scream it to the nothingness

today's title comes from home by edward sharpe and the magnetic zeros. idk, blame ginger.

i guess it's time for me to update this thing again. where do i begin? well, a quick skim of my last post let me know that i left off right before my iranian revolution seminar, so i guess that's as good a place as any to start.

let's do this chronologically, shall we? on friday, after running all the way from my bio lecture, which ends at 2:50, to my film class, which begins at 3, i found myself in a rather large, carpeted office. not a classroom - an office. a very nice, dimly lit office, but still an office. oh, and there were no chairs in it. just lots and lots of rugs and these flat chair/pillow things on the floor. i'm not sure what they're called - maybe s-la could ask mona about it. anyway, we all sit down in the floor-pillow things and wait for a professor to come in.

except there is no professor. after a few minutes, a TA comes in, introduces herself, and puts a ten-minute video of the professor introducing himself and talking about the class on the projector. then she puts in a dvd and leaves.

the dvd in question? a compilation of pre-revolution iranian films. it was three hours long. now, i'm going to let you do a little critical thinking here. what does one dimly lit, air-conditioned office, plus comfortable pillows, plus one three hour movie equal? if you guessed a roomful of drowsy people, you'd be right. i'm thoroughly excited for this class now. as you all probably know, i'm all for naptime.

later that night, i had another nail party with the hall-es. look at all the nail polish!

oh, and marvel at my toes. aren't they great?

after that, i attempted to figure out the big bad world of skype. it sort of worked. i got s-la on for a little while, but ended up getting distracted by the hall-es playing christmas music (we've decided that now is as good a time as any to start the caroling - i miss holiday music, you know?) and making funny faces at me. i think she talked to them a little, too, when i went to get my computer charger. at any rate, it was a lot more successful than any of my other attempts to use skype. if only sarah with an umlaut would figure out oovoo like everyone else.

best quote ever? "i hate having to tell people i'm from leesburg because no one knows where lansdowne is. we're too rich to live in leesburg!" oh, s-la, never change. the angry twelve-year-olds from omegle would be proud. 

oh, i went running on friday with one of the hall-es and another friend, too. it was only about a mile, but it was enough to prove that all the eating i've been doing has gotten me way out of shape. i guess i'm going to have to work on that. i'm going to yoga and kick boxing classes, though, so hopefully that'll help.

on saturday, michelle and another one of the hall-es and i went to the farmer's market in fredericksburg. i have fresh fruit now! peaches, specifically. they're yummy. oh, and we got pastries there, too. actually, we just ate a lot - see what i mean about being out of shape? like after that, we went to the fredericksburg library - i have a library card now! - and got books, and then shopped a bit. i got a belt and a shirt, but that's it in terms of clothes since i already have too many. but then michelle showed us this amazing little bookstore where i stocked up. here's the full list, more for my records than yours, since i'm trying to keep track of what i read while i'm here:

1. howl's moving castle - diana wynne jones. i got this for one dollar! i love tiny bookstores. 
2. the road - cormac mccarthy
3. the dante club - matthew pearl. this was a library book since i have a copy at home. i just miss it. 
4. the white tiger - aravind adiga. my global issues in lit teacher talks about this one all the time, so i figured i'd give it a try.
5. the queen of dreams - chitra banerjee divakaruni. also mentioned in lit. 
6. the cardinal and the queen - evelyn anthony. this just looked fun. 
7. the secret history of the mongol queens - jack weatherford. remember how s-la and i really liked genghis khan and the making of the modern world, the book we had to read for ap world sophomore year? yeah, it has a sequel. i'm ridiculously excited for it. 
8. the devil wears prada - the movie. not technically a book, but i got it at the bookstore - and for only five dollars!

we had dinner at this amazing diner michelle always talks about. i had the best milkshake of my entire life. it was huge - we split it between three of us and were basically full just from that, but the food was good, too. after that, we headed back to the dorm and watched the devil wears prada with some of the hall-es, and then i got ready and went out. 

sunday was more of the same. i caught up on my studying and homework for the week - i'm completely done with all of my bio work for the whole week! i'm pretty excited about that - and we went to a cookout and hung out with a few people and went to a bunch of club and newspaper meetings. we went downtown again for dinner. we ate at a purple restaurant! it was purple inside and out, a policy all other restaurants should try to follow. oh, and then on the way back we found a gelato place run by an actual italian. we could barely understand a word he said but the gelato was amazing. i got black raspberry cookie dough, which i didn't even know existed until...now, actually. it was so good that i bought a pint of it, but now i'm trying to ration it so i don't run out. 

after that, i completely failed at skyping/oovooing again, so if anyone wants to try to have a real conversation, i'll be on tomorrow night. some of the hall-es and i watched sherlock holmes. i forgot how much i missed robert downey jr.'s silly faces:

nothing very interesting happened today. this is my back-to-back bio classes day, so i basically spent five hours trying not to laugh every time professor bowtie described unsaturated fats as kinky. oh, and i wore contacts again. so far nothing too bad has happened, but when i tried to take them out last night the right one folded in half and got stuck in my eyelid and i had to flush my eyes with water for like half an hour (and with roomie supervision, since they seem convinced i might accidentally die on them or something) before it would pop back out. why do these things always happen to me?

i'm going to wrap this up now. i've got to meet some friends for dinner and then get my homework done. i figured i'd get this post over with now so you could all marvel at my good blogging and finally update your own. not that i'm hinting or anything. 

the list goes on and on

today's title comes from gives you hell by the all-american rejects/glee because it came on my itunes shuffle just now.

so, my first week of classes is almost over. i've actually managed to survive it. i even did laundry! and my roomies and i are now mostly unpacked. we're still figuring out how to organize everything. we're thinking of going to the mall this weekend to pick up a communal bookcase since, as you can see, my desk area is a little cluttered right now:

the mall is fun. there are actually two of them, right across the highway from each other - an indoor mall and an outdoor reston town center-type deal. we went the sunday before class started with michelle, chiara (she's an italian international student with a fancy coffee maker - i took it as a sign that we should be friends), and renata, my neighbors. michelle's the girl from fredericksburg that i mentioned in my last post. freshmen aren't allowed to have cars on campus but she got her parents to drop hers off for the day so she could give us the grand tour/we wouldn't have to take buses. she's got the cutest car - it's a bright yellow beetle. i'm in love with it. oh, and while we were in downtown fredericksburg, i found the cutest vintage thrift shop. it specializes in nothing but audrey hepburn memorabilia. like, it tracks down posters and post cards and replicas of outfits she wore in movies. i probably don't have to tell you this, but i stocked up:

classes started monday. it was pretty easy. i have my biology lectures and lab that day, but it turned out to be a lot of review from high school. i had a lot of sophomore year/s-la flashbacks. oh, and we got to play with tapeworms. that was fun. our tapeworm had spots and cute little goggle eyes when we looked at him through the microscope, so my partner and i decided to name him fred.

i've got three classes in a row on tuesdays and thursdays. two of them are really fun and one of them is stats. my chaucer and his age class is amazing. the professor is just like my ap lit teacher last year, which means everything is automatically funny. today we started out talking about chaucer's life and the various references he makes to religion/history/literature/nature/astrology/your mom and somehow ended up talking about mimes and how she still can't pronounce virginia place names correctly. i'm happy, because it's a 300-level english class and my advisor was all "caution! danger! danger, will robinson." but it's all good.

my other english class is global issues in literature, which is, predictably, depressing. it's also my last class of the day, so we usually go straight from there to dinner. not the best idea. so far we've been focusing on famine and poverty. as you may expect, these aren't topic conducive to a healthy appetite. thank god for to go boxes, i suppose.

tuesday was pretty eventful outside of class, too, actually. on the way to dinner we ran into a guy dressed like this, which i'm sure s-la will appreciate:

and i stopped him to say hi/tell him how in love with his shirt i am. (the friends i was with were mildly bemused but i think i'm training them to get used to the weird). after that came the awkward small talk phase that actually wasn't awkward because the guy told us the cutest story about how he and his friend were going to the dodgeball club game (side note: there's a dodgeball club. oh, college) and everyone was a little afraid of going now because two people who graduated last year had met at dodgeball and were now married. and then he asked us to go to dodgeball with them. which...no. i'm holding out for an accent or someone with proven culinary ability. we all know what happens when i get near a kitchen. it's a good thing there are dining halls/restaurants/takeout.

the takeout around here isn't bad, actually. i still haven't found a good thai place, yet, but we found a yummy chinese place that delivers and had a movie night in on wednesday. wednesday was basically a girls' night, actually. to begin with, the momster came to visit/drop off more things that i forgot. we walked around downtown with the lulus. i miss my evil little munchkins so much. i wish i could smuggle them into the dorm with me. they're so tiny, it's not like anyone would notice. well, not until every pair of headphones in the hall ends up in lulus evil clutches, anyway. still, we had a good time, see:

after that, we headed to the wonderfully air-conditioned library to chill in the tree houses:

while there, we discovered that one of my hall-es likes to dance while she's studying/listening to her ipod. we got the funniest video of it but i've been banned from posting it. oh, we also invented the term hall-e. it's pronounced like wall-e and it's basically the people who live on your hall. idk, it's just fun to write out. plus we had just watched wall-e (one of the other hall-es was showing it in her room and we popped in) so we sort of had it on the brain. then we had more animal fun times. first, we tried to lure a squirrel over to say hi with trash:

and later that night we saw russell the cat again:

club fair was wednesday night, too, so now i'm signed up for all sorts of interesting things. i'm excited. after club fair was the laundry party. me and six of my hall-es grabbed our laundry and met up to combine our laundry and get it all done together. our laundry room is in the basement, so it was good to have buddies down there. we ended up bringing computers and ipods and speakers and having an exercise/dance party since it took, like, two and a half hours to get everything sorted/washed/dried/folded/sorted again. oh, and in the middle of it, s-la, jenibean, and meggo were all "get on oovoo"/melodramatically asserting that i'm dead (i'm clearly not - look at me bloggling!) so i got on oovoo and talked to them/let them creep on us. it was pretty fun.

and then after that was a bout of creepiness/general hilarity that i can't blog about but am mentioning so you can remind me to text/call/skype you about it sometime. it's carried over until...now, actually (two of my neighbors, one of my roomies, and a couple of my hall-es are stalking the fourth floor while i write this), so you'll want to hear this eventually. i might get to be james(ina?) bond after all! and to think my second grade teacher told me being a super spy wasn't a viable career choice. that bwitch.

today i had three classes in a row again, so nothing too interesting happened. like i said, we took today to clean and organize and make a list of groceries to get (we're splitting breakfast and basic snacks with our neighbors so we can all have breakfast and decent coffee together early in the mornings instead of going all the way to a dining hall before class. i spent some more time studying in the tree houses with a few of my hall-es. oh, and we had a mini nail party in the lounge. there were so many pretty colors, i was a little overwhelmed. my fingers are now sherbet orange with a sparkle me silver top coat (OPI! i love my hall) and my toes are painted red hot chili pepper. after that we just chilled in my room and watched reruns of community and the office. oh, and we finally figured out the channel listings. that was exciting (well, to me, since we all know i'm a nerd). and now i'm blogging really quickly (in case you couldn't tell, i've been saving bits and pieces of this post as drafts all week long and was too lazy to finish and post it) before everyone comes back.

tomorrow i have my first revolution and cinema in iran seminar. i'm really excited for that class, in part because the kite runner is on the reading list for it and i really loved that book. wish me luck! and tell me how life has been for all of you. or get on skype. i'm sunandsilence (obviously). i need friends!

call me an expert after three days

well, a lot has happened since the last post. for one thing, i managed to move in...surprisingly successfully, actually. like, don't get me wrong, there's still a whole army issue duffel bag full of clothes that hasn't even been opened yet, but some things are unpacked. that's way more than i thought would happen.

so, here at training wheels college, i have already been semi-rescued by the momster. she was here having dinner with the future-stepdad's boss (who lives like a minute away from campus - so guess who's been loaded down with emergency contact numbers) and i come back to the dorm like five hours after move-in and find six bags full of food from target waiting for me. well, at least i won't starve.

despite my worries (see the last emo post), college is fun. we're in the middle of a whole week of orientation, so maybe it's been a little too fun, but don't worry - once classes start and i need sleep (9 a.m. labs...blegh), i'm probably going to morph into the world's most boring college student.

...actually, i might already be the world's most boring college student. activities include: seeing the magic show (surprisingly good), going to the free fair (where - surprise surprise - you get free stuff), a couple of parties (including a jersey shore viewing party...why do those exist?), and wandering around with people trying to find things.

homesickness hasn't really kicked in yet, but ever since ginger reintroduced this song to me, i've had it stuck in my head. it was playing on loop the entire drive down here, so now i'm probably always going to associate it with depressing leaving-home things. thanks a lot, ginger.

my roommates are nice. one of them has horrible, horrible taste in music and is a bit of a partier, but she's being considerate and not an alchy, so we'll see how it goes. oh, and i have access to a car! don't worry, i won't be driving it. i met a girl who lives in fredericksburg but didn't want to commute, so she lives on campus, but she introduced me to all her friends who do commute (and therefore can drive us places) so now i'm excited.

other exciting things include:

the treehouses. they're these elevated study pods in the library where you can just look down and feel taller than everyone. why, yes, i am a nerd.

this is russell the cat. he isn't to be confused with russell the dorm or russell the person who lives in my dorm. nope, he's a kitty. a stray kitty, to be precise. we first saw him after being (badly) serenaded by a band of drunks who were standing on the hill outside my friends' room and trying to creep on us/get us to come outside. once one of the (few) sober ones figured out what room we were in, came up to say hi, and turned out to be nice, we headed downstairs and said hi/laughed at his drunk friends. my favorite was mah-mood. i'm probably spelling that wrong, but whatever. that's how he introduced himself to us. all "HI, MY NAME IS mah-MOOOOD." and then he started ranting about basically everything under the sun. i love drunk people. but, to get on with this story, we were all sitting outside our dorm and two guys walked past us and basically threw the cat over to us. we figure they must have picked it up from the ground since it seems to live around our dorm, but at the the time we were all kind of freaked out/going "wtf, there's flying cats here?". and that's how i met russell the cat. i kind of wish i could take him home with me, or at least let him into the dorm. meg the crazy head resident (and she really is crazy - all the RAs are really nice and friendly and soft spoken, and then meg calls us down for a meeting, cusses for every other word, and threatens our souls if we do any little thing wrong) would probably stop me, though. i'm sure there's a "no stray cats in the dorm" rule somewhere.

as for taking the cat home...well, sometimes i kind of want to take me home, too. it's so strange. i'm having tons of fun (except for right now - i'm waiting to go to my advisor meeting, which promises to be very, very boring) and people are nice and it actually isn't too hard to make friends but...it's like if i stand still and think about it, i actually miss home. like, fun as this is, i still expect it to be like going to camp or something, and being able to go home after a week or two and just pick my schedule back up. i still don't think i've wrapped my mind around the fact that we're all in or going to completely different places. hell, i even miss the momster/having her crazy around to make me feel normal. i guess it's time to see how well the oovoo/skype works.

we all knew this was coming

it's two thirty in the morning and i'm still awake. i am one hundred percent packed now. even the car is packed up. that's how packed for college i am. also, i really hate using my number keypad, so don't expect anything with...digits. is that the word? i don't actually know. it's late, i'm tired, and...

i don't remember my first day of high school. or middle school, for that matter. for some reason i do remember every first day of every grade between kindergarten and sixth grade. i guess my brain is just weird like that.

well, today is about to be my first day of college. i wonder if i'll remember this one. i guess that's why i'm blogging. i really shouldn't be, i'm so tired that i can't even understand what i'm typing right now. i guess it's a free write, then. stream-of-consciousness? if only i was james joyce.

i'm actually excited to go to college - and even if i wasn't, the momster's crying fits in the container store/bed, bath & beyond/harris teeter/every public place in the world would be enough to make me excited just at the prospect of leaving her. but...

my room is empty. like, meggo's and jenibean's fans are off the walls and my bulletin board is taken down and my sheets are in the dryer still because the momster said i wouldn't want to come home to a dirty room. it's so creepy.

so now i'm sleeping on the couch. it's kind of fitting in a way. i mean, my first night in this house (my first night in a lot of houses, actually) was spent sleeping on the couch because those slacker parents of mine were too lazy to set up my bedframe. they blamed it on my picking out a bed made of wrought iron and wood. i still think they were just lazy.

i dyed my hair black yesterday. it's going to be a pain to keep up during college, but at least it isn't The Oops.

just looking at the link is enough to make me nostalgic. alas, alack. woe is me, etc. etc.

in other news, real madrid signed another midfielder and drew against a third-rate belgian team in a pointless friendly yesterday. if they keep this crap up expect lots and lots of pissed off soccer ranting from me this year.

oh, and get on oovoo. it's addictive.

ahahahaha

i'm getting to all of you. this is a quick post to share the good news: i've got another convert. that's right: the soulless ginger has a blog! go follow him. hopefully we can peer pressure him and sarah with an umlaut into consistent blogging.

...which also means he needs a tag. damn it.

oh well, here's my nocturnal song of the night. it used to be on the bloglist (you know, way back when there was one), so it should be familiar (i'm looking at you s-la), but just in case you haven't heard it:

also, i just want it on record that i object to this whole "rachel is snarky" thing you all seem to have agreed on. i am so not snarky. trust me, i know snarky people and i'm definitely not one of them. mildly sarcastic, yes. full blown snark? not there yet. but, oh, do i have goals.

let's see how far we've come

today's title comes from how far we've come by matchbox twenty. i've got this playlist full of really cheesy songs that i listen to during moves/transferring schools/important life changes &c. and this one is all over it.

in case that wasn't enough to tip you off, i'm in full on nostalgia mode right now. i'm not entirely sure why it kicked in now and not, like, a week/month/year ago, but...well, it probably has something to do with this:

that? that is the result of six hours of shopping yesterday. my feet still haven't recovered. and i strained my ankle doing yoga last night and have to wear tape on it like a loser, so that might have something to do with it.


i've got to pick up a bunch of odds and ends tomorrow morning before the movie marathon s-la mentioned finally starts, but other than that i'm...done. other than laundry and physically throwing things into boxes (i'm not a big believer in that thing called "neatness", especially not when it comes to packing), i'm actually ready to move into my dorm...and away from home. i feel like i should be more excited/worried/spastic about this. i'm mostly just calm, though. maybe this is the real reason seniors get to leave school early - summer has stretched on for so long that i'm just ready to actually do something. or at least get away from the momster who keeps trying to bribe me to stay home with cupcakes and coffee and crying binges in the middle of the container store, oh lord.

it's so weird to think about this, but - excepting meggo, of course - i didn't know any of you four years ago, and now you're all so important. i wonder who we're all going to meet in the next four years. i wonder if we'll still talk then, or if we'll all have gone the way of the girl jenibean affectionately refers to as she-devil. like s-la, i don't think we will. for one thing, we really are the only people weird enough to put up with each other, and for another, i'm kind of bossy. all of you better expect lots of annoying blog posts/texts/facebook messages from me for the rest of your lives. also, we've discovered technology! see?

look at us, using technology. successfully, even. i'm still a little amazed. honestly, web cams just make me feel old. it seems like not that long ago video chatting was that thing they showed in movies to let you know you were in The Future. what happened to us?

also, i feel like our omegle adventures really have scarred me for life. like, i might have post traumatic stress disorders. when we added bean to the conversation her friend was the only person in view and i had, like, a vietnam flashback, all "OMG PENISES. PENISES ARE GOING TO RISE OUT OF THE DEPTHS AND FLASH US RUN FOR YOUR LIVES BITCHES."

and, yes, that is exactly how the vietnam war was fought. don't let anyone tell you anything different, okay?

maybe later i'll take a picture of the dogs for you all. the momster had them shaved again. they look terrifying.

physician, heal thyself.

alternatively, you could heal me.

i seem to be spontaneously sick again, but for once i'm going to the doctor early and getting it all sorted out before i become debilitatingly ill/loose another tooth. i hear they come in limited supply or something.

there's a real blog in the works, but until i get back from the doctor, here's two things to tide you over:

this is amazing. i kind of hate the original song, but...big band covers! you listen to this one if you know what's good for you (this means you, too, s-la)

soccer football! i'm saving s-la's latest post to read in the car/waiting room so i don't know if she wrote about it or not, but we were in full international friendly-viewing mode. it was relatively good times. well, it was cathartic to be able to yell about the usmnt's poor defending with other people, anyway. for those of you slackers who still aren't watching, bayern munich is playing real madrid (so basically, the german national team's starting 11 and a few dutch players are playing half of the spanish national team) at 2:55 and it's being showed on espn. not espn 2, or 3, or depo-something spanish idk. actual espn. go watch it.