To Be A Schoolboy Again

Since September 28 I have been attending North Seattle Community College in Seattle's Northgate neighborhood. The people are very nice but the campus was designed and built in the late sixties/early seventies when the architectural trend, I figure, was to try to make things look futuristic. What was supposed to be a cool, cutting edge design in the spirit, I reckon, of Seattle's World Fair came off as a cold, gray maze of stark concrete walls and passageways, imagined right out of some bleak future dystopia.

Courtesy of North Seattle Community College

Courtesy of North Seattle Community College

Courtesy of Worth1000

Courtesy of North Seattle Community College

This is the place small children come disembodied in the middle of the night to have their bad dreams. I can subtly feel their presences reeling through the windy, exposed sky bridges. On particularly cloudy and rainy nights the orange light of halogen lamps on vast expanses of dark cement create an especially exquisite gloom.

The teachers and other faculty are great. I am doing the twelve credits it takes to be a full-time student. I have a ten credit coordinated studies class combining English 102 and Humanities 105 called "Beginnings: Connecting Learning, Identity, and Culture," and I have a two credit Library 150 class called "Research in the Electronic Environment."