Friday, August 29, 2003
Well. Today, at least, has been a better day than yesterday was. Sort of.
This morning and afternoon I was still really zonked and pretty ill-feeling. I spent the morning doing something or other, I don't even remember what, just generally trying to not be sick again. Later in the afternoon, when I was feeling a tad bit better, I wandered down to the Michigan Union, which is this place on campus that has a food court in the basement. I'm sure other sorts of things go on there, but the food court is all I need to know about.
I got a salad but I only picked at it, since I was still feeling pretty queasy. Then I meandered on down to this little market place, where I purchased a bag of baby carrots and a bag of pretzels. Safe chewing foods for ill folks.
So I went back to the dorm and sat on my bed eating carrots and reading. After a while of that, I started feeling better... still uneasy in the stomach, but much better than I felt last night.
Around 5:30 a couple of girls from down the hall stopped over and asked if me and my roommate wanted to go to the Maize Craze. My roommate sort of slipped out of the room and disappeared without answering, but I said sure. So to Maize Craze I went.
This is sort of a big pep rally thing for the first football game of the year, which is tomorrow. Everyone went to this big field thing that's behind the Hill dorms (of which my dorm is one) and the cheerleaders did some things, and the band played 'Hail to the Victors', that being the glorious Michigan fight song.
The dance team also performed... they were pretty good, but it was strange, because they were wearing pink shirts and black pants, and they were holding blue and yellow pom poms for one of their dances. Bizarreness.
There was also food, which I ate a little of. I'm actually starting to get hungry now, I might break open the pretzels at some point. They had those sumo wrestler suit things, and people were going at each other in them. There were also some of those giant inflatable things you see at carnivals that little kids go in and jump on. Everyone was sitting on the grass eating, or standing around watching the people in the sumo suits or the inflatable things, or going in the sumo suits or inflatable things... just generally a big party-like thing, but with more people on that field than there are in my entire high school.
Then I went and picked up the tshirt that came free with my season tickets for football. It's neat, it's bright yellow.
I then returned to the dorm, because I wanted to make sure the digital camera was all set for the game tomorrow. I'm going to try to take pictures, so I can show them to all the non-Michigan folks out there... you won't believe it until you see it.
I also mucked about with the computer some more. I put all the songs I wanted into iTunes, so music now travels with my computer. I activated iPhoto, for use with the digital camera. I changed the backdrop of my computer... it was just one of the generic Mac ones before. I put on a picture that's actually a still image taken off of a video I took... the video is on the computer at home, but I put the still (and a ton of other pics) on a CD with me here. It's a loverly little shot of the sunset over the Swampscott bay, with Boston way in the distance.
this is what my computer looks like now
There was a really cool sunset here tonight and I took a picture of it, but for some reason Village Photos doesn't like the file, so I can't put it online. I hope it doesn't do that for all the pictures off of the digital camera, that would be most unfortunate.
As I was doing these computerly things, a bunch of people came by the room to say hi and to chat. I guess a lot of the upperclassmen moved in today, so now there are more people on my hall. So I met more people. They're mostly sophomores.
I had a very lovely chat with one of them, named Jen, who's some sort of ecology major, although she's not crunchy at all. She stopped by the room to say hi, and she saw the few books I brought along with me to college. One of them's Ender's Game, which it turns out is one of her favorite books. Hooray. She's married to a guy in the Army, and she's going to live with him in California at the end of this schoolyear. Made me think of Monsieur Chulsky, who is now married to the lovely Celine and will soon be living in merry ol' Paris.
Another girl named Nakia, who lives one door down and on the other side of the hall from me, has a single. That lucky, lucky, lucky duck. I writhes in jealousy, I does. But she is a sophomore, so I suppose it's ok... if she were a freshman with a single, I would have started screaming. Ah, I would kill for a single.
Anyways, we got to chatting, and she asked what I was majoring in. So I told her... trying to double major in art and zoology, I am. She asked if I had any art here. Quite honestly, this caught me off guard, maybe because no one else has asked. I think I said something like, "Oh, um, uh, yeah... er, I think I have a sketchbook here, or something." She then expressed an interest in seeing it.
So of course I let her look through it... it's a relatively new sketchbook, there's not too much in there... mostly pen and ink stuff from in Boston this summer, and a couple of biologically-oriented drawings, and a couple of drawings from the Cape. She said that they were 'awesomely good', which was awfully nice. Probably untrue, but awfully nice.
Ha, I have my Levellers CD on, and I'm sort of blasting it. With the dorm door open. Well, my hall deserves it, someone was blasting rap earlier. Ugh. And I couldn't put any of my CDs on, because it just made a cacophonous racket with the competing stereos. Well, I guess I could have closed the door, but a) that's no fun, then no one can look in and b) then the room gets really hot, and it's freaking hot enough as it is.
So right now I'm just vegging out, sitting on my bed with the laptop, thusly running the ethernet cable all over the room... as if we don't have enough cables going everywhichaway already. I have so many various cables for so many various devices that I put little labels one some of them today. I mean, really... ethernet cables (mine, Brynn's, and the one connecting the ethernet port to the hub), printer cable, two for the digital camera, two for the iPod, and untold millions to connect the laptop to everything else it could ever conceivably be connected to... phone lines, chargers, etc. Vurry confusing without the labels, and my desk is a mess of wires even with 'em.
I still have barely seen my roommate. You see, she knows a lot of people here already... 15 from her school came here, and she has all sorts of relatives and friends of the family here. So she's not really too concerned about making friends with the roommate. I think that if I had a roommate who didn't know anyone here (such as myself), we'd be a lot more chummy.
Hmm, well, I suppose that I do know a couple of people here. I've kept in touch with Seth from orientation... actually he called today. We chatted for a bit. I haven't seen him yet, though, since he's up on North Campus. Of course I also know Dean and Sasha, the two other Swampscotters at UMich, but I haven't seen either one of them. Sasha, I think I heard, is in Stockwell, which is the dorm next door, but it's an enormous dorm so there's no reason I would have seen her. Dean could be anywhere.
But I digress. Why, you ask, have I barely spoken with Brynn yet? She's always out somewhere with her buddies, and even when she's in the room she's on the cell phone. She's out right now, I think she's at some event or other at the Hillel. I didn't much feel like going, I'm still a little under the weather and I don't want to push it. I just hope she doesn't come in half so late as she did last night (around 3 am), I want to get to sleep so I can wake up with enough time to get a shower and head out to the game nice and early.
Only two showers for the entire hall. Not good. They're not bad showers though, much nicer than the ones they had in East Quad (the dorm we stayed in for orientation). The water pressure is really high, so you don't have to stand there forever trying to rinse the shampoo out of your hair. And there's this little anteroom thing enclosed along with the shower stall, where you can put your towels and stuff. So not too bad. But they really need more than two.
I think I shall go try and doodle something silly and dorky for my door. Maybe another XMen Wolverine with the Michigan block M. Ha ha. Yes. Excellence.
10:19 PM
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