It feels good to be in the second year and to live above a complete strata of incoming students. Unfortunately, I am frequently mistaken for being a first-year. It doesn't help that I've somehow forgotten how to be a college student over the summer.

I guess it started with the registrar desk. I tried to turn in my pink slip (for switching French sections) into the Harper desk, because I'd never had to pink slip before.

"I'm here to turn in a pink slip."
"Oh, honey," says the desk lady, sighing and automatically pulling out a campus map. "You're going to want to go here, Administration."
"Good to know, thanks--"
"Here's where we are now. It's a quad. You're going to want to go to this quad."
"Ok-"
"Often the quads are connected.Hon, you're gonna want to take a sidewalk."

Now, the Co-Op is one of the campus bookstores that lets you buy $30 stock in the store and gives you 10% discounts. For some reason I'd put off getting a membership until this year.

"Excuse me, I'd like to buy a membership."
"Whoa now, hold your horses, son. You gotta give me some info first. Now, do you live in a dorm?"
"Yes, I--"
"Do you remember the name of the dorm, son? It's OK if you don't, it's still early in the year. Now this here membership will give you discounts at Co-Op, which is where you are now, the Newberry Library, and 57th Street Books."
"Great."
"That's on 57th street."
"Gotcha."
"Ten percent is the discount. What you wanna do is, add up the cost of your purchase, and then multiply that by ten percent. But careful now cowpoke, when you multiply, you gotta convert that sucker into a decimal..."

And so on.

There are other aspects of being a second-year which have made me feel older, though. For one, I've been cooking the tarnation out of my little galley kitchen. I made my own vinaigrette last night with a funny little substance called "liquid garlic," and for this weekend, I'm prepping the ingredients to make Quaker oatmeal-raisin cookies. My suite, which is "big for a dorm, small for an apartment," actually comes furnished with mismatched lamps and chairs and a dining room table. In the presence of such tasteful sentinals, it feels uncalled for to put up my garish "OK Computer" poster. I finally decided that I would only feel comfortable dining with Miles Davis looking down from the wall; so the very very yellow Kill Bill poster I bought at the poster sale has been relegated to the bedroom, where it is happily busy being very, very yellow.

Thankfully, the Miles Davis poster strikingly compliments the Confederate flag my roommate hung above the sofa while I was at class. Since, you know, Miles recorded Kind of Blue, and the Rebel flag is kind of blue.

My two-hour COVA (Committee on the Visual Arts) 101 class is long gone. I dropped it like a sack of wet mice after Monday, when we sat in a circle and talked about "how art makes us feel." We also had to go around and think up figures of speech that contain the word "line" (I said "sign on the dotted line." Another girl's was much better: "do a line." 'You know,' she said. 'Like as in cocaine?'). The professor reminded me a lot of Ms. Jennings, who could spin even the most inane work or answer into a productive point. The gift God gave to art teachers is the strength to restrain either their ridiculing laughter or their bile in crucial situations. But I dropped the class because I'd done all the projects once before in Mr. Paris's classes, and I picked up Fundamentals of Psychology. The class is at least more educational, but the professor is of questionable repute.

"Aristotle used to claim that men had more teeth than women," she said, as if she used to bartend Aristotle's old haunt. "What I want to know is, why didn't he just ask Mrs. Aristotle to open her mouth?!"

I think she actually paused for the knee-slap, but nobody obliged. At least the classroom is wood-paneled and chandeliered. I appreciate tasteful decoration in academia.