So I will now be 18 in 45 minutes. whoohoo. i have to wait up till midnight in order to recieve some preliminary gifts from my friends here. i love the "preliminary". wendy made me clear off my desk so that i can be all suprised when i wake up tomorrow. they're all coming in "secretly" at 730 to set up whatever it is. if they think they're all going to troop in here without waking me up, they're probably, hopefully mistaken. i don't want to be observed sleeping by random people! eek! ok so andrew's seen me sleeping before, but still. in large numbers it's like a violation. oooh AND i'm getting a letter from meghan and a gift from sara in the mail. AND when i go home my mom will have gifts for me! this is awesome!!! :-) i already got my bday card from ashley and it made me inordinately happy to receive real mail. i literally giggled as i opened it. who knows what tomorrow may bring?

I can't really believe I'll be eighteen tomorrow. Finally I'll be able to vote, smoke, have sex, buy porn, play lotto....gee. how many of those will i actually do tomorrow, possibly one or two. cough cough. legality, ah. today in my art class our teacher, eliasoph (i just call him phillip in conversation, having been corrupted by meredith) mentioned how all these 19, 20 and 21 yr olds, plus the older people, should know by now that the apostles did NOT write the old testament. i guess i looked amused because he addded "and 18yrd olds, for our two freshman", to which i added "17 till this week!" haha that was nice and embarassing, have all those juniors and seniors craning their necks at the pesky little 17yrold freshman. well as of tomorrow, i join the ranks of ashley and sara. whoot. and then there's flanny on the 15th, andrew on the 20th (but he's going to be 19), and my mom and meghan on the 31st. lots of people! thankfully no one in november...you need a month of rest between that and december, what with rae and greg AND christmas. oi!

probably should, um do something meaningful, right? i have a spanish quiz. might study.

I've just spent the last half hour on the rather boring task of transferring files from my dinosaur laptop to my pretty little one. i've become rather fond of my memory key, though i don't use it a lot since the printer is attached to my computer anyway. anyway so i copied most of my poetry files, which gave me an opportunity to go back and read things i wrote junior year for creative writing, along with things i wrote just this summer. i don't really rememeber writing all of them but i must say some of them i just LOVED. it was if i was reading someone else's poetry, and i could really enjoy it without the subjectivity of it being my baby, as some of my poems have been in the past. here are a few:

A Sea-Farer Bids His Love Farewell (Pantoum)


The ship sails at dawn, my love,
With or without you.
I leave this very evening-
Will you be at my side?

With or without you,
I shall cross the sparkling seas, my love.
Will you be at my side
When we reach the distant shore?

I shall cross the sparkling seas, my love,
Never to return.
When we reach the distant shore
Will you always look back?

Never to return—
I will make a home in foreign lands.
Will you always look back?
Am I not enough for you?

I will make a home in foreign lands;
We will shrug off the old world for the new.
Am I not enough for you?
What ties you to this place, my love?

We will shrug off the old world for the new;
Make your choice between them!
What ties you to this place, my love,
So you would abandon me?

Make your choice between them—
I leave this very evening.
So, you would abandon me?
The ship sails at dawn, my love.

Found poem


This is a found poem.
I discovered it as I was shifting aside
some boxes of junk in a closet.
I moved a stack of photo albums
(which were quite dusty from disregard)
and there it was on the floor.
It lay there so limp and motionless
I wasn’t sure if it was still alive,
so I grabbed a yardstick and poked it a little,
not too hard, just enough that it wiggled
and gave a faint little crinkle
of its paper, as if to let say
“I’m here! Don’t throw me away!”
I was relieved; the thought of finding
that a poor, defenseless poem
had been crushed to death
by the weight of all my memories
would have been too much too bear.

But there it was, safe and sound
and looking haler by the minute,
even more so after I gave it a cup of tea
and a biscuit, to regain its strength.
It looked at me with such gratefulness
and made such endearing rustlings
that I could not help but love it, right away,
and I became very glad that I had thought
to clean out the closet that day.
Who knows how much longer
it could have lasted, suffering as it was,
before it finally gave up the ghost
and became one of the little scraps of poems
that lurk on the edge of the mind,
mere shades of what they could have been.

We have been very happy ever since,
my little poem and I,
and though people tend to assume
that it was I who found it that day in the closet
I am not at all sure that that’s the way it happened.
The poem, for its part, simply refuses to say.

Untitled


Sometimes I try too hard to write.
The page is fresh and full of possibility.
My hands are warm, poised over the keys.
The cursor blinks out its endless rhythm.
Waiting, always waiting.
It must be ever-patient,
For at times I have spent hours in this position.
It is always the same:
My brow furrows,
My mouth curls into that concentrated scowl
And all my senses focus
On loosing the flow of genius
Which surely lurks just below the surface
Of my temporary mediocrity.

I have heard of poets
Who locked themselves in their studies
With only pen and paper,
And perhaps a glass of water,
For days on end.
Perhaps they thought if they waited long enough
The poetry would surrender
And crawl, emaciated, from its hiding place
To be swiftly chained onto paper.

My poetry, alas, seems to be made of stronger stuff
I suspect it has found some other way
Of supporting itself.
Perhaps in some well-concealed spot inside me
There is a small farm
With tall rows of wheat and corn,
And a few cows and chickens in the dairy.
There is a well and a trickling brook,
And in the evenings the sun dies
In a blaze of glory over the trout pond.
A gentle plume of smoke rises
From the farmhouse where my poetry lives,
Content in its solitude,
And amused by my clumsy attempts
To draw it out.
Meanwhile, I grind my teeth
And stare at the screen,
Hoping it will give in soon.
Dinner is almost ready,
And I am very hungry.

my other purpose in seeking out some of these was that there's a competition to have your poetry performed on the stage. wendy's entering, so i thought i might too if i could find anything of interest. i'll probably enter these. thoughts, anyone?

I read sara's post last night, and what she said definitely didn't seem strange to me at all. it's like this is an entirely new start for all of us, and if we choose we can omit certain things from our pasts, or change ourselves in some way, or leave behind some insecurity that dogged our high school days. it was harder to change when you were surrounded by people who had known you intimately for years. i've noticed the same thing here. back home i never usually got changed in front of other people, not strip to the undies change, esp not if they were looking. here, wendy and i strip in front of each other and keep on talking. it's just not weird at all, yet at home i would have felt more uncomfortable, because of days that have long passed into memory. it was hard never liking your body because you remembered the way it used to be, and then being surrounded by people who a.) were smaller than you and b.) automatically scolded you if you mentioned it, like it was a precursor to an eating disorder or something. but here not everyone knows that about me. it's the same with andrew; whereas with greg i had some insecurities that meant it took a long time before i was comfortable taking off any clothing in front of him, i don't have them as much now. not that i'm ripping my shirt off every five seconds or anything. but back then it was a pattern of behavior i had trouble changing, but college made it so much easier to just leave behind. this is yet another reason why college, in a word, ROCKS!

Lauren just asked me if i was going to write about how cool all my friends here are. i'm sure i could go on at length, but i'm not going to. ok lauren, you're SO COOL!! happy? but that would overlook andrew and apop (cough, amanda) and wendy and meredith and james and matt, and i'm not energized enough to do an in-depth analysis for all those people. lol. suffice it to say that life's going good, despite tonight's fiasco with the birthday gifts. i talked to my mom for like an hour, and sara and rae and heather for good long times each. tried calling other people with no success. oohhhh i have to call flanny back!!

Wendy has gone home for the weekend, leaving the room solely in my possession. muahaha. of course andrew's sleeping over, but he would be anyway if wendy were here. she doesn't mind that he's basically in here every night until two am or later; she loves him. plus she falls asleep really easily and sleeps through anything. NOT that there's anything funky going on in the bunk below, when i say he sleeps over we really do sleep. which is a feat in itself, knowing the size of a college bed. those things were probably designed to prevent sex. and sex on a bunk bed, even worse.

Greg asked me all about andrew this afternoon while i was secretly IMing him in the Language Resource Center, which we have to go to for forty five minutes a week, by order of profesora knight, who is actually a really nice woman. i didn't have time to tell him much because the woman in charge was walking around making sure we were actually doing language related things, but i was really glad that we could talk about him without it being weird. of course he mentioned having picked up a girl at school like last week, so i wasn't concerned that it was taboo or something, but i hadnt been exactly sure how i was going to mention it. speaking of andrew, i met his grandfather, great aunt and great uncle today. they were staying with relatives in greenwhich for a few days and came by. i couldn't go to lunch with them, i ironically had to go to spanish class (they're all cuban), but they were very nice. they couldn't get over how gorgeous i was. apparently they spent most of lunch discussing me. plus they took several pictures. shudder. i guess they thought andrew was exaggerating when he said i was pretty; either that or they didnt think he could get a girl as stunningly fabulous as i. *preens* ok i must admit that today even i was satisfied with the way i looked, and god knows 'tis not always so. his great aunt, who really is not that old at all, has black hair, so of course she liked mine heehee. andrew andi were supposed to go on a "real date" to town tonight, to have dinner at one of fairfield's marvelously overpriced cafes, but i didn't feel very well. we were going to go to the dining hall but i didnt evne make it there; i fell asleep at 430 and woke up after 7. stupid sydexo closes at 7 on fridays and saturdays. ah well. my mom sent me a giant care package with cheerios, two loaves of banana bread (whoot), contact stuff, cough medicine, meal bars, a buddha statue for wendy cause she collects them (she brought a set of twenty little red ones with her, they're all over) and a copy of the wall street journal, which i heartily miss. i read ny times every day for art class (i'm one of two freshman in this class, which also has three adults, and yet i was the only one who got an A on a current events quiz. i learned something new--the dalai lama now lives in india. i think i said manchuria. someone else said Los Angeles. Dear god in heaven.) but it's just not the same. sigh.

anyway i think i'm through here. i read sara's blog today and it made me sad that she doesn't feel like she's getting everythign out of providence that she wants. i don't know what to say, really. i mean, it's not like i had to really go out and meet most of my friends. it just happened, because we all picked this floor. so it's not like i have mcuh advice to give in that department. even in my roommate, i was just extraordinarily lucky; wendy's one of my closest friends here, and vice versa. i'm interesteed to hear more about this joe character *hint to sara if she's reading this* :-) as for andrew, her andrew i mean, if he's going to be stupid and play that "hm let's pretend i don't know you today" game, forget him. turns out lots of guys in college are immature assholes. gee, don't they seem a lot like those immature assholes we were seniors with? hmmmm.

Tonight I went to see a speech by Liv Ullman, a famous film star of yesteryear and now a humanitarian worker. She worked a lot with Ingmar Bergman. the only film of his i've ever seen is the seventh seal, and i actually only saw about half of it because i was just not getting into it. yet it's supposed to be one of the best movies ever made. it was in that book of really good movies meg gave me junior year, so i rented it, and if i do recall it was a very quiet movie, black and white, in subtitles of swedish or something. bergman's swedish, i do believe. ullman was norwegian, i thought of meghan. it was one of those allegorical movies, apocalyptic and such. a lot of people know the most famous image of the film, though: the grim figure of Death in the black garb, with his hand outstretched and his faced painted a cold, untempered white.

anyway so we went with Creative Mind, though only seven people actually showed up, and we were the ONLY young people i nthe entire quick center, which is huge. it was entirely filled with OLD PEOPLE. it was freakish. we worried that we would be set upon and cannibalized by some modern-day Elizabeth Bathory who would try to reclaim her youth through our blood. or something like that. anyway it wasn't terribly interesting, though my art professor was the one who came onstage and asked her questions after her speech was over. he showed some clips from her films, including one where she worked with ingmar bergman as the director and ingrid bergman as an actor. i loved her in the movie "notorious" (possibly because she played opposite my darling cary grant), and i remember her as one of the most beautiful of the old Hollywood stars, right up there with Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Grace Kelly, Vivien Leigh, etc. ok, in the movie "Autumn Sonata", she was really scary looking, and it reminded me of the fact that so many of the gorgeous film star women don't seem to age very well. katherine hepburn definitely didnt, audrey hepburn didn't, meryl streep isn't...i can't think of many others right now lol. yet it seems that the men stay attractive longer; jimmy stewart, cary grant who was obviously handsome till his dying day, sean connery who is attractive still, gregory peck, paul newman, robert deniro. i know there's that whole hollywood prejudice against the aging actress, and forgive me for my superficiality but they really don't seem to retain their beauty as well as the actors do. (of course there are notable exceptions, like goldie hawn for the women and elvis and marlon brando for the men) it also made me wonder, would marily monroe have aged well? would james dean? maybe it's better that we don't know, that they were forever preserved in their youth and beauty. like hendrix and jim morrison; would their music have sucked later on? would plath's poetry have deterioriated if somehow she had pulled herself out of her depression and tried to live a happy life?

we read plath in creative mind today. my professor loves her and gave some detaile autobio info. there's a poem called lady lazarus, wherein she talks about being a cat with nine times to die, talking about her attempts at suicide. the first tiem when she was young, she accidentally ODed herself. the second time she ODed on sleeping pills and crawled into a crawl space for a really long time. by the time they found her, insects were starting to burrow into her skin. in the poem she writes "they had to call and call/and pick the worms off me like sticky pearls." ok reading this i had NO idea that was true. it's just so horrible to imagine. anyway plath wrote this three weeks before she actually killed herself, and from the description of the way she set it up, plus talking in this poem about the spectacle of coming back to life each time, it seems as though she wasn't really trying to kill herself. i think she wanted someone to save her. "Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ and i eat men like air." i think she thought she would triumph over death again, but she wasn't found by the au pair the way she had basically arranged to have been found, and the gas from her suicide intention accidentally knocked out the only neighbor who had a key, a neighbor the au pair actually tried to contact. how sad that what might have been another cry for help ended up a fatal reality. "Dying/ is an art, like everything else./ I do it exceptionally well." How sad that that proved to be the case.

Wow. It POURED today. i was lucky, i was inside for like three hours and missed the worst. Lauren got completely soaked. this girl in my spanish class left her window open and her computer got doused, and now it won't turn on, which really blows. A really good thing happened today though, I got an A- on my first art history critique! i critiqued the impressionisty painting that i bought for a whole dollar at a tag sale. my professor wrote "excellent; you have so much promise." I guess this is going to be one of those classes where i really like the professor and i really want to do well. he wanted to offer me a job over winter break, but i live too far away to commute. meredith also told me that the kids who work for him have to basically do everything for him since he's so disorganized. nah, it'll be back to sofia's for me. i think i'm going to skip ballroom dancing tonight to watch the premiere of gilmore girls....

I have the sniffles. Blech.

There's a trip to NYC next weekend to see Madame Tussaud's and Times Square. I'm not sure i want to go; that would make three consecutive saturdays i've dragged my ass up early to go to NY. then again it's madame tussaud's, and i always wanted to see it.

we just had to listen to another inspirational speaker about the way his life went to shit because of drugs and alcohol and he was saved, yadda yadda. basically sean forrest without the guitar and aaron belting out "king of the jungle". today in FYE, aka freshman year experience, this weekly discussion group thingee, the topic was alcohol. there are two upperclass facilitators and one adult; the woman left so we'd feel free to discuss our boozing habits. i must confess that i found myself pretty disgusted. in the first week of school someone in regis was caught with coke; he got expelled. people are racking up "points" over marijuana and liquor offenses. our facilitators gave us a slew of tips for avoiding arrest; be real nice to the fairfield cops, who are known for being hard on FU kids; don't keep your cup in your hand on the beach cause you can get one at any party; hide all your booze in your closet cause your RA won't look; if the RA invades a party put your cup down because it's a slighter offense to be in the presence of liquor than to actually have the cup on hand. a kid in my group already had a run-in with the cops at Lantern point; they were drunk and ripping down street signs. our friendly facilitators shared their stories about various arrests, fines and hospitalizations, laughing all the while. apparently five freshman got fined 150 dollars apiece for jaywalking drunk at the Point. almost as an afterthought, the facilitators mentioned that "oh yeah, and there are some people around here who really don't drink at all." i left that room thinking "what the fuck is WRONG with you people??" can people really not find anything better to do? are they that lacking in friends or self-confidence or desire to be healthy and sane that they spend their time getting smashed? It's hard for me not to look down on people who get trashed a lot. i know people who drink, and i can't condemn them because they're really cool, awesome people who happen to like the hard stuff, yet when i look at the drunken louts that populate this campus, these superficial bimbos and jocks who think there is no higher calling on a saturday than to converge on the townhouses in their skimpiest outfits and consume as many alcoholic beverages as possible, i just shudder in utter revulsion. see, i have these things called friends, and what we call "hanging out" involves crazy wild times but not booze. i don't know, some people seem to think that they have to go hand in hand. then again i have always felt like my friends have been intelligent, funny people, the cool kids. maybe other people aren't funny and interesting enough to be able to entertain each otehr without the benefit of liquor. grrrrrr. drinking schools.

i realized after last night's incredible conversation with andrew that i am right now the happiest and freest i may have ever been. i've felt special before, felt loved, but this.....just amazes me in a way that i must admit i never expected. and neither did he. sometime i'll write it all down so i won't forget it.

I haven’t updated in yet another week. It’s getting more and more difficult to record everything that’s been happening. It’s like there’s so much going on that if I sat down and tried to capture it all for my future edification I would be sitting at the computer for hours and hours. Yesterday was interesting, though. My creative mind class went to new york city to see the international center for photography, which was fairly interesting, but I didn’t appreciate the docent forcing us to analyze every centimeter of the photographs she wanted to cover. The theme of the exhibition was “Strangers”, so our workshop was that we were each given a bulky Polaroid camera and ten shots, and sent out to photograph strangers in any way we choose. As luck would have it, there was both a German American parade and a street fair going on right outside the center, so there were tons of people and plenty of cops. I had fun running up to random individuals and asking to take their photographs. The first person I got was this adorable little Asian woman inside this very colorful sidewalk shop of Asian clothes. I also got the requisite pic of the NYPD cops, who were very friendly. (this other girl got a picture with TEN hot marines, all in dress whites for the parade. The bitch.) most of the people in my class tried to take surreptitious photos, which mostly were from far away and were less distinct. I was somewhat afraid that someone might get offended, but the fact that the streets were crawling with policemen made me more confident. No one refused me, though one person said yes and then walked away. This other kid said he’d done the same project the previous year, and he’d asked tons of people and not one had said yes. He didn’t understand why people randomly posed for me. Well let’s see, he’s a scary-looking teenage male and he was asking uptight people in Norwalk, CT. me, nice-looking, polite teenage female asking in a tourist-drenched city. Anyway I have to do a response to the trip, and I was thinking I might just write a story based off some of the pictures I took. The only one I snapped unbeknownst to the subjects was of this couple arguing. That might work.

Heahter has instructed me to write her an email (gasp) detailing what's been going on between me and Andrew. it's kind of hard to discuss this sort of thing on two cell phones when people are always about. i'm having so much fun though! right now wendy and i are listening to the rocky horror soundtrack. i love this girl. last night she was at a drama party at the townhouses with her new gay senior friends lol, including the little dark haired one i thought was cute from improv. it was a pop star masquerade, lots of drag. and of course booze, but my little wendy does not indulge. anyway she wandered in around three in the morning. it's also great that she loves andrew, and doesn't mind when he stays over....poor boy, he walked in on his roommate julio "keepin it real" again last night. the room was dark and locked ,so he assumed twas safe....twas not....julio's response? "ma fault, ma fault. this time it wasn't his girlfriend, though. snicker. anyway no one was around to see andrew do the walk of shame this morning, i was almost disappointed. the three of us all slept till like noon. then i felt really sick at lunch, for no apparent reason, but now im fine. anyway must study for math quiz, then it's time for a john cusack movie called better off dead. ah, i love him.

Ok this is some crazy nonsense that me, Lauren and Matt did in the lounge really really late at night. it was a round robin kind of thing. heehee. oh and "Mitch" refers to me.

I went to the local Kmart with my pet dingo to buy a Nimbus 2000 vibrator for my 90 yr old aunt who lives in her own stomach. her favorite thing is stomach acids. she uses them for her patented sex serum which she peddles to Mitch when she's feeling amorous. She also likes to wear a G string and dance on a fat man's sweaty back while licking her own ear. she's able to do this because of her magical tongue which she bought at kmart a long time ago when she was fidel castro's mistress. he always liked to make naked monkey love to mitch. castro also likes to wear a g string when he feels up lauren with his naughty wandering hands. Lauren loves the fire in his loins because her pants are blazing for him. but she really fantasizes about james doing the g-string macarena upside down over her while a leopard nuzzles her neck. however james' efforts are thwarted when mithc confesses the fire that burns in her loins for the unbelievably sexy lauren. while matt, using his brand new camera, films a horrific act of leopard sexual abuse and sells it to castro to fuel his insatiable lust. however matt failed to realize that the camera actually belonged to andrew. andrew then opened up a can of whoop-ass on matt. after an epic battle, matt wins due to his invincible manliness. andrew, thus defeated, opted to go to sweden for a sex change, taking the name of fluffy the three headed dog that protected the chamber of secrets. after a few days of guard duty, he became filled with curiosity about the squelching sounds emanating from the chamber. he went in, only to find himself in the midst of a pgym y orgy. suddenly the fire in his loins, long thought gone, returned as he jumped into the tiny squirming pile. unfortunately he forgot to unzip his pants and found himself tearing at his trousers emphatically but to no avail until matt jumped in to "help him out" of the sticky situation. suddenly there was a flash of light as lauren, equipped with her bag o tricks, joined the melee.

to be continued, the next time we're all really strung out. which will be tonight, lol!!!

So. Not sure what I should be posting here, how much I can say or even how much I feel compelled to explain.

Zen

We can learn a lot from cats.
Just for once
why don’t we try it their way:
sleep all day
prowl the night
kill on a whim
land on your feet
live forever

I seem to do a lot of posting from Lauren's room. right now im on her roomie's computer, but shhhh she's not here. anyway lots of shit going on recently. oi. that's all i can say. oi. sara, i can't wait till there's a landline between the two of us! and heather, i live for the day i will meet your hilariously gay friends. meg, rae, ash, i miss you guys, call me.

Wow. today is september eleventh and i must confess i didn't realize it until i read it on greg's site. i'm in such a bubble here. everyoen agrees it's like the world could have entered a nuclear holocaust outside of fairfield and none of us would have even noticed. yesterday was my first time reading the newspaper in like two weeks. i miss the wall street journal a lot now. i had to get a subscription to the new york times for art history, so hopefully i'll read that and be all informed. saw yesterday that mamoud abbas stepped down. this whole road map thing looked like it was going to work out, but maybe not, after all. ain't that always the way.

my english professor told us a cautionary tale today. that when she went to college she was a straight A english kid who had been the editor of her school's literary magazine, and thus very well convinced of her own english ability. she wound up getting a c on her first english paper. eep, anyone?? therfore michelle WILL be submitting a first draft to prf. bridgford! ok time for some work.

I love Incubus. It’s so pure. It makes me feel like there’s nothing complicated in the world, nothing to worry about, nothing to fear, just the surge of music lifting you upward

Those left standing
Will make millions
Writing books
On the way things should have been

She woke in the morning
She knew that her life had passed her by
She called out a warning
Don’t let life pass you by

I don’t want life to pass me by. I’m sitting here with my music blasting in my ears at a volume I haven’t had it in so long. I had tool playing on my stereo yesterday loud enough that sarah came over to scold me, but for those few minutes it felt so good. It was like it made me come alive there for a second, I remembered times when the opening chords of 46 and 2 could send me into a rapture, when I stood so close to the pounding speakers I thought I might explode and the thought didn’t bother me at all. I could have stayed there forever, a thousand brilliant pieces dancing to music only I could hear. Nice to know you, goodbye, nice to know you, goodbye, goodbye.

The way things are and the way they should have been. Why can’t I reconcile them? Why can’t it all work out? Why does it always have to be goodbye?

To take another line from Brandon, “What’s wrong with being happy?”

grr. hate posts being erased. well the gist of it was that last night was really fun, i connected with lauren as we spent hours walking around campus, riding the bus aimlessly and not quite watching will and grace the first season. we pulled out our picture albums and compared friends. hers is cooler cause it's more of a scrapbook with really funny quotes written down all over it. i wish i'd saved quotes for my pictures. i explained about coning, the grabbing of boobs, the chevy tahoe song, all my "white stuff" pics, the air hump, the ducks, etc. she explained about her gay friend dave, people throwing pasta at doors to see if it's cooked, her "lesbian" relationship with her pal francine, and a pic where she's crucifying a friend among other assorted items. after hanging out constantly in groups for a week, some one on one time with someone was really nice.
today is stagstock. our bathroom looks out over the quad, where the music is, so everytime someone opens the door it sounds like there's a masive party going on in there. the good bands come on later. we're going to see one called paperface at 8, merely because this hot guy my roomie is into reccommended it to her :-) but first we're going to see men's soccer vs iona, again because this cute canadian boy wendy likes is on the team and and the guys were walking around encouraging people to come. i lose EVERYTHING. i lost my PIN for my fleet account, my PIN for my voicemail, my hogwarts stickers, and today i thought for a horrifying ten minutes that i'd lost my FU ID. it's fifty bucks for a new one. i'd rather not have to get one. i was awfully tired this morning. i fell back asleep after i took a shower, and after me and wendy got ysteriously locked out of our rooms. our rooms always have to be locked from the outside, not the inside, but somehow there we were, both stranded, neither of us with keys and michelle in only her bathrobe, wet hair and bare feet. we finally found an RA to let us in, though.

Well I’m once again working on my blog while unconnected to the internet. I’m sitting in my friend Lauren’s room while she finishes her essay for English class. I was intending to review some Spanish for class tomorrow but screw it. We’re having more fun just talking about random shit in our pasts while anyone who would be offended by our language and customs aren’t here. I’m glad I connected with weird people here, and she agrees. When I first met her I thought she was very shy and reserved, and then she turned out to be wild and a lot of fun. She said she was worried about people thinking she was weird, so she tried to act as “normal” as possible, but now that she’s got friends she can act as nutso as possible. Ok I’ve started using the adjective “uber” because wendy uses it a lot and people around me use it as well. We took our first ride around campus on the shuttle because wendy has asthma and she needed this breathing treatment that looked like she was smoking an opium pipe for fifteen minutes. In fact she has to go for another at 11:30pm, after which we’re heading to canisius hall to see if she got into the fall play. We met the bus lady judy and a nice upperclassman.
Had my first experience shaving in the showers today. My morning ritual now takes twice as long as at home, since I make one trip for showering purposes, which requires the careful ordering of items on the hook outside the stall, and then the actual showering which must be both time and space efficient, and deal with weaker water pressure than I’m used to. And then I make one for teeth brushing, flossing, contacts, vitamins. Sometimes another one for hair drying is required. Luckily I’m quite close to the bathroom, but at home I could be naked all the time, dash to my room in half a second, and I had more space and room. Ah, college. Luckily our bathroom is clean and never crowded. Wendy’s also thankfully ok with me not wearing boxers to bed (I hate it cause I roll a lot) and we’re completely comfortable changing in front of each other. Her mom’s taking us out to dinner tomorrow night. Whoot.
(this is later) the next morning, actually. Last night wendy and I got a lift to dolan with Karen the security guard, who is really nice. I had to ride in the prisoner part of the car. She took us around the townhouses, which are like a whole bunch of duplexes and multiplexes?, many many more than I had thought there were of them, and pointed out all the kids who don’t live there and just wander aimlessly around looking for a party or an open door. If they don’t live there and they’re being disruptive she writes them up and sends them packing. She also broke up a party of seventy-five people that night, and as we got dropped off there was something about a car on fire. She also invited us to do the ride alongs, on a weekend night after ten, when you see really amusing drunken antics and watch people get busted. Heeehee. Oh and I hate drunk people, even though I am awful at spotting them. One of the closeted girls on our floor, most likely one of the ones who wound up here by accident, had an entire troupe of drunken people visiting her last night, wandering around our floor in cow blankets and slapping our hands saying “yeah sub free, you go, you’re cool”. Grrrr. We could have had them kicked off of course if we’d told Karen the RA, but they weren’t too annoying and I think people do pity jen and her ilk for being stuck on the dry floor. Anyway my classes today are transformations in western art, Spanish conversation, and philosophy. Wish me luck!

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.

I have no idea when I will have the chance to actually post this, but here goes. It’s 11:48 pm, I’m having some alone time in my room and it’s finally time that I chronicle some of the amazing, different, slightly scary things that have been happening since my mom and greg left Sunday at four thirty. Ok, first of all, I’m loving this, despite some brief feelings of weird homesickness, and “wow, this is like living in a hotel! When do I go home?”, and worrying about my mom and how lonely she’ll be without me. I left her a card telling her how much she’s done for me and that I love her. Typical of our relationship, though, she didn’t mention it when I talked to her on the phone.
I must say this: the absolute best decision I made was choosing the substance-free floor. THE BEST. EVVEEEEEER. This is like the coolest experience of my life. We signed a contract last night agreeing that not only will we not have illegal substances in the dorm (Campion), we will not come back to the dorm inebriated. Ie, if you get trashed, sleep elsewhere. Unfortunately some people seem to have arrived here against their wishes, which is odd considering the dean of student life said there was a huge waiting list to get sub-free. The two top floors of Campion Hall are sub-free. I don’t know how many people that actually amounts to, but it’s all soph and freshmen. Fourth floor, where I am with Wendy, 425 in the corner, is entirely freshman. Both floors are divided on the half into guy-girl. Wendy and I were determined to have THE coolest room, but we’ve been unfortunately upstaged by Katie and Lauren down the hall. Don’t know how they did it, but they have the coolest room ever. One of the ideas we’re pitching to our RA is having floor competitions, like for best room, neatest room, dirtiest, etc, and WE want that award. We’re working on it. Our beds are bunked against the window, our armoirs are by the front door, and our desks and bureaus do an L along the walls. Someone told me our room, being a corner, is wider than the others. We have a lot of floor space in the middle, which is nice! We’ve made it really comfy and colorful….the walls are covered, but they looked planned out and elegant, not hodgepodge. I used to my ties to decorate the bedposts. Greg’s pirate flag is hanging from the ceiling. I propped sara’s gift to me up on the microwave. Along with the michell prom doll, the significance of which I am tired of having to explain to everyone after they remark on me having a Barbie. I put greg’s tshirt, which he kindly donated to me slept-in, on huggy the bear. It makes a nice pillow. Wendy liked the top bunk, which is good because in our old bunk beds, I was on top but I had a ladder and a railing. Nothing here, and me afraid of heights! Eep!
Ok none of this explains why this is so cool, and why sub free is in particular so very cool. It’s so weird but at random moments one of us will just shake our head and go “oh my god this rocks!” and give everyone high fives. Ok, so there’s no partying in our dorm, not of the drinking variety, but tonight we had sixteen people in 415 watching meet the parents, reno 911 and family guy, eating popcorn and having fun. Last night there was a party in Regis next door, and no one there slept. Someone got arrested. Two freshies are on probation from ORIENTATION. How is that possible, I don’t know. Yeah so we don’t have to worry about stupid parties at 3am, although if you leave your door unlocked, as sean down the hall found out, crazy people walk in at 2am and don’t leave. Lock thy doors. We don’t have to smell vomit in the bathrooms, which other Ras have promised their students will begin this weekend. We might miss the walk of shame, but I’m sure a few people around here will have to do it. Sub-free halls and BRs are notoriously cleaner than any other. This still isn’t the main thing though—the very best thing is the people. The emphasis on our floors is community, and it’s so amazing. We really are a community, in a way that other dorms aren’t, because other dorms haven’t necessarily committed to the same lifestyle choices as we all have. People here are so friendly and so open, and I know one could say that’s just Fairfield, but no it’s not. There are plenty of snobby people, plenty of drunks. I’ve met them in my orientation group, where they discussed drinking habits and the cost of a taxi ride to the beach houses. So far three people have noted the same phenomenom I have: with a few exceptions, the coolest and nicest people I’ve met independently of the floor turn out to be living on Campion 3 or 4. it’s the strangest thing, but so comforting, especially when we all get together and people are so different but united in this aspect. We have one girl, Mo, who’s a recovering alcoholic. Everyone else has a lot of varied reasons for choosing this floor. I didn’t actually give it a lot of thought, beyond the fact that despite my having tried many types of alcohol, I do not like them, and I do not wish to imbibe them, nor do I wish to be forced to cohabitate with those who do so on a regular basis. Already last night a drunken lacrosse player was arrested after he injured a girl he was carrying. Last year eighteen ambulances were called in the first MONTH of school. Much drinking occurs here, but I’m comfortably insulated from that, and if I want to go to a party to party, I can. Freshmen are not supposed to go to the beach without a specific invitation, and Wendy scored us one from one of the improv guys, so we’ve got that option. Also, so far I’ve noticed that a majority of the people on the sub-free are on some sort of merit scholarship from the school. I know that five of the thirteen university fellow scholars, myself and roomie included, are here (I get my laptop tomorrow, complete with the Ethernet card, so michelle can be wireless and online! Whoot!) Chris is here! The pic of myself I put on our door under my name is the one heather gave me from the southwest, of me in that blue hoodie of hers, with chris right there in the background. He’s downstairs. Wendy and I have had so much fun just walking around introducing ourselves to everyone, knocking on doors, although most are left open (more common with girls than guys) and writing on those little boards “Visit 425! Love, Michelle and Wendy”. We’re in a corner and don’t want to be forgotten. Tonight when we were getting ready to go to the carnival, we were going to go with Lauren and Katie from down the hall, and we wound up with 22 girls and three guys, a huge herd moving as one across the campus. At one point we were a huge long line and I made a pirates of the Caribbean analogy! I made an engraved candleholder tonight with a pirate ship on it, and another with ship rock/ monument valley on it, in honor of the old southwest. I got a henna tattoo of a gorgeously plumed peacock, and two temporary tattoos, a snarling tiger on my back and barbed wire on the back of my neck. It was so frickin loud. I skipped the following dance to come back here and do the movie thing, and now wendy’s sketching and I’m writing and we’re discussing the glories of sub-free yet again! I’m making guy friends. The guys on these floors are so friendly. Actually the only standoffish ones are the ones who didn’t want to be here and are understandably upset about being contracted to be sober.
Ok more stuff about sub-free, and just so you know, this post has taken a while to be writing, in between doing other things. First of all, all the RA s here get a certain budget to plan activities and field trips and such; our four RA s get double that, simply because we’re sub-free. So we can have a lot more stuff to do and places to go. And, one of the very coolest things of all, something Harry Potter related because of course that is so cool. Yesterday the RA s made us fill out this weird survey with moral questions and personality questions like “mark year: first year, second year, third year. are you: cunning, hardworking, adventurous or organized? If you were a superhero, what would be your power?” Even the bathrooms were marked “: WOMEN’S Freshmen (1st Years). a friend of mine went and was chatting with our RA, Karen, who told her that this year they’ve decided to sort the sub free floors into Hogwarts Houses and do inter-house competitions like in HP!!! How frickin’ cool! Now more than ever I need my Ravenclaw scarf back. If I’m in Ravenclaw, that is; they didn’t mention this before so that they wouldn’t skew the survey for everyone trying to be Gryfffindors. Wendy likes HP, which is excellent. Some people have never read it here. The third floor rooms even had HP postcards attached to the doors!! One of the guys down there said I could have his when he takes his name down. Oh and I met my first person to have had a religious opposition from to HP. Her name’s Katie, I’ve mentioned her twice I think, and she’s really cool. I met her back at orientation and I never realized she was, to put it frankly, a jesus freak. Christian rock music (loves switchfoot, sara), youth ministry, religious rallies, prays over her food, told Wendy she wouldn’t walk next to her if she wore this trampy top to dinner, etc. Yet she’s not some reticent, pale little thing. She’s lively, outgoing, even boisterous. She never read the books, yet believed they advocated witchcraft. Until the pope officially accepted them, that is. Oi. Wendy and I refrained from arguing with her, but we privately agreed that that’s crap, and who would suddenly change their opinions of something because one old man in Rome suddenly says it’s ok? We’re both unaffiliated religiously. Lots of people here wearing crosses. Never saw that at northwest outside of campus ministry, really. ok that's all i have time for right now...i have to get dressed for my whole fifty minutes of class today. creative mind! whoot!!