Today is my last day at IU.

Freshman year has gone by fast.  In a haze of classes, dorm food, and almost unashamed boredom I have spent two full semesters here.  I am still shocked every day to see that the beauty that initially made Bloomington my first choice for school has not faded away. The coming summer months make the place greener, fresher, lovelier.

But I am ready to go home. I have lived too long with a room mate (not that she's a bad person, I am just a private one) and I have had enough of classes for now.  I miss my family, my friends, my dogs, my familiar bed - 

But that is where I stop.  This bed has become familiar to me.  When I go back for weekends or holidays this is the bed I want to sleep in. The people in my classes, the teachers, have become welcome sights. I might not have my own pets, but I do have squirrels and chipmunks that will almost stand still long enough for you to pet them.

And - I'm not going to lie - living away from my parents has been fun.  Part of that might be because I haven't had to do chores, but I think it's also shown that I have responsibility. I'm not dead. I'm not addicted to drugs. I haven't gone to jail. I enjoy living away from all of that, from the same town I've been a part of since I was six.

And I've made so many friends here, from so many different places.  They are not my friends from home for sure, but they're just as good, and now I have to leave them for four months.  I am being stripped of the people that I have spent nearly every day of an entire year with.  They are some of my best friends now, some of my favorite people to talk to and gossip with and drink coffee on a cold day with.

I'm not sure how I'll be able to cope.

I am going to see Spamalot tonight or, Even Sweet Transvestites Win Once in a While.

Indiana University - blessed IU - can sometimes be extremely supportive of my nerd love, and there are very few things that I love more than Medieval mythology and funny British men.  The speak to me, deep in my soul, and I cannot help but love everything about them.  So, when I heard that IU was putting on Spamalot, the musical based on Monty Python's The Holy Grail, I could do little but stare agape, drooling in utter disbelief and excitement, waiting for tickets to go on sale.

And then I waited a little too long.  My friend and I (the friend that usually accompanies me on my less-than-typically-teenage escapades) went to purchase tickets about a month ago.  A month, we reasoned, gave us enough time to get good seats yet not seem too eager.  We wanted to seduce this play like a love long lusted after, not like a first date fumble. Or maybe it was just me.

I like to daydream a lot.

And so we went to get tickets, and found that the only seats left were all the way to one side of the auditorium or in the balcony.  Apparently, treating popular musical adaptations of movies like dates you want to impress is not the way you are supposed to go about these things.  We ended up getting the seats that were closer to the stage instead of the balcony seats in the middle of everything.  Problem is, I am short and very nearsighted, so either of these choices were probably going to be difficult.

So, tonight we see Spamalot. Me for the first time and my friend for the third.  It will be totally awesome.

Things I like that no one else understands or, My favorite religious song is for the Shakers

I have a band concert tomorrow, in which I will play the flute and generally be really awesome.  I'm excited for this concert, too.  I really like the pieces we're playing, my favorite of which is called "Chorale and Shaker Dance," which is a variation of Simple Gifts, the Shaker Theme Song.

I like Simple Gifts.

I like Simple Gifts like normal nineteen-year-olds like Rihanna or whatever they listen to, I don't know. I'm busy making classical piano playlists so when I walk to class I can feel like I'm in a music video.

(Seriously, though, have you ever walked to class and listened to an orchestral recording of anything? It's spectacular.)

That's the Chorale and Shaker Dance. If you actually listen to it, four or five minutes in (it is kind of long, forewarning) everything starts to taste like Batman and the lights dim like Gotham City and then you get back to hyperactive Shaker Dance Aerobics and it's just lovely. If any of that made sense.

Our other songs are good too, and I think I already posted the Gershwin one, which is also one of my favorites.  I might post the rest of them later, since it gives me an actual excuse to look up concert band songs on YouTube without feeling like a nerd.

Oh wait.

I don't care.

COME TO ME, CONCERT BAND MUSIC PLAYLIST! LET US BE LIKE VIENNA IN THE 18TH CENTURY.  MAKE ME FEEL AWESOME, GRIEG AND CHOPIN, YOU GENIUSES.

Speaking of, bonus Grieg:

 

Anna Karenina or, Hipster Classics But I Don't Care.

I have am issue with buying books. As in I have to buy them constantly and then I keep them until I read them, even if that takes years and years.  Bloomington has a fabulous bookstore called Boxcar Books, and my friends and I go there of a boring afternoon, when there is nothing else to do and classes are over.  Since I'm in Bloomington, and therefore nowhere near my own personal library, I have to restrain myself from buying everything I see.  One particular day, though, I hadn't bought anything for a few months, and, delightfully, Boxcar is a good place to find cheap books.

I decided to be intellectual that day, and so I bought just two books, Anna Karenina and Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut.  I commented that it probably meant I was turning into a hipster, but I was strangely not concerned by this.  MY friends proceeded to call me a loser. It's probably true.

I decided to read Cat's Cradle first.  It was shorter (Cat's Cradle, 200 pages; Karenina, 700+), and I had heard phenomenal things about Vonnegut.  It's basically an end-of-the-world novel, satirical and serious at the same time. An amusing side note: a lot of the characters are Hoosiers (random side note: most of the characters in The Great Gatsby are from Louisville).  Vonnegut was immediately thrust into the spotlight that is My Favorite Authors, and I had to remind myself that I am poor in order to not go back to Boxcar and buy all of his books.


And then I tried Anna Karenina.  My copy has been graced by graffiti, someone having changed 'Anna' to 'Banana,' which is stupid and hilarious all at once.  I read it for about an hour, and I liked it.  It's smart and Russian and interesting to me.  The only problem was, I was having issues connecting to it.  I like to feel a connection to the books I read, and it was just not happening with this book. I chalk it up to too much literary accomplishment in one setting, but you can call it what you will.


So, instead of  reading Anna Karenina, a fabulously classic tale, I am reading Jim Butcher's White Night, about an angsty wizard trying to save Chicago and Brian Jacques' Martin the Warrior, about talking animals.

Why is IU so lacking in things to do?

I haven't posted in a while, and I apologize for that.  And now I'm going to be all hateful, and I'm sorry for that as well.


The only thing I've heard about 'round the IU campus is sorority related.  I am not in a sorority.  I never want to be in a sorority.  I don't see their point, except to make it a little easier to get wasted.  Which is pretty easy anyway, especially around here. 

My room mate is in a sorority, as is everyone else in my dorm it seems.  And I sit here, on the internet, forever alone like a 4chan meme.  I hear about the formal that my room mate's house is having,  I hear our neighbors gossiping about their awesome parties and their legion of sun-tanned sorority sisters.

I know I've made this point before, but I want to outline it again, in case it wasn't clear enough the first time: my room mate has conversations about drinking and parties; my friend and I walked around one of the Halls on campus looking at exhibits of taxidermied amphibians and birds. My idea of a cool night out involves going to the art museum or watching reruns of Doctor Who on Netflix.  Sororities do not concern me so much.

The other thing going around is religion.  My parents did not make us go to church.  The first time I remember attending one was around fourth grade, with a friend of mine.  So, when rumors fly around about Religious Anything I tend to ignore them.  However, when I heard that there was going to be a talk called "Jesus and the end of Religion" I decided to see what it was about, hoping for a legitimate talk about how religion could change.  I had hoped for a talk about what religious people thought was wrong with religion and how they thought it could be improved.  I will not deny it, I think there are some things wrong with religion, but I also believe that with some help things could get better.  They did none of these things, however.  Without going into detail, I will tell you that I was uncomfortable and angry the entire way through the seminar, and I now owe my friend my soul for making her attend the horrible thing in the first place.

So I say again, there is nothing going on around campus that is worth my time.  So instead I did this.

Faust or, Why Satan Would Make a Good Flasher.

There's a lot of things to do at Indiana University.  Granted, a lot of those things involve drinking, but what can you do.  Some of them, however, are geared to a classier sort of folk, myself included. 

My friend Claudia and I decided to go out last night, since the only alternative we had was sitting in our dorm rooms, lonely, surfing the internet.  I had  wanted to see Faust for a while, and since it was  coming round we decided to attend.

When we arrived, we realized we were severely under-dressed. Like penguins showing up to a peacock party, we walked into a dress-filled room in jeans. I, personally, felt like a winner.

We found our seats and sat down between an elderly couple and a middle-aged man, the youngest people in the theatre.  Neither of us knew quite what the opera was about, but we weren't too concerned.  All of the singing was to be in French, but there were, thankfully, super titles (which are not little floating Supermen holding cue cards).

The opera started with a lovely piece by the band, and the curtains rose to show Faust, an old man, contemplating suicide.  I was already feeling cheerful that day, and this just put a cherry on top.  Eventually, Faust calls on the Devil to make a deal with him, and Mephistopheles, AKA Beelzebub, obliges.  But, instead of just showing up like a normal demon-of-the-underworld, six of him show up simultaneously.

Six.  Six of these.

 To get Faust to sell him his soul, Mephistopheles tempts him with the love of a beautiful woman.  Faust, of course, agrees.

But I would like to make a point here: Faust is old.  Seventy or eighty, if not more.  Yet here he is, lusting after a nineteen-year-old girl.  I just want you to imagine the implications of that.

Anyway, Faust spends the next Act and a half trying to woo this woman.  The beginning of the Second Act finds Faust and Mephistopheles in the woman's garden. Mephistopheles is disguised, so the mortals who happen to walk by won't notice that he's the Prince of Darkness. He is wearing a trench coat.


Faust and his jail bait spend the next half hour singing lovingly to one another, which is beautiful and all, but the only thing I could pay attention to was Mephistopheles.  He spends that half hour appearing and disappearing behind a large bush that's downstage.  Wearing his trench coat. And totally looking like a flasher. If you couple this with the half-crazed smile he constantly had plastered across his face, he looked kind of like this:

Screw you guys, I'm SATAN.

And so I begin to silently break down.  I'm trying to hold back my laughter, and it is almost successful. I make it to the intermission, and then I mention it to Claudia. In between wild bouts of laughter and the disapproving glare of the multitudinous elderly around us, we decide that Satan would make the world's best flasher.  Perhaps even the world's classiest flasher.


About ten minutes into the final act I remember that there were a half-dozen Mephistopheleses running around in trench coats. Now I can't stop worrying for humanity.

Because I'm Better Than You.

After nearly a week of disturbingly nice weather, it rained yesterday.  I woke at seven in the morning, expecting a nice, 60 degree day, but was instead forced to bring an umbrella with me everywhere.  An umbrella that, at some point, said it itself, "Oh, screw this," and never fully dried. I made the HORRIFYING mistake of wearing Chucks instead of rain boots, causing my feet to wrinkle more than your grandfather's face, and yes, that is an image I want you to remember.

Three of my classes are early-ish in the day, no big deal.  I dealt with the rain LIKE A BOSS and came back to my dorm only mildly soaking wet and shivering. But my last class, band, isn't until 7:00 on Monday nights.  I was, by this time, shaking my fists at the sky and screaming unintelligibly at the unfairness of it all.  It was cold; it was wet;I was warm and cozy in my room.  But I HAD to go.  I try not to skip class unless I really have to, and laziness and an unwillingness to leave comfortable surroundings are not viable reasons for not going to class. So, once again, LIKE A BOSS, I went outside.  By this time the sheer relentlessness of the rain had caused my umbrella to leak right in the center of my head, making it the world's worst rain deterrent.

I get to band, we play a little bit, (by a little I mean for an hour and a half), and I flute away on my...uh...flute...

But we ended the session with this little ditty:

Not the best version of the song, but not bad either. 

Ah, Gershwin, you speak right to my soul...

'Our Fun' and 'Their Fun'

Today, for what I believe is the first time, I realized the major difference between my roommate's idea of hanging out and my idea of hanging out.

It's Friday. A good day, Friday. The end of the week, the first time I can actually stay up past midnight.  The bad part about Friday is that my first class is at eight in the morning. I wake up at seven so I can make my leisurely way to class, my roommate is still asleep, and I tiptoe around as best I can.  Her first class is at eleven, so she can stay up till way past my bed time at one frat house or another.

One other good part about Friday: I'm meeting a friend for lunch.  And she has promised to show me something cool.  A TARDIS graffitied on the side of Ballantine Hall, one of the biggest buildings on campus.  We meet finally and she shows me this beautiful thing.

BELIEVE

We go to Subway, where we talk about how time is nonlinear, how the whole concept is merely human invention, how you can remember things that haven't even happened to you yet.  High-class information, here.

When we leave, we continue to talk, and our conversation soon turns towards vampires. Not like Twilight, don't worry.  Instead we speak about the many creation theories of Dracula.  She believes it was the influence of an other-dimensiony particle, and I say it is a genetic mutation.  Eventually I have to go back to class, where two more of my friends and I talk for twenty minutes about the advantages of knowing a second language (one of them knows three and is working on her fourth)and the discrepancy of hand gestures around the world. 

Eventually class is over and my friend and I go back to my dorm- to do something cool, I know that's what you're thinking.  What did we do, you ask?  We played sheet music, her on violin and me on piano.  Her song is this lovely piece, Czardas:

And mine, the beautiful Raindrop Prelude:

(It gets really good in the middle) 

This is what my friends and I do.  For fun. BAM! Done before six P.M. 

My roommate does this:
On Thursday, goes out to party, coming back at one or two in the morning.
Turns disapprovingly towards the wall when I rise at seven.
Leaves as soon as I come in at 6:30 to START partying.  
Will not return till two, three maybe (it IS Friday night, after all).


I feel like a WINNER.

How much can it snow? I mean REALLY?

The weather in Bloomington has been particularly bipolar as of late.  It has literally gone from fifty degrees to three inches of snow to forty to snow BACK to fifty to ice, which melted just enough for it to SNOW AGAIN.  If you look outside, it's not really five inches of slippery death, it's like a blood-and-misery parfait of death-ice and freezing snow.  Pretty as it may be, it's like Hoth out there and I may have to slit a fat kid up and live in his stomach if something doesn't change.

These things sing.  WHY MUST YOU MOCK ME?

These people all died from horrible ice exposure.  They were so young...

SHE NEED A SWEATER, STAT!

 

My teachers and exercise habits.

I had my first Math recitation today, which is a fancy name for 'Just another math class that you have to take.'  It was on the Fourth Floor of the scariest building I have ever been in.  The Fourth Floor itself was dark and quiet, bits of drywall leaning by the elevator as I got off.

I did the math.  I walk, on average, about five miles a day.  I deserved to take the elevator.

I finally found my way to the room, and I sat and waited for class to start.

And I waited.

And I waited.

And the room filled up slowly.  And the teacher came in.

And he looked like this.

Okay, maybe not that exactly.  I have no way of knowing whether or not he's a samurai in his spare time.  But it made math more enjoyable.

They look like happy cacti

Since I woke up this morning (round 7:30) it has been snowing.  And not like a little drizzle of snow.  Or flurry.  Whatever.

For the past twelve hours I have seen my feet and then ankles disappear beneath the flakes.  My shins were slowly taken over by frozen water.  My sock monkey hat did nothing to protect me from the wet downpour, for that's what it was.  I became a wildlife expert, tracking the footprints of the various wildlife that lives here.  I trudged through the blizzard and went to class, all the same.

On my way to piano I spotted some birds hopping on the ground as they are wont to do.  I scared them away and looked down to see if they had left footprints on the light dusting of snow that had been left since the last brave person had crossed this sidewalk.

These footprints make me happy

I think this discovery was the highlight of my day.

Ah, college.

My Physics discussion leader has a hat like Indiana Jones.

my Physics professor is female.

My Math teacher is German.

My Piano teacher is Russian.

My Japanese sensei is, well, Japanese.

One of my friends is Chilean/German/Italian.

I can eat almost any kind of ethnic food I could ever want, at any time of the day.

I can go to the museum that is ten minutes away (seven if I walk fast).

I can see a show at one of the three or four auditoriums ON CAMPUS.  That's not counting the ones 'round Kirkwood.

If I had my druthers (and it wasn't snowing) I could sit by the wall of the art museum and stare as colors are painted across it by a lit totem.

It's pretty sweet.

The transition.

Yesterday for breakfast I had a Super Omelet.  Two eggs, some onion fried up in olive oil, tasty mystery herb from the bottom drawer of our fridge, three kinds of cheese, and some tomatoes with jalapenos.  To add to the awesome I had biscuits. Good biscuits, too.  Then I packed up my stuff for a leisurely drive up to Bloomington.  All was well.

Today for breakfast I had a choice between granola bars, pop tarts, or microwaveable oatmeal.  There is something wrong here.

I could have gone to the food court, but it was closed. My room mate said it would open today, though. 

I did not eat breakfast.  I was too sad.  So instead I decided to search out my classes.  I never like to be late, no matter what I happen to be doing, and especially not to my first day of classes.  There's a certain amount of embarrassment in that that I cannot deal with.  So I walked around till noon, finding buildings with names like Swain West.

I walked back to my room, barely able to feel my various appendages.  I walked to the front doors of my building carefully, since it seemed that a bunch of birds decided to have a Seed-eaters Anonymous meeting last night and they forgot to bring Port-o-Potties, or whatever those are actually called.

By the time I got there, successfully avoiding the bodily emissions, I was starving.  I thought to myself, "Surely the food court will be open, it's already noon!"

The food court, even the C-Store downstairs, did not open till three in the afternoon, I was told by a convenient sign taped to the doors.  I stared at the sign dejectedly before heading back to my room.

For lunch I ate soup.  Microwaved soup.  For dinner I will probably eat microwaved mac and cheese.  If I didn't think it would be too awkward I'd bring my own bag of potatoes, and if it wasn't against the rules I'd bring a crock pot.  But it is awkward and it is against the rules.

I would have gone to Kirkwood for lunch, but few of my friends are here, the ones that are are busy, and the ones that aren't busy live on the other side of campus or up a gigantic hill and have decided to be secluded today.

But classes start tomorrow and I have a lunch date with some friends.  So I'm not bitter.

Squirrels need coats too, picture version!

Awesome.

In memoriam: the feasts that will never be.

Soon I will have to return to IU, yet another institution that seems intent on educating me.  But, as fine and educational as IU might be, they leave me severly lacking in kitchen space and kitchen functionality.

I like to cook; it is one of my greatest joys.  I am good at it and I cook quite often while at home.  When I come home from school I sift through my mother's recipe books, of which there are dozens (many of which she has written over and changed, making her the Half Blood Prince of cooking), and I pick out one that I can make easily.  Normally this involves me changing a few (most) of the ingredients around to suit what I have on hand.  But somehow they all end up delicious like the chicken and bacon contraption I made tonight.

Oh yeah, you like that? Oh, you want a close up? I bet you do...

AWWW YEEEEEAH

 And as the time of my departure grows near, I think about all of the meals that I will not have the good fortune to cook, and then I think about what kind of food I have to live on in college.

My sense of taste just threw itself off a tall building.

The only problem I'm really having with this transition back and forth is the excercise issue.  While at IU I am forced to walk to all of my classes which are normally at far corners of campus and a good fifteen or twenty minutes from my dorm.  Even if I eat crap food it doesn't matter since I walk it all off anyway.  Sometimes I am just too lazy to prepare anything even it is microwaveable. 

Then I come home where I can cook whenever I want and I have no need to walk anywhere.  I realized today that I was once again gaining weight and in a desperate attempt to shed a pound or so I did five push-ups (Impressive!), ten crunches (Practically Hulk!), and two miles on the treadmill, which lead to me having treadmill-feet for about ten minutes.  Not that it helped with the chicken and bacon.

I think it was the five push-ups that put me over the edge.

Squirrels need coats too.

I find myself bundled up against the cold, walking back from my piano lesson.  It is cold in Bloomington this time of year, and the Indiana University campus is no exception. 

I shove my gloved hands into my pockets after I tighten my scarf around my face.  I pause for a moment at a stop sign to let a car pass, stomping my feet to warm them.  I cross quickly before a car accidentally runs me over and I continue up the sidewalk.  

A noise catches my interest and I look around for its source, and stop when I see a squirrel sitting in front of a building.  It has its arms crossed in front of it and it was shivering.  I stare intently at it.  It looks calmly back at me.  My brow furrows in concern.

"Yes, it's cold outside," I say to the squirrel.  I almost tell it to get a coat, but then I remember it is a squirrel.  I bite my tongue and continue on my way.

I still worry about that squirrel.  I mean, if he couldn't afford a coat for itself, how could it afford clothes for its little squirrel family? They're probably all sitting around their kitchen table having a budget meeting right now.