Yes, that is my copy of Cats. No, I really do like chicks.

The girlfreund took a huge step in making our current hovel into a home by creating two funky and amazing bookshelves out of wood and plastic cups. I was skeptical when she explained her vision to me - it sounded less Vern and more Hilde - but they look quite spectacular. Pictures to come later. Add this to her insane quilt project and the super cool wall of faces that makes hipsters everywhere drool, and you have quite the little creative genius. If there's ever a reality tv show about having the most schizophrenic list of talents, I'm signing her up.

Anyway, I liked the bookshelves so much that I immediately took them over to hold my CDs and DVDs. Instead of studying, I spent the entire evening alphabetizing and displaying my entire music collection. I haven't been able to do this for years, because I've never had the space for it. The experience brought me back to high school, when the rest of my bedroom was a cesspool but I'd obsessively catalog each of my albums in a state that was almost meditative. I have many favorite scenes from "High Fidelity", but I identify most with the scene where the protagonist is surrounded by rows upon rows of his records which he is reorganizing into the order that he got them. I don't have nearly as many albums (my collection tops out at around 300), but I bet I could do it. The first CD I ever bought was the Beatles Past Masters Vol II. Then came Clapton Unplugged...

If you have a significant collection and haven't bothered to organize it in awhile, I can't recommend it enough. Take all of your CDs out of that humongous CaseLogic binder you bought to save space and stick them back in their original cases (you know you kept them for just this reason). While you're at it, put your portable cd player on the floor next to you. You'll listen to discs you've forgotten all about even though the teenage you listened to them over and over again while lying in your bed, agonizing over why it is girls don't get you.

I discovered that I own a Tori Amos CD. Awesome. I'm gonna listen to it tomorrow. Cats, though? That's fucked up.

All right, I forgive you...

Now let's get back to chatting.

Today is the first official day of classes for broadcast and new media concentrators at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism - I write the full title to add pizazz and because rereading my last post made me realize most people think I'm probably going to NYU. Broadcast journalism, for those of you who don't know, means radio and television. New media means something to do with computers or whatever - those people are the really weird ones. Within broadcast, you can tell which people are the somewhat weird ones and which are the really aspiring go-getter types. The weird ones talk about radio all the time, while the go-getter television types bat their eyelashes and look stunningly beautiful. I imagine it's going to get cut-throat for the tv students, because everyone's going to be competing for jobs on air afterwards, so they have to get all sorts of plastic surgery on top of all the work they're going to be doing here. I kind of feel bad for them. We radio bog monsters never had that personal drive gene activated. Bags and bags of Frito-Lays products all combined into perfectly shaped molecules that sat in those cell receptors and blocked the motivation proteins from being transcribed. That doesn't matter though. Somehow we made it into what is supposed to be the best journalism school in the country, so our innate inferiority complexes are somewhat confused and roaming about, ready to latch onto new reasons to fret (e.g. His article is longer than mine; should I quit?).

The last two days of classes don't really count, because they were orientation. I was confused as to why they felt something as important as orientation needed only two days as opposed to the two weeks we had at the U of C. It turns out that two days is actually too long to fill, and they spend most of the time trying to terrify us about the upcoming workload. "Enjoy your loved ones now, because you won't see them till May." Whatever. I am a product of the 4 year gauntlet at the U of C that heaped stress on us like helpings of your aunt's nasty spam casserole. Are you trying to tell me that I'll be miserably busy when the school year is divided into semesters? I don't think so. But they spent so much time convincing us we were going to be swamped and stressed, and every alumnus they brought up to talk to us said the same thing. What if it really is worse than undergrad? I'll die. I'll actually die. No... I'll persevere and make up for those lost, wasted years of C-minuses. I'll probably die.

Yet, here I sit in my first class comfortably blogging because the instructor got stranded on a train from lower Manhattan. If this is a sign of things to come, then...hope.