I had all day Thursday off of work and plenty of projects around the house that I wanted to tackle. Joy! Bliss! Happiness! Nothing beats having a day off while life is otherwise hectic, and crossing projects off my list always makes me happy.

Except I spent the whole day trying to register for classes.

News flash: You CAN entirely forget what it’s like to be a college student within a decade of leaving school.

Because I’m seeking an associates degree and not just auditing some courses, community college that hosts the web courses I’ll be taking starting Jan. 8 required me to attend an advising session before I could register for my classes. No problem, the school has a satellite campus two minutes from my house, and I was able to schedule an appointment with the adviser there for Thursday morning.

Except like every school counselor I’ve ever encountered in my life he was completely, unequivocally unhelpful.

He told me my previous college transcripts hadn’t been received (they had — that was contingent upon my being accepted at the community college). He couldn’t answer my questions about the nature of the web courses. And most importantly, he was unable to actually place me in a single course when we logged into the system where one registers. He told me he’d make some phone calls and let me know when I was clear to register.

He called two hours later only to pass on another name and phone number. That person passed me on to another name and phone number. That person told me I’d have to come in and register with pen and paper at the main campus, a 45-minute drive away, but I couldn’t make an appointment because that was just a first-come, first-serve service, and this time of year it gets kinda busy.

Great. So much for the day off.

The ‘first-come, first-served’ bit of it turned into a 30 or 45 minute wait, but fortunately the dude who called my name knew exactly what to do, which was get his boss to offer her ‘magic signature’ to my course request and walking me to the person in the registrar’s office who could manually put me in the system thanks to that magic signature. As it turns out, the computer system was very, very confused by my bachelor’s degree (the one that exempted me from all the prerequisite ACTs and SATs and high school diplomas and whatever else the computer needed to be reassured about). I guess it’s kinda not normal to get an associate’s degree after getting a bachelor’s degree. The computer thought I had completed a class called bachelor’s, not a degree full of 120 hours’ worth of classes.

At my four-year college, we’d call that the Big Orange Screw — orange being the pervasive color of the school’s sports teams.

my brand-new used books, yo

But I can honestly say I’m excited. I’ve got that little thrill of a feeling that I’m doing something that can make my life different in a better way. I realize it’s going to take me forever to finish even a 2-year degree while working full-time and taking just a couple of classes each semester. I also realize that the luster will probably wear off really quickly when I’m knee-deep in an introductory class that feels like a waste of my time. But right now, I don’t care. I’m ready to learn, bitches.