I think I signed up for something too hard

Writing this brief, because finals just wrapped up, and my brain has officially melted, but I wanted to get this down while the summer hasn't had time to steamroll this current nervousness, away.

So, I got into a summer session course at UChicago: a couple weeks at college, reading what is essentially the theory of how societies stick together, and come apart, with tons of old anthropology and sociology thought-leaders. I applied half because of all the things I've read this year on here: Boas, Mead, Levi-Strauss... The gang, and half because I genuinely wanted to see if I had it within me to handle real college assignments, instead of just reading books like I normally do in my free time.

After reading through the syllabus and email list that they sent out, I immediately felt nauseous. Familiar names appeared along with masses and masses of other names I'd never seen but still look like a terrifying number of pages. One of my friends, Rafi-taking a program some other time/place this summer-told me it would all be fine, everybody feels like that on the first day.

I hope he's right.

I'm still not convinced.

One reason I'm nervous is that this is literally the first time I've decided to do something scholastic purely based on my own curiosity, not because a homework assignment or college-application deadline nudged me into it. All of this year's supplemental reading, Boas, Mead, Levi-Strauss, Geertz… has essentially been me following my curiosity with no consequence. This class has homework, grades, a professor-who has no obligation to care if I found out about this because I went down a three-houryoutube rabbit hole a few months ago followed by digging through my great aunt’s genealogy research on a long-defunct blog. This is me finally being tested to see whether I actually understood any of it, or just really loved the feel of the low-stakes, easy version.

I'm leaving in a little less than two weeks, and I'm going to try to blog about what it's like actually in the class as it happens (rather than waiting until a month after it's over to figure out what happened), though at this point I'll consider it a victory if I have the energy to read.