So Metzger hates Hillsdale now. I can't say that I disagree with him too much; there is something very odd about this last semester here. I too have been skipping classes left and right, and slacking across the board. I waste time with video games, surfing the web, anything but actually thinking. I drink too much, I sleep odd hours, and I don’t read enough, even in the classes I like, even though I have plenty of time. Pretty much the only things that I work on aren't really that useful, like my Physics Independent study. Speaking of that, it is bizarre that once I decided to drop the Physics major, I became more motivated to work on stuff for the department.

I'm not sure that I really hate Hillsdale as much as I'm torn between cheap nostalgia for Galloway (and my life here from 2-3 years ago), and wishing that I had made more of my time here, and being scared of the future. I still think that Hillsdale is what you make of it, but perhaps I can't decide whether I like what I made of it or not.

Socially, it is not so much that I'm tired of the people that are here, as much as I miss all of the people that have graduated way more than I'm likely to miss the people that are still here once I leave. This week really hammered that home, what with Givens, Priz, Kirschner, Ben Courtney, and Dave DeMarco all here at the same time. Every time the alumni, especially Prizio, are back we seem to have a massive amount of telling each other stories from their time here that we all have heard too many times. I really don't have a good explanation for that, but is seems kind of sad, and perhaps indicative of the decreasing quality of social interaction here. Maybe I’m just sad about it because The Highlands seem very empty now that they have left.

So, for lack of anything better to do about all this, I think that I'll fritter away the next month by slacking off, drinking too much beer and sleeping late.

On monday night I had my official senior dinner at Dr. Arrn's house, fortunately Seraphim was there, so I wasn't totally stuck with people I didn't know. In any case, we spent the better part of two hours discussing the Freshman core requirements. I started the discussion by asserting that Science 101 is too weak, that there should be a stronger science requirement, and that perhaps the ACT score needed to escape the math requirement should be higher. None of that was too controversial, but dealing with the bottom-feeders that already strugle with science 101 would be a larger problem. So, i've been thinking about how to relate science to the Liberal Arts, specifically to the "core" here at Hillsdale. Dr. Arrn seemed to favor an apporach that was based on the history of science, it sounded like freshman english or history with Newton and Gallileo for texts. Seraphim did a nice job of defending lab based science, based on his experences with langauage, but talking to other humanities people, there seems to be a lack of appreciation for science and math as anything other than low level tool, something that if they merely had a powerful enough calculator, they could avoid entirely. So, how should science work in the Liberal Arts? I'm working on it....

Well, this is a more permanent home for my ill-fated blog that I started a couple weeks ago on my Tripod page. Stupid tripod is too slow, not enough bandwidth. Anyway, I probably won't do much with this for the next couple of weeks, but come summer, I promise to update.