We were at the Niwot Market today to eat Sachi Sushi after 4 hours of sleep and most of it being spent inside a 100 degree stuffy room. I wanted to get a notebook for school (tomorrow, because clearly I plan ahead) after we had already paid and walked out.

"Shit," I said, "we gotta go to Target", because 'shit' is the perfect expression for realizing that one has to go to Target the day before fall semester starts at a giant college with 30,000 students, "and our ice cream is going to melt!"

Dan told me to hang on and he'd just go get a notebook from the Niwot Market, to which I yelled at his receding back: "There isn't a notebook section at a grocery store!!" but lo and behold, there was.

I haven't had this back-to-school elementary school style feeling since, well, elementary school. Something about a new notebook. A five subject one! I used my neatest handwriting to title each section with the course name, time, and location as though my penmanship would be graded by my fifth grade teacher. I think my handwriting was actually neater in fifth grade.

Last semester I would take my laptop to class and take notes that way, but I found myself falling into the trap that I loathe in other people: surfing the net and blanking out. The prospect of net-surfing is way too instant-gratification for me to have available in class, so this semester it's pen and paper only.

Five classes + research lab + senior honors thesis = the excuse I've always wanted to totally immerse myself in learning... also known as nerd-dom... also known as paradise.

I attended the first class of the first college course I've taken since I graduated in 2005, and there's so much that I can't believe I've forgotten about the moment to moment experience of sitting in class. It was at once both new and utterly familiar.

The majority of the class consists of slumped, splayed boys in backwards baseball caps who have slack looks on their faces and always try to sit in the back row so as to play internet Solitaire on their laptops without arousing suspicion. I know this is a common generalization about frat-boy types and isn't always true, but in this class, it is true for sure. These boys think nothing of tuning the teacher out so completely that when he stops right in front of their desk to ask him a question, they look up guiltily with their ears just recently turned on, saying 'What?' and then just sort of try to guess the answer. They don't feel guilty. They don't feel embarrassed. Their faces are the very picture of relaxedness (stonedness, possibly - I wouldn't know because I was never the type of stoner who could handle class high).

There's also that awkwardness of when to stop engaging and listening and start taking notes. For me the two are mutually exclusive. I feel weird when a teacher's going on and on animatedly and fleshing out a perspective or theory and I'm nodding and figuring and forming new ideas and I look around me and everyone is heads down and scratching away bullet points and you can tell that all that they care about is bullet points. Those are always the people who do better on tests.

I was one of those people three years ago, but apparently I'm not anymore. I'm super interested in everything that's going on and can't write about it and think about it simultaneously. I want to answer every question asked. I want to flesh out every theory on the board in more detail than I am given. In short, I have become one of those 'nontraditional students' I and everyone else used to hate because they came to class bright eyed and bushy tailed and enthusiastic, and they never stopped asking inane questions, and always talked to the teacher after class trying to show how smart they were and to expound upon every idea that had ever been brought up ever, and also wanted extra credit and recommendations for further readings.

As hard as I try not to be that person, it's really hard, in a class mostly full (mostly, I say, because there are two or three other people who are not like this) of completely indifferent slouches who are morally opposed to sounding like they actually care about stupid learning. I'll sit there, fidgeting, really WANTING to answer or ask a question but feeling weird about it because I'm the only person who's opened their mouth aside from the teacher in fifteen minutes and I don't want to look like an attention hogger or a show-off or a teacher's pet. Attempting to look bored while answering questions only serves to make the teacher sorely tempted to ask you, 'if you think you're too smart for this class, then why don't you just go ahead and take the final right now?'.

All this aside, I tremendously enjoyed being back in a classroom and exercising my brain, and if I do become that annoying nontraditional student, then I guess that's what I get in exchange for the travesty of being excited about learning.