One thing I’m lov­ing about uni already is the com­plete lack of com­mer­cial intru­sion. With the excep­tion of wannabe-activist-emulating adver­tis­ing (you know the kind… Comm­Bank “Free is Good” adver­tis­ing in the form of chalked stair­ways, badges, etc.) and pro­lific party pos­ter­ing, I can wan­der around the USyd cam­pus for a day and not feel the need (née ‘want’, the aim of mar­ket­ing being the trans­for­ma­tion of ‘wants’ into ‘needs’) or com­pul­sion to spend money on any­thing. Well, except books. I’m still feel­ing guilty I don’t own all the books for all of my sub­jects yet… but *cries* they’re expen­sive and if I wait I can get them secondhand!

Stu­pid Eng­lish went and pre­scribed edi­tions but hadn’t really made that ter­ri­bly clear on the course out­line online… so bleh, time to sell some books back! Greek (yes, I’m doing Greek… has this story been told here? Prob­a­bly not. What­ever. I’m learn­ing Clas­si­cal Greek right up until when I fail mis­er­ably and drop out! Non-Latin-alphabets scare me.) cost… too much. Was about $90 or some­thing I think for two texts… so I can’t quit now, which is good I guess. I’m get­ting some Clas­sics texts from TextbookExchange.com.au (so good! go sign up!) which is nice. Phi­los­o­phy, mer­ci­fully, only has a reader (but that was like… $32 or some­thing, which is kinda expen­sive for a bunch of pho­to­copied stuff (I think) but saves so much has­sle it was read­ily handed over).

Then there was an amus­ing inci­dent with pur­chas­ing read­ings online but not being able to find where the online-only queue was. I saw the line at the UCC was absolutely mas­sive and assumed there must be a dou­ble queue for online/prepay (I have a Visa card now, yay. Try­ing not to ever actu­ally USE it, heh.) and so I joined the line so I wouldn’t be queue jump­ing. Hah. I got to nearly-the-end-of-the-line and saw a sign say­ing “Pre-paid/online orders” and quickly switched lanes. Ah well :P Les­son rather decid­edly learnt! Mind you, the nor­mal queue is more intim­i­dat­ing than it is actu­ally long. Moved really quickly. So I might pass on the online-ordering next time and save myself 50 cents or what­ever the card charge is, heh.

Another really inter­est­ing thing has been see­ing who’s doing var­i­ous sub­jects. Peter (Notarus? I can never spell his last name…), for exam­ple, was in the same Clas­si­cal Mythol­ogy lec­ture as me this arvo. Just didn’t really think of him as an Arts per­son, I guess… heh, he thought the same of me though ;-) I’m find­ing myself semi-regularly apol­o­gis­ing (in jest :-)) for being an IT per­son who’s inter­ested in… more inter­est­ing things! (another wink here… typ­ing lots of emoti­cons in blog posts is bad!)

But it’s cool. I haven’t encoun­tered any­one who hasn’t been nice/has been judge­men­tal yet. It prob­a­bly helps that every­one in all of my sub­jects seems a lit­tle bit lost around the place… up to and includ­ing a bunch of third– and fourth-year stu­dents in my Clas­si­cal Greek course whom I encoun­tered whilst equally lost look­ing for the room for our first lec­ture. Four of us met in ad-hoc fash­ion out­side the Vice-Chancellor’s office (because that was where – log­i­cally – the room should have been! *aban­dons try­ing to deduce order from room numbers/names), and wan­dered aim­lessly around the Quad for a while (we knew what build­ing, just not what sec­tion!) before finally find­ing a sign marked “Greek Room”. It was reas­sur­ing to know I wasn’t the only lost one!

Phi­los­o­phy and Eng­lish presently feel the most inter­est­ing of what I’m doing, but I take it that could be in part because I know what to expect from both (to an extent) and could prob­a­bly hold my own with­out too much guid­ance in both. The other two (Clas­si­cal Greek and Mythol­ogy) I’ve fairly lit­er­ally flung myself into with a con­cep­tion that either/or could be inter­est­ing and/or ben­e­fi­cial to study, but with very lit­tle idea as to either their con­tent or their method. I got to see Tori for half an hour today and laughed inwardly as she expressed her frus­tra­tion at peo­ple who didn’t get stuff in her Chi­nese tuts, think­ing “That’s going to be me as soon as we start tuto­ri­als for Greek next week!”. So so com­pletely lost. Any­way, on that note, I should prob­a­bly go and look over some stuff. My Yel­low­card CD re-construction fin­ished… *retreats to bed­room with music and read­ings and books and stuff*

Tags: cent, CommBank, online ordering, online/prepay, TextbookExchange, USyd campus, Vice-Chancellor, Yellowcard