What's APA?

I find the education system here to be weird, and very unstructured. I really don't think I like it. It's a little bit too different from what I'm used to.

One of the first things I did this morning was go to my sociology lecture, from 11-1. My professor is always at least 5 minutes late, which I find odd. And then when he walked in today, he noticed that, of the 35ish students in the class, there were only about 15 people there. His response? "Oh, it's the faithful few!" He was surprisingly cheery about it...I think I'd be a little bit annoyed if only a tiny bit of the class attended lectures. At any rate, he lectured today on symbolic interactionism...which I learned about last year in my deviance course.

After class, I stopped my professor to ask him a few questions about the upcoming paper. I wanted to know what kind of format to use....APA, ASA, MLA, Chicago-style, etc. At first he didn't really understand the question, so I told him that the psychology department at Bangor uses APA. He doesn't know what APA is, but once I told him that it's basically a way of citing sources, he understood. And he told me that it doesn't matter as long as I am consistent. He showed me an example on an in-text citation, which looked like ASA, so I've decided to use ASA. But now I'm unsure about the format of the rest of the paper. Does my title page matter? Margins? Do they double-space things here? Ahhh! I'm so used to having a strict set of rules to follow that I'm really uncomfortable with this.

I went to the gym after talking to my professor. That crossramp machine will be the death of me. I've figured out how to stay balanced, and I figured out how to adjust the angle (so I can just run and not prance). But I'm incredibly sore. That should fade as I keep working out, but it definitely makes me want to take it easy rather than push myself.

I finished going over my sources for my paper, and I now know exactly what I'll be writing about. I made a very detailed outline. So, basically, I'm making the whole paper-writing process incredibly simple. I even started my paper...I have a title page, and a paragraph. Ha. I should probably work on it more, but I'm really tired today. I have a lot of time set aside tomorrow, so I should be able to continue working (and hopefully finish it).