1/11/01

it’s so, so good to be back. i feel so much more complete here at school, where life is hectic yet uncomplicated and drama is held to a minimum. i’ll gladly trade jealousy, violence and drug addicts in exchange for books, classes and early morning alarm clocks.

i’m getting ready to go to the first party i’ve been to since leaving school: beer, boys and punk rock. the last time i went to one of these i was by myself, and i stumbled home under a lightening musky sky thinking of all those warnings my mother had always given me about never walking home alone in the dark. i made it back in one piece, snuck into the dorm and rolled into bed. when i woke up the next morning, i was naked. i barely have any recollection of coming home that night, and none at all of stripping down. my roommate is a bit uneasy about my tendency to unknowingly expose myself; she says she’d have no idea what to do if she woke up to find me unclothed. i assured her it wouldn’t be the first nor the last time someone had seen me in that state, and to just look away and throw something over me, like one would extinguish a fire.

i picked up my last paycheck today. a whopping sixty-nine dollars and forty-eight cents. i won’t be working this semester, so i’m going to be one very, very broke little girl. in place of work, i’m taking german this semester after all. my professor made me an offer that i couldn’t turn down: eight extra credits added if i make a c or higher this semester. that brings me up to a total of twenty-two credits, whereas i only had twelve without german. so deutsch it is. this also means that i’ll only need four more credits (one more semester) to acquire a german minor. so it looks like i’ll be having a minor within my first semester of sophomore year. how fucken cool is that?

the rest of my classes are decent, thus far. not as rad as last semester, but that’s to be expected. my psychology teacher is a lingering grad student who resembles a chubby greg graffin; my philosophy teacher is a conservative man with one tiny, silver loop earring in his left ear as a staple of his rebellious side who says “mmkay” a lot; my english professor is a nutri-sweet woman who smiles through displaced modifiers; i’ve got my same unbalanced german professor and my sociology professor walks the thin line between brilliance and insanity. he has a chrome baldhead with white hair sticking out from everywhere along the sides, bushy, overly animated salt and pepper eyebrows, and glasses like un-tinted pig lenses. he’s an oxymoronic, absurdly wealthy, completely non-hypocritical liberal who speaks only in ranting tangents. so, my classes are good for the most part. they’re all in completely different buildings than i had before and my legs keep wanting to steer me in the wrong direction, but i’ve been leaving fifteen minutes early for each class and getting there early. we’ll see how long that lasts.

two of my classes are held in fairfax, an old church turned into classrooms when the separation of church and state clause was finalized. it still has the smell and sound of a church, though, old polished wood and creaking-alter-steps. it’s strange to walk through it and see boisterous college students instead of elderly women in floral church dresses and veiled sunday hats.

and there’s this boy there.

he’s in my philosophy class, one of the ones held in the old church, but he by no means fits the building’s sermonic decor. he’s a misplaced gothpunk boi with bondage pants and misfits shirts and fishnet sleeves and spiked collars and gauntlets and black red tipped hair. he sits right next to me, front row center. i think we’ll get along just fine.