previously purchased ticket or going to the new event independent of the fact that the ticket was already purchased.  But we all know that the fact the money has been spent will weigh on the mind of the decision maker and that person may well go to the previously scheduled event just to make sure that ticket money wasn’t wasted.

Another example used in lecture was people that tend to stay on a certain path on which they have already invested a great deal of time or money rather than accept that the path is heading in a way that will never be successful.  The specifics she talked about related to research, that people stick with a line of research even if it becomes obvious that the end result would be less than optimum.  Her point was that it was much better to abandon the research even though much had been invested, because those investments were “sunk costs” that would never be retreived.

This lead me to wonder why anyone has motivation to work on  difficult situations.  Why work through problems in a relationship or at work?  If a rational decision maker would know the previous work was a sunk cost and not recoverable, would that rational decision maker cut their losses and leave as soon as the going gets tough?  What keeps us trying to make things work?  Are we being irrational?

I have to say that being a student is a lot more comfortable during balmy fall days, with trees lit up in brilliant colors and beautiful sunsets than it is with snow showers, gusty winds and early dark evenings.  So as I make my way through this first week of classes I try to adjust to leaving campus in the dark and cold, try to get comfortable with standing at a dark bus stop with my hood up, back to the wind. 

The classes are confusing, but I remind myself I felt the same way at the beginning of last semester.  I spoke to my graudate assistant for one of the classes about my fear of math.  It’s been almost 30 years since I took and barely managed to pass my last math class.  I hoped never to see algebra again in my lifetime.  I asked him if algebra had changed much in the last 30 years and he looked at me blankly.  Could be because he’s from India and doesn’t have my sense of humor.  Could be he can’t believe I took algebra 30+ years ago.  He said he couldn’t say if it had changed because he didn’t take high school algebra in this country.  I see his point.  I guess it doesn’t mater if it changed as I didn’t understand it back then anyway.  I told him it would be interesting to see if I could learn it now, and he was encouraging that I probably could, and that he’d help.  Wouldn’t that be amazing, if I found out I could understand something now that was so foreign to me then?  But I don’t have high hopes, as I didn’t understand it when I was trying to study for the GRE, and that was only a year ago!  But I didn’t have a tutor then, nor a support group.  So maybe this will be OK.  I hope.

Forget what I said about “easing into this school thing slowly.”  Having attended only two of my four classes so far I have three chapters to read for one class and 4 chapters to read for the other, all by Friday.  Not to mention the short paper due Friday about a search experience, and another one for the other class about a problem solving game that I have yet to do, also due Friday.  I hope the other two classes have less reading!  But I imagine they will be similar. 

Last night I read a chapter while working out on the eliptical.  Do you get extra calorie deductions for doing homework while working out?  There should be some way to manage that. 

After a long break for the holidays we’re back to school.  I’m easing into this school thing slowly, my first classes were not until Friday of this week, and since I don’t have classes scheduled on Monday I have a three day weekend.  But looking at the syllabus I think I may have trouble this semester.  Just what IS an algorithm anyway?  And why oh why do I need to know how to use it if all I want to be is a librarian when I grow up?

And what’s the difference between a class called “Choice & Learning” and one called Search & Retrieval?”  Couldn’t this all be one course?  Don’t you make choices as you search, and don’t you learn when you retreive?  Of course I recall the same feeling of confusion at the beginning of last semester, and at least this time I can navigate a little better both around campus and around ctools. (the computer software we use to provide communication between faculty and students.) 

I haven’t attended the other two classes I have this semester yet.  I can only hope they are more obvious in their goals and meanings, than the two foundation courses I have attended so far.  And more fun!  I fear, though, that “Fundamental Human Behavior” is going to be a whole lot like “Choice & Learning”.  We shall see. 

Meanwhile I am getting organized, setting up file folders, notebooks, buying textbooks, figuring out schedules and trying to think like a student again. Amazing, after “only” three weeks I seem to have forgotten how to roll with the punches of student life.  I figure that will come back quickly though, for really, what else can you do?

A week from today I will be back in school, the second semester of my new life.  I am looking forward to it, though I am also throughly enjoying the weeks off between semesters.  To have this time without work or school has been a gift.

I wonder what the new semester will hold for me, what I will find intresting, and what I will find annoying.  I know there will be some of both.  But looking back at the last semester I learned so many interesting things that I can only hope the novelty will not have worn thin! And that the snow will not test my resolve to continue along this path in Ann Arbor.

I almost can’t wait for school to begin!

I started painting again tonight.  I put my brush down the day Dad was killed and haven’t picked it up since.  It will be two years tomorrow. The urge to paint again has become stronger over the months since I’ve been back in school; school has many ways to heal.  Of course with school going on I had no time to dig everything out the storage to which it had been relegated in those black days following his death. 

Tonight I got out the paper and brushes and the dried water color pallete.  I put them on my desk and walked away.  I wasn’t sure what was inside me.  Later in the evening I drew the rough outline of the villa we stayed in while we were in Tuscany last June.  Then I put it down.  I was almost afraid to find out what would happen when the paint hit the paper. 

 Little by little paint filled in the vision.  I’m no great artist, but I recognize it as the place we stayed.  I remember the warm sun, the olive groves, the rows of grapes, the view across the valley from our room.  That’s not all in this simple picture that is almost complete now.  But it’s still in my heart. 

Hey Dad, I’m painting again.  It feels good.  I miss you.  I miss Mom.  But tiny little pieces of me are coming back home.  And each little piece of me has a little piece of you and Mom too.  I’m not the same person I was.  But I think you’d recognize me, just like I recognize the impression of the villa in sun soaked Tuscany that sits drying on my desk tonight.

So this is what it must be like to be retired.  Sort of.  No school.  No job.  No responsibilities (at least today).  I don’t even know what day this is, and certainly don’t know the date.  I spent the day napping on the sofa and reading a book.  A book that had nothing to do with anything.  What a luxury! 

I am getting Christmas cards from friends of my parents and they are full of all their activities.  I think retirement is actually very unlike my day today.  The retirees I know seem to be very busy, but they also seem to really love the things they choose to do.  That’s what I want when I finally retire.

 For now I’m just retired for a day.  Is that like being queen for a day?  I guess so, minus the tiarra.  It was lovely.  But I’m ready to start doing something more. 

Tomorrow I’ll figure out what.

Today as my bus went by the Nichols Arboretum I said my customary silent hello to my folks.  (There’s a memorial to them there.)  It was an almost sunny day, warm for mid-December.  In my head I told my Mom that it would have been a good day for me to take a walk down to the river and visit them, but I didn’t have time today.  I promise next semester I’ll stop by a couple of times, but today  I needed to get ready for a class presentation.  As the bus rounded the next corner it suddenly occured to me how often I had said something similar to my mother when she was alive.  I don’t have time to visit right now, but I promise that I will soon.  Soon….maybe next month, next summer, next year, next Christmas, but not right now.  So many times I could have made the time but I didn’t. 

Tears threatened, but I concentrated on the elderly lady in the front of the bus who was rocking frantically.  I couldn’t start to cry now, I had a presentation to do today, and it’s hard to look professional with puffy eyes and a red nose.  Sometimes you just have to reach way down in your soul and pull yourself up, grab a piece of guts and hang on.  The presentation went fine.  And the tears, well, they began in earnest on the long dark ride home.

Another year done…a new one beginning…I hope it’s more fun!

I know the new year will be more fun!  I will be in school the entire year.  I sit today in the undergraduate library, having edited (again) my group’s final paper for the dreaded foundation class that deals with affinity notes and flow models and clients with obscure requests. 

Our presentation is tomorrow, so far I think I have too many minutes of stuff to talk about, but I know that I will talk too fast and so it will all work out. 

Our final paper is due Friday.  It has sections that are done.  Mine.  The rest is undone and I don’t know why.  Our group meets tonight; their goal was to have this paper done by tomorrow, I don’t see that happening when so much has not been touched.  It’s hard to work as a group when you can’t stop being a manager! 

Monday in another class a student presenter was talking about getting opinions of election data from people that are “older” and offered the possibility of getting insight from a group like the AARP.  The quote I smiled at was “those folks might be old but they still have a lot to say!”  Well.  I got my 2007 AARP card in the mail over the weekend.  I wonder if any of the other students in the class realize they have an OLD person in their midst.  And I know none of them realize how soon they too will be OLD.  It happens in a blink of an eye.

So, enough musings on the life of a student at the end of a semester at the end of a year, at the end of the old life and the beginning of the new life. 

Best wishes to all of you, thanks for your support.  I hope I see or hear from you after the holidays!