These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

There are so many things that I love about college. Here's a few of them. 


Weekends are lovely. I never really appreciated weekends until I got here. It's so easy during the summer when both parents are retired to lose track of what day it is or even how far into the month you are but there is no possibility of that here. Or more precisely if I want to do well it's not possible. I have to know what day it is because my Greek class is at different times on different days. Do I need to read Goethe for Lab tonight (he didn't just write Faust) or can I postpone it? TGIF has taken on whole new levels of meaning for me. It means that I get to go to a lecture for fun about how the brain is formed in infants and the best part is I don't have to take notes. It means I can try to sleep in the morning although my internal clock refuses to let me sleep past 8 anymore. But I can lay in bed and pretend that I'm going back to sleep. It means I won't feel rushed about squeezing in study time between classes and sleeping. Weekends. They're the best.


Last Sunday for instance was a particularly good day. I felt like such a grown up at the end of it. I'd done almost all of my homework on Saturday and so I felt perfectly able to take the bus to church by myself. I'd already done it once with one of my dorm mates and I'd been downtown a couple of times so I was pretty well acquainted with the plaza area. All was going well until my bus driver dropped me off at a stop that was definitely not where I had gone last time.
"Today there's a big parade going on for Fiesta and they've blocked off the usual stop for it so you just turn left down there and you'll get there just fine."
"Ok." I assumed that this was going to be the place where I'd meet the bus again since they were already blocking off streets but I discovered later it was not. 


Fiesta is a big deal. It's a three day weekend with a parade every day and Sunday is the last day, culminating in the biggest parade of all lasting two hours and you're sure that 3/4 of the Santa Fe natives are on one of the floats. Everyone with anything to sell be it an idea, a politician, a hot tub, or a Boy Scout troop has a place. But the parade hadn't actually started yet so all I had to wend through was several vendors and the early birds grabbing the best pieces of sidewalk to watch. I got to the cathedral just in time to hear all of the bells pealing wildly and see several costumed characters emerging, Conquistadors, Franciscan monks, Native Americans, and the Donnas and their beautiful daughters. I assumed that since a big event had obviously just finished that there wasn't going to be a noon Mass in 15 minutes. I made a lot of assumptions that day. I wandered around to waste time until the 1 o'clock bus but when I wended back by the church I was informed that I couldn't go in because Mass was ongoing. So I slipped in in time for Communion and found myself with another hour to waste until the 2 o'clock bus. Luckily for me the parade had just begun. 


I didn't understand how there could be enough people for a two hour parade. I live in a town larger than Santa Fe and a parade lasts maybe an hour. But Santa Fe is much older and has a richer culture. And everyone here understands that half the fun of a parade is being in it. I walked past a yellow bus disguised as the Yellow Submarine with the Walrus and the Eggman escorting it, several bands including bagpipes and mariachi, more Conquistadors mounted on horses, and Ninja Prairie Dogs fighting Crows. I finally reached my most recent bus stop to discover that it too had been blocked off by the splendid parade. But if you stand around looking confused with a bus route map traffic directors will take pity on you. I managed to get on the bus and out of Fiesta with very little difficulty and I felt positively adult at the end of it.


Mail is another thing that makes me feel adult except without most of the annoying bills. Even in this age of blogs, email, Skype, and cell phones there is something very exciting about sending and receiving mail. Notices about lectures, concerts, hikes, paychecks (yes I've managed to keep my job long enough to get paid) and plenty of uninteresting info is stuffed into my tiny box every day. I've sent postcards to my family and I've received packages in return, my favorite being the most recent once containing fresh fruit, books I forgot, photos, and notes from my parents. Hopefully I'll be able to keep the pattern of outgoing mail as it seems rather unfair that I'm getting so many treats and I'm just happily receiving them.


Movie nights. 3:10 to Yuma is amazing. I'd never seen it before and the amount of time we spent talking about honor when we were reading the Iliad was actually useful. Up was not any more meaningful unfortunately but I still love it. I'm hoping I can talk someone into watching a musical with me this week. I do not love all musicals *cough Oklahoma! cough* but they do seem to dominate my favorite movie lists. I'm thinking Hello Dolly! or My Fair Lady. Barbara Streisand and Walter Matthau or Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. Oh the dilemma. 


I'll try to avoid having a blog post where I talk about all of the things I hate about college. Greek for instance is really messing up my perception of the letter "p". Because in Greek the letter Rho looks just like a lower case "p"  but it's pronounced like the letter "r." So now when I see a "p" I have to think about it for a moment even if I'm not in Greek. So yeah, college stinks if that's my greatest problem. 

Survival

I survived my first week of real college. No more summer camp for me unless you count midnight tea parties. And Greek class is like a secret code so that we'll be able to write messages to each other in invisible ink. I'm already able to read the Greek graffiti on the sidewalks and walls. We went on a hike in my last Lab class. Instead of campfire songs we have Delphic paens in Music. Math class...well...ok, so it's not summer camp. But it's a lot of fun. I'm even enjoying math when I can understand it (thank God for colored chalk) and I only had one small panic attack the whole week.

My dorm mates and I have formed into a gang. We eat together, we watch movies together, we curse our tutors together, we solve Euclidean propositions together. The gang is functioning very well so far. We still have to come up with a proper gang sign and elect a Godmother but our nerdoms are integrating well together. I will be introduced to the wonders of Doctor Who in the next week or so and we're already able to bicker about which Star Trek captain is the best (Kirk!)

Our great adventure for the week was a Walmart trip and I was ridiculously excited. On the one hand, a small campus is great because you get anywhere you need in five minutes. On the other hand, a small campus is terrible because no matter where you go you can't escape the nagging feeling that you should be studying. Walmart sounded like a welcome escape.  Ten minutes after entering Walmart and almost running into and almost being run into fifty different times and discovering that this Walmart had no produce section I was ready to leave. Why did I ever want to leave campus? Sure there weren't any good apples and I was going stir crazy but at least I wasn't being steamrolled every time I turned the corner. The gang reassembled and we managed to escape with all our limbs intact and our desire to leave campus sated for at least another week.

Things to do:

Learn Euclid's Props 6-14.

Finish categorizing evergreen specimens

Pick a film for movie night that we'll all like (One gang member hates Rochester which kind of spoiled Jane Eyre for her. But luckily Cary Fukunaga's excellent directorship and Michael Fassbender's awesomeness made up for it.)

Petition for better apples in the cafeteria. The food's still good but come on. Granny Smiths? There's a reason people only put them in pies.

Swing dancing. Make time for the dancing part this week and not just the lesson. Remember that tiny panic attack I mentioned? Yeah, I really should've been studying Euclid and not learning She Goes.

Update blog more often.