That painting class I'm in? Turns out it's nothing but watercolors. Now, I have not had any halfway-decent experience with watercolors in the past, but I always kinda figured it was because they were the cheapass ones that they always give to little kids, with the little oval things with hard crusty "paint" in them that you can only get to actually go on the paper with excessive amounts of water and even then you barely get any actual color on the page. Turns out, it's not just the cheap watercolors--all watercolors are terrible and I can't do anything at all with them without things blurring together or just looking awful.
And to make it even worse, that class has the most excessive amounts of homework of any class I've ever been in. Homework assignment, due tomorrow: not only do I have to paint NINE FREAKIN' PICTURES on a single page using different watercoloring techniques (which, at the moment, basically consists of "flail randomly with paintbrush" and "sorta try to use different brushes and stuff to see if it makes any difference"), I'm also supposed to look up some painter and try to imitate one of their paintings. WHAT? Come on, that's just way too much. Either one of those assignments would be almost excessive on its own, but both of them? That's just wrong. About the only way I would've had any hope of finishing them both is if I had skipped my trip back home over the weekend and instead wasted every last moment of my time painting (or more accurately "making blurry colored garbage all over this really nice paper we have which is way too good to waste on this watercoloring crap.") It's almost as if the teacher's lesson plan assumes this is the only class we're taking, or something.
The one good thing is that out-of-class projects are apparently only 10% of our grade, but... that honestly bothers me almost as much as watercolors do in general. Basically it's "here, work your asses off on these horrible torture assignments! but no, you won't hardly get any credit for them, they're just to make your life miserable." The teacher seems pretty nice most of the time, so I'm really not sure how she could've been the one who thought this up.
I'm seriously considering dropping the class now, it's that bad. I mean, the class itself is okay, but if we're going to have ridiculous homework assignments like this on a regular basis I will never actually be able to get one done, and even if I do it will still look like crap and I doubt I'll ever get any better at watercoloring. I wish somebody had bothered to tell me that this class was nothing but freaking watercolors when I decided to drop out of Astronomy so I could take it... at the time I was so worried about having to pay for another book for Astronomy, but I bet if I had heard even the slightest mention of "nothing but watercolors for an entire semester, and waaaay too much homework too" I would've changed my mind in a second and dropped this one instead. Plus I had to pay for all these useless watercoloring supplies, so I ended up having to pay for extra stuff anyway on top of being forced through watercoloring torture for a full semester... urrrrrgh.
EDIT: Actually, nevermind that bit about dropping the Painting class. I was just getting really frustrated with the watercolors at first because I really didn't know how to use them all that well and, with a little more practice (and a bit of talking with my roommate and dad to distract me enough that I don't get frustrated too much), I'm sorta feeling like I'm not completely lost when it comes to painting with them. Still doubt I'll get all nine of my paintings done in time for class (let alone the other assignment...) but I don't think I'll actually drop out now.
...though just realizing that I
only just now am halfway done has kind of made me get a little annoyed once again. It was
nine paintings, I mistakenly split my page up into
six sections... guess I can try to divide the other two that I haven't done into several smaller ones, or something?
The pain-in-the-ass watercoloring was about the only really bad thing about today, fortunately. Food was good as usual (had a waffle AND Cap'n Crunch for breakfast), I actually managed to jog three blocks without stopping to rest in between, got to talk to a bunch of people throughout the day, Spanish went pretty well, and I'm now taking an Institute class on the Book of Mormon. Just because I like learning stuff in general, and since I'm at a school that's 95% Mormons it just kinda makes sense to learn about their religion and culture and stuff like that, rather than just having no idea what people mean when they say certain things. Another good part: the class is free aside from the books, one of which--the student manual, the "textbook" type book of the class--only cost something like 5 dollars and the other--the Book of Mormon itself--I'm getting for free (borrowing? I'm not 100% sure) from someone I know. So I can fill up one of my empty slots on Tuesdays and Thursdays without emptying out my wallet and/or bank account any more, which is always good. Also, there's several people I know in the class, so I'm not going to be lonely in there and I'll probably have a place to sit where I won't feel all crowded by the tons of other people I don't know.
Got a random text message from someone and it turned out it was from the phone number which
supposedly was the "sign up for student alerts by sending a message to this number" number. Turns out it was actually a 10-year-old girl, who is probably very confused now. I ended up telling her that I had probably gotten the number wrong, and ten minutes later I got another message telling me to "stop contacting this 10-year-old little girl" (I'm assuming from one of her parents or something, the grammar and such seemed better than the other messages.) Which... I had already done, since I didn't send any more messages after the "sorry, this was probably a wrong number" one and it was 10 minutes or more between that and the possibly-from-the-kid's-parents message. Weird. Why would a 10-year-old have a phone, anyway??
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