Yesterday I was having a conversation with a woman who I’ve been in a few classes with here at Wells.  At the end of the conversation I said something like  “Well, okay, I’ve got to go to orchestra now” and she said

“Wow, you do a lot.”

What I wanted to say was “Thank you”, but as the words were in my mouth, I realized that “Wow, you do a lot” isn’t actually a compliment.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that to someone listening in, her “Wow, you do a lot” would have sounded more like “Are you completely insane?”

It got me to thinking about stress addiction.  Earlier this semester, I listened to a friend of mine describe her busy schedule (twenty credits, a part-time job, auditing an art class, a couple of clubs) and I actually felt guilty for not doing enough.  Keep in mind, this girl is no longer working that hard because it’s not actually possible for her to do so.  But hearing about it, even when I suspected she would eventually relax her commitments a little, was enough to make me jealous.

Here is a list of what I’m doing right now:

15 credits of “real” classes.
5 credits of independent study, choir, and orchestra.  Total=20 credits.
Henry’s VIII, a campus a’ cappella group, 6 hours/week.
Work study job, 5 hours/week.
Campus Greens, which I’m a partial member of.

Wow, I do a lot.  And sometimes I feel like it ought to be more…

I’m sure acronyms can be quite useful.  And the best ones are clever, that’s nice.  But really, they are severely overused.  On campus, there are a plethora of clubs, positions, and campus groups that refer to themselves by acronyms.  That might be fine if they ever used the full names, but they don’t.  I am constantly getting emails saying things like “MUN is having its first meeting of the semester.  New members welcome!”  Which is all well and good if I’m in MUN, but if I’m a prospective new member, how am I supposed to know what those letters stand for?

Here is a list of a few of the acronyms we throw around on campus- you can try to make something of them.

MUN
MSA
WBS
WRC
WIIS
BIRT
GP
RA
TA
HRA
SA
SU
AI
Q & A
POWER
WISA
IT
JICS
LIS
CoCo
SAAC
AER
FARGO
WIRE

So, you’re home for winter break.  The holidays and all that.  You see your family, you celebrate, you waste your time watching movies on the couch.  But you aren’t the only one who has come home.  Your friends (high school or otherwise) are all home too, and you want to see everyone.  Hopefully they want to see you too.

The trouble is, for me anyway, that I have so many friends and aquaintences I’d like to see.  Sometimes I even feel compelled to meet up with people who aren’t necessarily close friends of mine just to find out what they’re up to these days.  Of course my really close friends and I make time to see each other.  But there are a lot of people that I don’t end up spending time with.  We run into each other at the mall or a holiday concert, and our conversation goes something like this:

“Hey!”
“Hi, how are you?”
“Great!  So, how’s school?”
“School is excellent; I love it there.”
“Oh good.  Hey, we should really get together sometime to catch up.”
“Yeah, definitely.”

That yeah, definitely is the tombstone on any future get-together we might have in mind.  Of course we want to get together, and at the time of the conversation we have every intention of doing so.  But somewhere along the line that yeah, definitely creeps in and ruins everything.  In polite conversation these days, yeah, definitely has come to mean
“I’d really like to hang out sometime, but we’re both busy so it probably won’t happen.”

Let’s break it down.  Yeah is of course an informal version of the word “yes”.  Here it means “maybe”, or even “probably not”.  Definitely is a trickier word.  On the surface it sounds great.
“We should definitely get together.”
But in truth it becomes a substitution for the actual event.  The word definitely says
“I care about our friendship enough to use this strong word.  I am putting effort and caring into us.”
The false promise given by definitely eventually replaces the formal act of getting together.

On rare occasions, I do actually hang out with the yeah, definitely people.  It’s often pretty awkward.  We’ve used insincere pledges on each other so many times that our friendship has sort of withered away.  We find we have nothing to talk about anymore, or perhaps we never really did.  Maybe, we think, it would have been better to have just left it at our chance meeting and our yeah, definitely.

People often ask me what surprised me the most about college.  I guess it’s a pretty common question to ask a student.  It’s really a good question to ask a student at a school you’re thinking of attending, for one thing.

It took me a while to come up with my answer, but after some consideration I think it’s this:  The friends I made at school are not the people I would have befriended in high school.  I’m not saying that’s a good or bad thing, necessarily, it’s just true.  Sure, we would have been friendly acquaintences in high school, but these people simply would not have been the people I chose to hang around with outside of school.  But outside of the context of high school, it really doesn’t seem to matter whether we are athletes or geeks, activists or passive observers, pretty or plain, scientists or historians or engineers.  We are simply people with common interests, similar senses of humor, and like tastes.  We are friends.

I think just as good a question would be to ask what surprised me the most about coming home.  I certainly had a few things to choose from.  My parents got rid of our piano, brought a lot of new things into the house from my grandfather’s estate, and re-arranged my room, among other things.  But none of those things fazed me as much as this one small, stupid thing:  My father changed his salad dressing.

For as long as I can remember, my father has always used ranch dressing.  He used it at home, he used it at our favorite pizza place, as far as I know he didn’t use anything else.  So I was very surprized when I came home from college to find out that he had switched from ranch, his old standard, to maple dijon.  It’s not like it actually matters what salad dressing my father uses.  He can use whatever he likes.  It’s just the principle of the thing.  This was not a change in the physical layout of the house, the way things are arranged or the way they look.  This was a personal change.  A personal choice.  It was like my father had changed a part of himself, even if it was a small, unimportant part.  It just put college into perspective for me.  I am going through different things at school, but that doesn’t mean my family will be exactly the same when I come home.  They are entitled to change, and they will absolutely be different people with different experiences just like I will.

Over the course of the year, I’ve come to view my dorm room as something of a pet.  Maybe that’s just because we aren’t allowed actual pets, or maybe it’s because I’m accustomed to thinking outside the box, but whatever it is it’s true.  Our room has its own little quirks- the strange noises the walls make at night, the way it shakes in high winds, the way it’s always much hotter than the rest of campus.  Sometimes it does get its pests- the spiders we had the begining of the year, for instance, but overall it’s fairly clean.  We have a really excellent view of the sycamore and the lake.  The point is, I know I’m probably going to have to say goodbye to this room for good in a few weeks.  It’s sad, sort of like I’ve only been fostering the room and now the time has come to pass it on to someone else.  Or perhaps the room has been fostering me.  Nonetheless, it has been a good run.  I’ll miss this room.

It is one of the most sinister diseases known to mankind.  Found mostly in the North, it occurs during January, February, and March, and it’s happening across campus right now.  It is known as Spring Fever.

Today it was forty-two degrees and sunny.  Tomorrow, we expect snow or freezing rain.  It’s so tantilizing to have fluxuations like this.  People from out of state are so confused about the changes.  Jenny, who is from California, laughs at us when we start bringing out spring clothes.
“It’s forty degrees out!” she says, “Forty degrees is not flip-flop weather!”

And I agree, but it’s hard not to get excited when it’s warm enough to leave off the coat and venture out in just a sweater.

In high school, we used to have an epic Battle of the Classes every spring.  It was intense.  Each of the four classes was pitted against each other in a series of contests.  I was never a big fan, because it was encouraging us to hate each other.  (I never bought into the It Separates Us But It Really Brings Us Together argument.)  Nonetheless, I would go and cheer for my class every year, which probably makes me a hypocrite.  One thing that always bothered me about Battle was that many of the cheers and chants taken up by my classmates (and sometimes by me too, I admit it) were extremely negative or meant to bring the other classes down.  I didn’t like that much at all.

(I stole this picture from Emily Strong’s facebook account)
Here is a picture of me and some friends at Battle of the Classes when we were seniors.  Also, for some reason there was this tradition of the senior class dressing up in horrible 80’s fashions (possibly because we were born in the 80’s?)

The point (I do have one) is that when I came to college and found out about the Odd-Even rivalry we have here, I was worried that it would be a repeat of Battle.  I was pleasantly surprised.

The Odd-Even rivalry has to do with the year in which you graduate.  I graduate in 2011, for example, so this makes me a member of the Oddline, otherwise known as an Odd or an Oddliner.  Someone who graduates in an even year would be a member of Evenline, an Even, or an Evenliner.  The cool thing about this is that instead of turning us all against each other, it gives us allies within the school and among the alumnae.  Each team has its own traditions, colors, songs, and the like.  Odd colors are purple and yellow.  Even colors are blue and green.  So.  Now that we’ve got that straightened out…

The tradition is for freshman and sophomore girls (heavily coached by juniors and seniors) to have a sing-off and a basketball game in the fall as a sort of homecoming celebration.  This year the Evens won the sing-off and the Odds won the (more important) basketball game.  I didn’t get to see either one, but I hear they were a riot.

(I stole this picture from Maggie’s facebook account)

This year for the first time, the men of the college decided to create their own tradition in the Odd-Even genre.  Their version is a competition in the form of a chili cook-off and a dodgeball game.  I couldn’t make it to the cook-off, but the dodgeball game was legendary!

The teams were pretty evenly matched, much to everyone’s surprise.  The Evens had much more athletic guys, so most of us were expecting to be slaughtered on the court.  Turns out, the Evens were athletes, but their sport is soccer.  Our guys, while smaller, had much better hand-eye coordination somehow.  The two teams battled it out in a series of games, and the score was tied for most of the evening.  The boys trotted out at half-time leaving a 4-4 tied score behind them.

In the second half, tensions were running high.  The score remained fairly even, but there were a myriad of disputes.  One game, which would have been credited to the Odds, was argued over so much that in the end the referees threw the entire game out.  In the end, the Evens were triumphant, though Oddliners are still arguing over alleged cheating on the Even side and the game they might have had.

The best part for me about the competition is that in the end we sing to each other to remind us that we are all one campus of friends.  While it is sometimes difficult, Odds and Evens can give up their quarrels and party together again when the game is over.

All in all, Odd-Even is a fun, exciting tradition, and I look forward to cheering on my teams in the future.  And a big congratulations to all the guys for finally making it happen!

Hmm, that post was something like a sports review.  I’m not sure how I feel about that.

There is a fly trapped in our dorm room.  I think he accidentally flew in when we had the window a while ago.  At first I found his relentless buzzing rather annoying.  Every once in a while, I’d hear him as he passed overhead and I would get a little angry at him.  Sometimes, he would buzz by during a particularly dramatic moment in a book or movie.  But now I find him a bit endearing.  Go ahead, call me crazy.

It started last night when he got stuck under the shade of the lamp on my dresser.  It’s a rather bright light with a white shade, and when he got caught under it he just kept buzzing back and forth frantically.  Think what it must have been like for him.  There he was, already in a foreign world, when suddenly the entire world was WHITE and BRIGHT and CONFINING.  According to the box, the lightbulb puts out 1170 Lumens.  I’m not sure what that means exactly, but it’s a pretty big number, and imagine what it must have felt like to the poor, tiny fly.  Add to that the fact that flys have complex eyes (so they can see WAY more than we can), and the poor thing must have been in an immense amount of pain.  I know what it’s like to have sensitive eyes, and that cannot have been fun at all.

The point is that ever since he got stuck in there, he hasn’t been the same.  Not that I was really monitoring his behavior that closely before, but he has now taken to flying around at random, buzzing almost constantly for long periods of time, and running into the walls quite frequently.  I know it sounds weird, but I’m actually a little worried about the wee fellow.  I have good reason to believe my lamp drove him temporarily (if not completely) insane.

Perhaps I am the insane one.  I feel a bit like Renfeild, actually, and trust me, that is not a good feeling.  I like to think that this obsession is more along the lines of “She wouldn’t even hurt a fly”, because that would make me a much nicer person.  The point is that the fly is trapped.  And maybe my caring so much proves that I am a little trapped too.  Maybe I need to get out more, instead of spending so much time in front of my computer.  Maybe I need to find some human company so I won’t have to worry endlessly about a fly.

I actually do think my college life is going well so far, and I certainly don’t regret any of the time I’ve spent here.  But maybe it would do me at least a little good to get out more.  Meanwhile, my poor friend the fly will go on ramming into the white walls.

So this morning, we had another of Main Building’s infamous early-morning fire alarms.  I wasn’t sleeping this time, thankfully, but I still managed to be in quite a predicament.  A wet, naked predicament.  Again.  But this time it really wasn’t my fault!

 That’s right, this morning as the fire alarms rang through the hallways, I was just stepping out of the shower.  So I wrapped my towel around myself, keeping one hand firmly clasped on the knot, and started the trek to our evacuation site, dripping hair and all.  To be clear, I had my glasses and a pair of flip-flops on this time, but that didn’t seem like much compared to the amount of clothing I was wearing (none but a towel).  Douglass Adams would have said I was prepared for anything (because non-hitchikers would willingly lend me what I needed after seeing that I at least had my towel), but I felt superbly underprepared.

It could have been worse, I suppose.  Sarah was actually in the shower (with the water running), and she didn’t hear the alarm go off at all.  Not very reassuring, I must admit.  Though I would have been quite happy this morning to go on showering, blissfully ignorant.

 I like to look at it as a refreshing stroll in the cool, morning air.  If a bit chilly.  On the plus side, an upperclassmen from my hall told me today that I was officially a member of the Wells community now that I had been caught in my towel during a fire alarm.  This begs the question “What kind of school is this?”, but I think she meant it in a broader sense.  Welcome to college, honey.  The ordinary rules don’t apply here.

I was sighted in my towel by most of my building, as well as a few early-morning commuters (from the dining hall to class), some of whom I knew.  Even my Environmental Science teacher showed up and said hello.  Pretty embarassing, (especially the hairy legs), but I’m okay with that.  Now all I have left to deal with is the chill it gave me, and my friends saying
“Hey, Emily!  How was your morning?”

I work in the dining hall here at school.  One of my jobs is to clean plates off so they can be super-rinsed and sterilized.  It’s a gross job, but the thing that disgusts me the most is the amount of food people throw away.

Today I was forced to throw away a whole, unblemished apple.  You might think this was some kind of freak accident, that no one in his or her right mind would throw away an entire apple, especially here where fresh fruits are so scarce.  You’d be wrong.  I throw away a whole apple at least once every time I work in the dish room, and I work there once a week.  So we’re definitely wasting one apple a week, and think of the things other workers must be throwing away!

 I’m not talking about the food that goes bad in storage or the food that gets set out but not eaten.  That’s an unavoidable consequence of a school kitchen and can’t be helped.  I mean the food that people put onto their plates and don’t eat.

“Don’t take more than you can eat.”
“Finish what’s on your plate, or there’s no dessert.”
“You eat what’s put in front of you, I don’t care if you don’t like it.”
 How many times did our mothers tell us these things, and why haven’t we listened?  Why are we so wasteful?

People are starving across the world.  I don’t mean to sound cliche, it just happens to be the truth.  How can we be so selfish as to throw away food when some people have to live with hardly any?

I’m not saying that you will like everything you put on your plate every day.  I’m not saying that if you accidentally take too much food you should always finish it and make yourself miserable.  Just please, please be considerate of amount of waste you create.  If each person attempts to curb his or her waste habits, we can start to make a difference.