Well I don’t know when I’ll be posting this, exactly, but right now it’s midnight and I’m in the lounge on our floor, which is thankfully empty since I took off all my makeup, my hair’s a mess, and I’m wearing my exceedingly dorky bathrobe. Three nights a week wendy has to go to bed early, and I’m not really tired, so I came in here. Actually I’m a tad peckish now that I think about it. Plus a whole lot of other people were up, I even heard someone playing the flute, although our RA made them stop. We have “quiet hours” on the sub free floor, which is yet another thing to love about it. Unfortunately this same RA, the guy one, not Karen, wouldn’t let us all stay in franny’s room tonight, even though there were only ten of us this time. Sigh. Karen’s much nicer about that. But something wonderful happened today! Ok so several wonderful things happened. First of all I had my whole fifty minute class, which was creative mind seminar, and it was AMAZING. Katie and I sat next to each other and we kept grabbing each other’s hands when something particularly awesome came up. First off the prof, dr bridgford, is recognized as the campus’ favorite English teacher. She’s very cool and has a likable voice, which I actually find almost necessary for me to enjoy a teacher. She’s also a poet and published author, and she runs the literary mags on campus, so it’s good that I have her in class as well. The class is going to be my favorite, I already know. We have no tests and no final, our last thing is a big creative project. Our papers and responses to things can take the form of poetry, prose, painting or photos. We’re going to see a play with Mia Farrow, going to the National Photogrpahy museum for a tour and workshop in NYC, watching movies including Sunset Boulevard, a poster for which was in my old movie calendar and is now above wendy’s bed, and reading so much awesome poetry. On our syllabus was a quote from one of my favorite ee cummings poems, the one on rae’s profile, “I do not know what it is about you that opens and closes”. We’re doing a paper on Sylvia plath, we’re going to go see lectures and performances, we’re having some famous bassist give us a private concert because prof bridgford knows him, brian something or other, never heard of him personally, and harry Belafonte, whom my mom said was famous once upon a day. A lot of these events were on-campus things I was planning to attend, and now they’re free cause everything in the course is included. Which is good, cause some of the lecture tickets at the quick center were forty dollars, and I’m cheap.
Ok on to cool thing numero dos—Hogwarts has come to Campion. We gathered in the Oak Room tonight to be sorted, and Michelle has found herself—in Ravenclaw!! WHOOT! I already have an appropriate scarf, if sara gets it back to me. We won our very first inter-house competition, which was a wicked hard scavenger hunt involving campus trivia: how many bong’s are in frank’s security office? 44. how many speed bumps on campus? 19. what kind of bird nests near bellarmine? Monk parrots. There was also outdoorsy hunting with clues, and then there were the hardest of all, the riddles. I forgot what those were, but we got all but a few. Me and Meredith did some of the trivia, and we were slick; we went and plied the campus ministry people with questions and then went to the security office to ask them stuff and count their bongs (one was six feet tall). The only rule was that it had to be on foot, which involved someone having to go to dolan, a fifteen minute walk. Anyway we won, although an RA noted the competition was skewed for us because we’re supposed to be the smarty-pantses anyway, chris swetke is in it with me, and james (nicknamed tall james and now TJ; another james is short james and then we have one called ‘Jiggedy’), Meredith, and some cute guy who looks like Kevin bacon. I can’t tell who’s a soph and who’s a freshie, but that’s kind of the point, to mix genders and classes and floors of sub free. Oh and the winner of the cup at the end of the year gets all the leftover budget money for a “fancy” dinner off campus. Fancy in Fairfield is FAN-SAY.
Oh we watched father of the bride tonight, but greg called and I saw like none of it. Everyone already knows about him now, because I apparently mention him a lot, so they were all like “ooooh, say hi to greg for us”. And then me and my mom talked to like an hour, me lying on my back in the hall because wendy was inside on the phone as well. It was weird. We’ve even started saying I love you on the phone. It’s like I connect to her more in my absence. She’s sending a giant care package with a wall clock, alarm clock, my audioslave cd, more hangers, and banana bread! Yippee!! I haven’t had a chance to watch tv, listen to my cd player or read a book from home yet. I’ve already hit the library and taken out three more genetics books: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and two books by Matt Ridley, one of which is called the Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Beings. I barely started selfish gene; working on house under snow for English. Oh and one of the trivia tonight was who or what lives in “teilhard de chardin” on block 12? The answer was someone in res life, it’s the name of their townhouse, but the significance of that name is that he was an important evolutionary philosopher that we studied in hill, and I really liked his writing, which connected evolution to the soul and to god. It’s weird having chris around, almost. I saw Alison devine once and we smiled, I’ve waved hi to Nicole and she told me her roommate already has beer in their fridge, but chris I’ve been seeing around and once again not having too much to say to. He’s on three anyway, he hasn’t come upstairs yet and everyone knows this is where it’s at cause it’s all freshies up here. Third is mixed boys and soph girls. Surprisingly, sub free is majority guys! Weird. Many are girl-phobic though. A few, like mike, the jameses, matt, brian, and sean, are definitely not, and hang out inside a pack of girls, but others are scared of us. Wendy and I are now infamous for writing hello on every board on two floors, and introducing ourselves to everyone. We met brian tonight and he already knew who we were. “oh you’re THOSE two”. We have the nickname the evil duo from him, in a nice way. And after we’d originally gone to bed, short james knocked on the door cause he’d brought a guy named jared from down the hall who simply wanted to meet THE michelle and wendy. They’re coming back tomorrow instead. It’s so funny, we’re like a zoo attraction!! Ok approaching two pages. See I just have so much to record, this isn’t really even for anyone else, it’s like I want to capture the feelings of true happiness and belonging and community that I’m feeling right now, so in the future I can go back and remember how I was happy from the day I got here. Damn I need a neck massage. We’re thinking of doing a massage circle. I’m also joining ballroom dancing club with a bunch of people, we do swing and classical. Time to see if lefty here has two left feet. Anyway I’m tiring myself out more, which was exactly my objective here.