Well. I haven’t written anything here in a little while. That’s
not to say that nothing has happened in the past…two-ish months.
The routine settled in. Papers, scripts (for my playwriting course),
and kanji had to be written, more urgently than blogposts. I had softball
practice at both 6:30 and 18:30, depending on the day. I opened that stationary
store at 8:45 twice a week and closed it on the weekends (there were plenty of
mid-shifts, too). Then there’s the whole social-life thing (which I got much
better) and keeping up with home and sleeping. Or maybe I let the blog slip
because the new-car smell of college faded, replaced by the ever-present, pungent
wafts of pot.
I don’t mean to sound whinny; I love 1,439 minutes out of
the 1,440 I get at school every day. That’s just my lame excuse for why writing
a blog got boxed out of the weekly plan: I got busy.
But my writing professor is insistent on “getting back on
the horse” and “writing even if it’s been awhile.” In fact, in her rule book, I
shouldn’t even be apologizing (to myself, or to whomever) for not writing [in this
personal life-log]; I should just get back to it. To my great surprise, this little
project still gets read a few times a day, despite its preoccupied writer’s
absence.
So here’s to getting back on a horse.
I’m not even at school right now; the semester ended last
week. I’m home for the holidays, planning on driving back to the Anthill in
mid-January with two fellow Ohioans. Thanksgiving break has come and gone;
basically I got off for five days in November, went back to class on December 1st,
stressed about finals for 2.5 weeks, and then came back to the kitchen chair I’m
sitting in now.
My question to Karen Lawrence, the president of SLC: what
would happen if we moved the start of school to the beginning of August, or
three weeks earlier, and have the semester end just before Thanksgiving, spanning
the holiday break from Thanksgiving to just after New Year? In a more realistic
proposal I would expand upon the beneficial outcomes of this adjustment, but
something tells me that there are more interesting things I could discuss…
I suppose some interesting things happened in October, November,
and December…
I joined the DIII softball team! I love the team for the
sport, which is good for my quick-twitch sense of athleticism…so I’ve been
told. The coaches are strict but fun, and my teammates are down to earth and
outside of my typical circles of friends from class. This past fall the NCAA
allowed us five weeks of practice and one game; we almost won against Yeshiva
University. Apparently we’ve drastically improved from last year. Practice
season starts up in February.
Maybe I’ll be an anthropologist when I grow up; I’ve really
enjoyed a semester of sitting around talking about cultures. Then again, there
are four areas (archeological, cultural [the focus of my current course],
linguistic, and physical) of study for the field…all of which are, while
interesting, potentially/maybe/likely/sort of/I-dunno-but-for-the-sake-of-the-argument unemployable. I recently got the “you’re
gonna have to figure out what to do with your life in the near future” lecture.
I’m not gonna let it get to my head too much at this very moment, as I do the
type-and-delete-type-and-delete cycle for all my expansions on the subject. Time
for a new paragraph.
My neighbor and friend Marinoff and I recently got $5
tickets to the Broadway play This is Our
Youth, starring Tavi Gevinson, Kieran Culkin, and Michael Cera (thank you www.studentrush.org), after which we got
selfies with all three actors. I stood three and a half feet from Ewan McGregor
and Maggie Gyllenhaal on 43rd street after seeing a rehearsal of The Real Thing and passed “Big Boo” from
Orange is the New Black in Chelsea,
but now I have photos to prove the encounter happened; the one with Paulie Bleaker
got some serious appreciation on Facebook.
NYC is still great. My impersonation of the accent is getting
better. New Yorkers have asked me where I was from, saying that my accent is “weird.”
My friends from Essex, England and Derry, Ireland get that more, of course, but
it’s still true that I am a New Yorker in training.
Finals? They happened.
Midterms? They didn’t happen. Such is normal at Hipster
College.
Retail is busy in December, but now I wrap gifts pretty
well.
I have a new found appreciation for trains, subways, and
buses. I think of them fondly as I drive around in suburb-city.
I’m gonna miss my former roommate, who has chosen to
transfer out. But I don’t get a room to myself; I get to room with one of my
best friends at Hipster College (which is even better). Boston isn’t far away
though; maybe I’ll save up for a bus ticket and a weekend get-away, where I
know I have both a couch on-which to sleep and/or a dorm room floor on-which to
crash.
I don’t know if I’m really different; college hasn’t changed
me so quickly, methinks.
Youthinks?
