in-person classes

[graveexcitement]

so! today was the first day of the fall semester. now, my university initially planned for a full return to in-person classes this semester. however, texas' covid situation right now is a shitshow. it's surging right now and our fucking idiot governor is doing everything he can to make it worse, including banning mask mandates in governmental entities and public schools (and today i also heard he's banning vaccine mandates for governmental entities, even if the vaccines do have FDA approval.) now, a number of K-12 public school districts across the state are defying the governor and requiring masks in schools, which is great. but my university apparently doesn't have the guts to do that, so masks are recommended but optional.

(in my class of around 20 people today, everyone was wearing masks except one girl. so, not terribly impressed with her, but at least everyone else was wearing them despite them being optional? outside the classroom, i still saw most people masking indoors.)

vaccines are also in the "recommended but optional" category. what was mandatory was everyone getting tested for covid in the first week of class (ideally in the 3 days before classes started, but it's pretty hard to schedule a test in this area right now, so they extended it a bit). i got tested today (nasal swab, but it was pretty painless - i gather they're not swabbing as deep in the naval cavity as they used to), and i am negative, as expected.

so my university won't mandate vaccines or masks, and will mandate testing (at least this once). other than that, its reaction to the ongoing covid surge has been "uhhhh... we'll let individual professors decide whether to go online/hybrid/in-person for the first 4 weeks of class!" and with my luck, i got one of each. i was originally slated to have 3 in-person classes on M/W/F. my first class, english, has moved entirely online. my second class, japanese, is hybrid -- it's online M/W, in-person on F. and then my third class, japanese literature, is in-person both days (M/W). which means i'm still going to campus 3 days a week, it's just for only one class a day, and it's more troublesome

i still live at home with my parents, which is like a 30-40 minute drive to campus. (used to take the bus; i might test out the bus for return trips, and see how crowded it is; however, the route i took to commute down to campus had its southbound hours cut, so no matter what one of my parents is going to have to drive me to class, at least.) my second class of the day on M/W is online from 13:00-13:50. my third class of the day is in-person at 14:30. so i gotta finish my second class and then immediately be driven to campus to get to my third class. i explained to the prof and she's understanding of my lateness, but... it is inconvenient.

(can't zoom on campus because my laptop, which was never very good for zoom in the first place, broke, and i haven't yet taken it in to see if it can be salvaged.)

so! that was a lot of words to explain a bunch of inconveniences and grievances with my university. despite that, it was nice, if very strange, to have an in-person class. two of my classmates were classmates i recognized from prior japanese culture classes i'd taken in the last year, and i actually ran into one of them when i went to buy a course reading packet from the print shop. it was cool getting to actually talk to her in person. (also she was tall! it's funny realizing that you've gone a year not knowing how tall your classmates are.)

it's also gonna be nice to have class only 3 days a week, even if there are inconveniences on those 3 days.

uh... i think i had more words on how odd it was to be an in person classroom for the first time in nearly a year and a half, but i think that's about it. It Feels Weird!

(ps. one of the Quality Skirts With Pockets vendors i was talking about in my last personal post, Maya Kern, has opened a new round of preorders! i bought two more skirts, which will bring my total skirt count up to 5. i think i've spent more on my wardrobe this year than in the last 5 years combined, and most of this year's spending is attributable to skirts. but they make me happy so i'm good with it.)