TAP is my absolute favorite Harvard benefit, hands down. $40 for an extension school course; graduate credit even.
Mmm, syllabus. I disapprove of the fact that the course does the evol Harvard thing of having final stuff after the Christmas break. Though dude, I think I can handle "Students enrolled for graduate credit will be asked, in addition to the above requirements, to submit an extended essay of about 8 pages on January 2." (A two-hour in-class exam focusing on Ulysses, on the other hand....) The professor is an emeritus from Indiana University -- an Institute of Higher Learning about which I know nothing.
I have minor anxiety (recalling how I dropped my Russian Lit class from credit to audit because I had absolutely nothing to say about any of the texts) but I'm also bubbly inside at getting to take a class again. (Having people with whom to talk about the media one is ingesting is love.)
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In other news, it was Emily's official first day today, so Cailin invited me to go to lunch with them. I didn't leave word with Mary Alice (or a real note on my computer) which I felt bad about. So when I got in, Eric saw me and was all "Where were you?" I explained and went down to the conference room to explain/apologize to Mary Alice and Katie directly (and ended up staying -- watching a Home Improvement episode). Mary Alice talked about the new "global vegetarian" option at the Grille and Eric joked about my taste for "cardboard." This, in conjunction with deep-tissue massage being joked about onscreen, led to my doing the angry shoulder rub thing, and we've talked about touchphobic before, so I was totally expecting him to flinch away, but he just took it, completely nonresponsive. I guess because as we've established earlier, pain is fine; at one point he made a comment about one the masseurs onscreen (who was supposedly inflicting mucho pain with deep tissue massage -- yeah, watch me having problems with the fact that that is totally not how it really works) being so tiny and I said something and started in on his shoulders again and he said, "You can't hurt me."
Cailin was talking to me later and said "Did you get in trouble" -- for abandoning my lunchmates -- and I told her how Eric was all "I'm not talking to you" and she said, "He's just flirting." Which it totally isn't, though I can see how it would sound like that, but I was still amused.
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Checking my yahoo mail today, I saw a classmates.com ad that literally says "Click here so we can stop running these."
Oh,