Saturday, August 30, 2003

Wind to thy wings, sister.

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

It feels as if my life is too big to fit into my body.

It's week ten of a ten week term, and next week are final exams...though honestly, week ten is much harder. Finals are simple. You show up and you give them the right answers. Week ten is the week of preparation and intense intense work. Some might call this studying. I prefer to call it 'freaking out.' I have some amount of reading to catch up on for my various tests and quizzes so that my professors have quantifiable proof of what they already know...that I know the material. I have a six to eight page paper to write about the open casting call that I attended last weekend. I also have one final project which I think I'm done shooting. More on that later.

I'm told that I do nothing. Which certainly doesn't feel true, this week. It took me nine whole weeks to fall behind, this term, where I usually have something of a breakdown around week six or seven. Not to mention the fact that I have about thirty hours on my next paycheck, which isn't all that bad for a full-time student who spends tons of time with her boyfriend. But maybe I don't do anything.

My hair, partly pink for the last month or so, has washed out to blonde underneath. I think I'm going to dye it back to pink, but I have certainly decided to have it cut again next Thursday. Fortunately, only the underneath of my hair was bleached out, so the fact that my roots have grown in about an inch doesn't even really show. I just kind of look shaggy.

Thursday, August 07, 2003

There is so much life to live and only so much time in which to write about it all.

It's been a slow, sweet haze of contentment and humidity.

I picked up my seemingly-larger-than-usual group on Monday. Alas...cajoled once more into giving the campus tour to this week's mob of engineering-camp kids. And it started out fabulously. They laughed at my jokes, they were willing to talk to me, tell me where they were from, and about the tiny woman that seemed to be in charge of the program but who forgot had forgotten my name each of the last five times I'd told her what it is. According to the kids, she would show up for a couple minutes at a time and vanish for hours in between. Go figure.

So, for once, I'm getting some interaction from the engineering kids. I suspect it was the kamikaze way I flung myself into their tour, the last one of the summer, with the determination that dammit, they were going to like me and we were going to have fun. I'm walking backwards, yelling at the top of my lungs, and hoping out loud that the threatening sky would hold off for us. Unfortunately, no such luck. While fielding a question about my hair being pink, those chubby black little clouds decided to rain on our rather lengthy parade. This, of course, no more than ten or fifteen minutes into the tour. Ok, I figure, it's just a little rain. We'll be fine. A quick look told me that none of the few girls in the group was wearing a white t-shirt, so we proceeded on to reach the shelter in front of the library. During the library schpiel, the rain turns into a downpour. Of course. At this point, mind you, I still had them amused.

No problem, I think, we'll hop right across to the gym....how long could this possibly last? One athletic speech later, I had my answer. Long enough. Yes, folks, we'd been upgraded to a torrential downpour, and partway up to the residence halls, socks starting to get wet, we gave in.

The next five or so minutes was a struggle between keeping track of the kids who wanted to run for cover: "If you know where you're going, you're welcome to go on ahead," and trying to pull the stragglers up from the rear. There was shouting, there was skipping, and there was "We're waiting for the light to change because I'll be damned if I have you soaking wet and hit by a car." And of course, I felt terrible. These kids were here on day camp to see geeky Drexel engineering stuff, and I'd gone and gotten them wet right down to their panties. And not in a pleasantly liberating way, either.

Fortunately, after a half hour of searching for evil tiny-woman and profuse apologizing to the kids for my poor judgement in dragging them from building to building rather than trying to wait it out, Jennifer (I'd known her name since the first week) showed up with a big box of really cute t-shirts. They said Summer Engineering Experience @ Drexel. I, being just as soaking wet as the kids and wearing a more see-through shirt than most of them, was also offered a shirt, which I gladly accepted.

Every time I think about that shirt, I want to write on it "I walked through a thunderstorm for SEX@Drexel and all I got was this t-shirt."

Three days later and my sneakers have only just dried out.