first days of school and fall

Yesterday evening (the first day sans father and sister), I didn’t feel like facing the cafeteria (I know, I know—it’s probably a bad sign that I couldn’t face it my first day here. But I was also being frugal! I wasn’t feeling very hungry, so why waste a whole meal’s worth of points on a snack? We’re going with that excuse.), so I walked over to Jamba Juice in the gathering dusk (isn’t that a lovely phrase? It’s so nice to think of the dusk gathering.). I got to the shop six minutes before closing, so the store was empty, except for the workers. It was nice to sit in brightly-lit, fruit-scented store and listen to the end-of-the-day chatter of the smoothie baristas. Walking home in the twilight, with the “high travel of clouds” above was also incredibly lovely, especially since someone was practicing their saxophone in their dorm room with the window open. I think that solo sax was meant to be played just before nightfall. It makes such a lovely, lonely evening sound.

Later, I consoled myself with some kettle corn and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was made less awesome by David Borenaz’s lack of acting ability. I know he gets better later (he’s pretty good in all two of the Bones episodes I’ve seen), but right now the man is driving me crazy. Slightly concerned and sullen face does not equal pained, suffering, misunderstood love. It just equals sightly concerned and sullen face. Sometimes he’s so expressionless I can’t tell if my internet has frozen or if his face just looks like that.

Much later (My, do we keep late hours here at college! Most “evening” events seem to start at ten o’clock or later), I went to the Comedy Sportz (spelled like that, according to the host, “because the ‘z’ makes it funny”) event, which was, in fact, even more hilarious than I had been lead to believe! For those of you who don’t know, Comedy Sportz is a show where two improv teams face off against each other in different improvisational challenges, usually with audience participation. They’re judged by a referee who also acts as the host. I think my favorite comedy “sport” was a game called Forward/Reverse, where the team acted out a scene, but when the referee yelled “Reverse!” they had to re-do the scene in reverse. And he kept switching them back and forth, so the scene would go: “Oh my god, you broke it!” “No, you broke it!” “Reverse!” “No, you broke it!” “Oh my god, you broke it!” etc. Surprisingly funny. The best part of all of it was that the actors seemed to be having a really fun time with the improv. (Fun fact: when you type “improv” in Word, Spell Check automatically corrects it to “improve”. Every. Single. Time.)

Today, I wasn’t very hungry for breakfast, so I walked over to Breadsmith (the adorable bakery only a block away from my dorm) and got myself a delicious banana chocolate-chip muffin, which I brought back to my dorm and ate with a cup of tea that I made myself with my handy-dandy water heater (See, parents?! It was totally a necessity!).

After that, I went to a clan meeting, where we were shown a multitude of informative (but perhaps not very useful) pamphlets. Then we played an epic game of rock-paper-scissors (during which my Orientation Leader—Salima—had a near-panic attack of joy at seeing my splendiferous, Nerdfightastic giraffe love shirt. ) and went off to little seminar-things. A couple of other Ramsey kids and I went to the seminar on “What to do in the Twin Cities”, which was interesting and helpful. Did you know you can “check out” free museum passes if you get a St. Paul library card?! Me either!!

After a lovely lunch with one of the Ramsey kids from before—Annalise—I went on an epic adventure (involving one bus trip sitting next to a lady who had just met the governor and wanted to tell everyone about it) to Office Max, which unfortunately lives in the sketchy part of St. Paul. After some confusion, however, I managed to purchase my school supplies and leave the store without the one thing I’d been the most excited about buying. *sigh* Oh, well. Next time!

At dinner time, I went with Charmaine and several other girls from my floor (and also one from Turck) to the cafeteria, where we had a lovely time trying to remember each others’ names and discussing class schedules (and I met another nerdfighter!!! TWO NERDFIGHTERS!! IN ONE DAY!!), after which we hurried back to our dorm just in time for the floor meeting! The meeting was surprisingly fun, and we got to sign our floor agreement (not particularly exciting), which included a plan to leave our doors open most of the time, so that we can visit and hang out with each other easily (very exciting!). After that, Charmaine and I and two other girls went on a floor tour, where we stuck our heads in the rooms of all of the girls on our floor, said hi, and introduced ourselves. It was awesome.

At 9:30, we went to the talent show, where we heard a speech piece (dramatic interp), two original songs, a bagpiper, and a person playing the recorder. Extremely well. Also my mystery saxophone player! Afterwards, several girls and I (one of whom was ANOTHER NERDFIGHTER! THREE NERDFIGHTERS IN ONE DAY?! THIS LEVEL OF AWESOME CANNOT BE POSSIBLE!) were feeling all keyed up, and the air smelled like the approach of autumn, and it was cool and lovely and nighttime, so we dashed up the many flights of stairs to our dorms, changed into appropriate fall jackets and sweaters (to celebrate the approach of fall), and five of us from our floor went on a random walk/skip/dash/dance around our part of St. Paul talking about (among other things) the oh-so-deep-and-philosophical topics of North Carolina snakes, the marvelous Daneland (usually known as Denmark), and Paula Dean.

On our way back into our dorm, we saw a group of boys clustered avidly around a television screen in the ground floor common room, watching what appeared to be a National Geographic special on scuba diving. Charmed, delighted, and proud of this clear case of extreme nerdiness at our school, we decided to join them, only to discover (several minutes later, and much to our dismay), that it was NOT a National Geographic special, but instead an episode of Dexter. As none of us had ever seen this rather (in?)famous show, we continued to watch, until we were horrified to see the extremely creepy “hero” of the show torturing one of his victims. As we fled, the boys in the common room were heard to say “Haha, look at them just running away!” I admit to the charge. Upstairs, we fled en masse to the single room of one of our number, where we hastily put this disturbing image out of our minds by watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother, which was handily set in Minnesoohhta. Soothed by the laugh track and Barney’s innuendos, we returned to our rooms sleepy, but satisfied, only to discover that it was already past midnight. Although tempted to sleep in our clothing, we bravely got ready for bed and set our alarm clocks for the ungodly hour of 6:45.

Although all-in-all an excellent day, it’s no wonder that the Dean of Students says that the college’s biggest health concern is sleep deprivation!