caitlin e shogren

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November, oh how to count the ways...

Well, it's that time of year. No, it's not just the turkey, pilgrims and indians and leaves changing/falling time of year. It's also the no shave, football, Macy's day parade and, my personal favorite, black Friday weekend time of the year. Although my worst fear is that some guys won't be shaving after November ends, it is still one of my favorite times of the year. The weather isn't cold enough that I feel like my toes will fall off but enough that I get to have copious amounts of blankets scattered around my room. It is totally acceptable to be wearing thick comfy sweatpants to class due to the cold, overrated classes, and you're missing home so much you don't really care what you look like. Although the winter and summer breaks are longer, Thanksgiving break is the one break where I can go home and get smothered in "I miss you!" while never really getting bored. I can usually find something to do or plan and then go have my grandmother's amazing home cooking on Thanksgiving.

The worst part about this break, however, is waiting for it. This semester has been one roller coaster that I would rather not repeat. It has been no thrill ride. Not that I don't think I have learned some really cool things, like with sociology, multi media, and english classes this semester but my economics and cross cultural journalism classes are not my cup of tea. Economics has been one of those classes I just can't wrap my head around so I knew it would not be my favorite. On the other hand, my cross cultural journalism class is just way to subjective to be anything but a horror story. The teaching assistants grade all of our work and, while they have some guidelines, a lot of the work is not defined to tell you what is expected of you. Take our inter sanctum interviews. We are told to do an interview over the projects that were assigned to us but we were only told that we needed to go outside our comfort zone, to do some research over our subjects before hand, and make sure we make it helpful to our project. Well thank you but how do I know what your going to be looking for? That doesn't tell me how we will be critiqued on these assignments. I just don't know why this class has to have no clear guidelines on what is to be expected of its students.

Despite the grueling last minutes off classes, I can't wait to be home, with my family and comfortably sleeping in while the rest of my family in Oklahoma gets to have an added two days of school during my Thanksgiving break. This is where the OU v Texas weekend comes back to haunt them with their added Fall break during the semester.