Today's rambling: Cultural differences
Written on Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2002 at 12:38 p.m.
while feeling a bit

My first real college essay has been finished. And you know what? It sucks. If I get a C, I'll consider myself quite lucky. The worst of it is, I actually worked hard on this thing! Sure, I rewrote all the stuff for my final draft today, the day it's due...but you should see the first draft! I hardly left any of the original stuff there! The one thing that brought a smile to my face was the realization that I'd actually done everything required. We have to put everything into a manilla folder, like our freewrites and our two drafts, etc. In high school, I would have been lucky to have any of that stuff, but I'd done everything for this! I was proud of myself for a few minutes. :P

Remember that Earth Science exam I was afraid of? I got it back last night, and my grade was a 92. I nearly fell over in shock. I'd actually gotten an A on that thing, and I didn't think I'd understood any of it! Even though the professor's endless droning is brain-numbing, maybe the fact that he repeats things over and over actually DID have some kind of benefit. :P I wouldn't have gotten an A if I hadn't known the bonus question, but considering he said that 70% of his students fail the first exam, even a B would have made me insane with happiness. The only downside to having an A is that I never want to share it with any of my friends in the class when they get a lower grade. The girl next to me that I always talk to got a 70-something, and so I couldn't whine about how terrible our grades were. :P It's weird, I know, I just feel like if I tell someone with a C that I got an A, I'd feel like I was bragging.

I have to leave for French class in about 20 minutes. I'd forgotten all about the exercise we had to do for homework, but I remembered on my way back from computer science. That didn't take too long to finish, thankfully. I know that the only way to really become fluent in a foreign language is to practice it a lot outside of class, but I never do. I'd like to, really, but it'd only be fun for me if I had someone else to practice with. No one around me who's taken French wants to speak French with me! *sniffle*

I stopped by the student center this morning to pick up a manilla folder (to put all my Writing stuff in). After I'd paid for it (a whopping 16 cents, hehe), the girl asked if I wanted a bag for it. "No, I'll just put it in my schoolbag," I replied, closing my wallet. Instead of responding with an "Okay, have a good day," the girl was like, "Where are you from?"

This caught me a little off guard, since usually people only ask me that if we're conversing and the subject is brought up. Thinking maybe she was just really friendly, I told her I was from Reading. She nodded as if that explained things, and then said, "I have a friend who's from around Philadelphia, and she calls it a schoolbag too. I'd never heard that before until I came to college!"

It had never occurred to me that people didn't call their schoolbags 'schoolbags'. If mine wasn't a messenger bag, I'd probably be calling it a backpack...well no, I'd probably still call it a schoolbag. I'm not sure why I even started calling it that, since I think I used to say 'backpack' or 'bookbag', but somewhere along the line I started saying 'schoolbag' instead.

Something similar to today's incident happened awhile ago. I was at the radio station, sitting in with Kristin, and I mentioned something about Lancaster. She turned around in her chair and asked me where I was from, and again, I told her I was from Reading. She's from the West Chester area, which is about half an hour from Reading, and she told me that everyone up this way calls it "LAN-caster" (well, kind of like that). Someone who's from around the eastern half of the state (closer to Lancaster County) tends to kind of run the word together. I can't explain it, really, and the more I think about it, the less clear things are becoming to me. :P But it's funny the way people pronounce things differently...and the way you can tell a non-native by the way they pronounce certain words.

Natives to this area call soda 'pop', so that's another way of telling the natives from the visitors. Even the beer/soda distributor on Main Street advertises that it sells beer and pop, which made me chuckle inwardly when I first read it. 'Pop', to me, kind of sounds like slang, so to see an establishment use the word the front of its building just looks funny.

Oo, only four minutes until I have to leave for French class. After that, I have to run back here and get my stuff for Writing, and then I'm off to lunch with The Gang. Then I get to suffer through Writing, and then I'm freeeee for the rest of the day!!

OH! Mission Improvable is going to be here tonight!! I've been waiting for this since the start of the year, when I heard they were going to be here...They're supposed to be like "Whose Line Is It Anyway", and I love that show, so I'm really excited to see this show. I'll have to run back from DJ training, since I'm part of the UAB committee that's in charge of this. Not that I'll be doing anything important, but we're supposed to help out with setting up equipment and stuff like that. It's like being in the concert committee and getting to meet the talent. :P I can't wait!! :oD