Adventure 10 - 171 Steps

171 steps to get to my hideout in the 5th floor of the library, though I'm sure that I've done far more than that going up and down the stairs trying to find the books I was looking for.

Aside from the flipping of pages, the clicking of keys and me just being naturally noisy, it's perfectly quiet, and so much more so than the other levels of the library. It's such a nice change from my dorm; it's the honors building, so it's not terribly noisy, but I like the ability to unadulteratedly listen to my own music, read my own books and do my own thing.

Libraries, and books for that matter, have been an escape of sorts for me for a significant portion of my life. Once softball ended last spring, I spent every afternoon in the town library. It wasn't like I had any homework (let's be real, I was a second semester senior, we did absolutely nothing). I just liked the solitude that, while no one was home when I would have gotten home at the normal time, I couldn't get at home. And even though my town library wasn't anything to write home about, I could go in there every day and still find something new to look at. So now that I'm at a library that has... well, a lot more books, I think I'm going to find quite the living here. (Not to mention that they use the Library of Congress-type organization which is confusing as hell for me, so I'll spend more time searching for my book and wind up finding other stuff along the way.)

Also, please tell me this isn't cool and terrifying at the same time.

Adventure 9 - The Joys of Happenstances

Because if happenstances didn't... well, happen... I wouldn't have had the opportunity to go pantyhose shopping with a complete stranger yesterday.

This weekend is a hee-uge apple festival in the city, which means that the public transportation system was one big CF. The fact that it's consistently late isn't a problem because I usually rely on it being late, but you would think that, if this festival has been going on for longer than I've been alive, they would put more buses in service this weekend. Opinions aside, by the time the bus got to the stop, it was not only 20 minutes late or so but also completely full so we couldn't get on anyway.

I mentioned as a bit of an external thought process that I wasn't even going to the festival and instead needed to go to Walmart/Lowe's, and the guy standing next to me said that he had to also. I suggested walking down to the transfer bus stop (it's not a direct route from the school), and lo-and-behold, my trip with a complete stranger begins. It turned into the best decision I made all day.

Ok, maybe stopping into Dunkin Donuts on the way back for some hot chocolate was the best decision, but this was a close second and my hot chocolate wouldn't have happened without it.


It turned out that my new complete stranger friend is also a journalism major, and that he needed to go to Walmart to pick up costume supplies for our school's annual production of Rocky Horror, hence why he was the one buying pantyhose and I was the one buying wooden dowels. He apologized that our meeting had to be over something weird on his part, but then again, I was the one making wooden spears for a class project, so it wasn't a big deal.

It was pretty dreary out; Mother Nature wasn't sure if she wanted it to rain or just be cloudy, so it was an on-again-off-again drizzle, but it wasn't bad to walk in. It's about a mile and a half down to where we would have had to catch the bus, but we decided to walk through the festival and just walk the additional mile and a half to Walmart instead of trying to work through the public transportation CF.

Dunkin Donuts was an impromptu decision on the way back because the traditional cold weather of upstate New York decided to kick in and I was starting to lose feeling in my fingertips. We eventually decided just to walk all the way back since the bus back to the school would only take 14 more people and we didn't have much to carry; good decision in terms of exercise, bad decision in terms of my exercise-induced asthma.

We ate dinner together, and it was a really nice course of events that wouldn't have happened had the bus been cooperative. It was really nice being able to talk to someone who, until a few hours before, I had never met.

Adventure 8 - Falling Apart

Let's just say September was not a good time for the Sox.

Then again, the entire season hasn't really been a good time for the Sox.

Not all of that was their fault. Injuries happen to the best, worst and in-between of players. However, it doesn't cover up the fact that it seemed like no one on the team showed up to the games this past month.

Take Wednesday night for example. Wednesday night was nothing shy of downright embarrassing, and I'm a little annoyed that I stayed up that late on a school night to watch such a poor performance. As a somewhat sport-familiar person, I take nothing for granted, especially leads. I feel that, yes, the Sox could have definitely played better this month, but it's hard to designate specific players to blame for what happened because a lot of the game is left up to chance and no one is perfect. That blown save is proof of this. You can be mad about blowing the lead and the Wild Card, and you can blame Papelbon, God or your next-door neighbor, but it won't change the fact that they lost and ended the season in what is probably the worst possible fashion (though the Yankees blowing their 7-run lead was pretty spectacularly bad as well.)

Now that Francona is leaving the team, the team is going to undergo a lot of changes, and I'm a little worried about how the team will fit together. Tito has been the manager as long as I've been watching, and he managed the '04 and '07 teams, so it's not as if he isn't physically capable of doing his job well. I certainly respect his decision, but Varitek isn't getting any younger, and with the possibility that he might be retiring soon as well, this upcoming winter could potentially pose a large problem in terms of leadership on the team.

Every team goes through some shifting, shuffling and occasionally a complete revamping. Sometimes it works, and other times it doesn't. Here's to hoping 2012 will be better.

Adventure 7 - Futility

Learning that your intended major has, on average, a 60% job rate after graduation will dampen your mood pretty quickly. Especially when your college doesn't have the other aspect that you're interested in and could also help you get that job.

I hate these existential crises. They happen, I think I solve them, life is good for a while and then they're back.

Adventure 6 - Self-Sustainment

As a college student, I have a reasonable stash of food in my room, mostly consisting of carbs like cereal, Ritz crackers and ramen. (Don't judge, you know you did it too.) When I ran out of milk on Saturday, I took advantage of my grandparents being in town and asked them to bring me to the local supermarket after lunch. Between that trip and my impromptu trip today, I learned a few things about food.

1. I have definitely taken advantage of knowing where everything is back home. Obviously things differ a little from store to store within a chain, but starting over with a completely new company makes life really confusing. Thus, no fruit snacks for me today.
2. Buying items like loose candy or dried fruit in bulk is a neat concept, but not when you can't scoop the little chunks of whatever out of the bin. I probably destroyed far too many dried pineapple tidbits than I should've because they kept sticking to the scoop and making it impossible to pick up.
3. The store I went to is a decently large store, so they have a killer international section. What I don't get is how they could sell Pocky but not coffee syrup. Pocky is from Japan. Coffee syrup is a New England thing. I am in New York. This does not compute.

Adventure 5 - Sinking In

This week has not been a good week. I was going fine with time, and I've even been working on meeting new people. Then this week happened and I'm swamped. I was just barely late to two of my three classes yesterday (one because I was talking to another professor and the other because I had a Skype date that ran long), and because I was late to the second class, I accidentally left my keys in my room and had to get a dummy key to get back in. I have 12 hours of paint crew between Monday, tonight and Saturday when my grandparents are coming out to visit. I have a test in journalism on Thursday, intro to theater next Tuesday and one in stagecraft within the next week. I have a rather large analytical essay due on the 3rd (which seems like a long time from now but I'm not good with writing 7- to 10-page papers.) I have to work in the dining halls this weekend, and I need to go to job training for my other job at some point in the near future. I have an article due tonight that I don't have all my interviews for because the professor I needed to talk to was never available. I have a Big Bang Theory marathon planned with one of my guy friends on Friday because my boyfriend is busy doing... "other things"... this weekend. And I've just been having all sorts of problems on the boy front lately (more on that later).

I hope this week gets better.

Adventure 4 - Questioning Faith

Also, how I consistently become the odd man out in my Spanish class.

Our class is conversational, so usually our professor doesn't really say much, other than to keep the discussion going, but today he started a discussion about faith and the effect that it has on someone's life. He'd recently lost his brother, plus his wife is expecting and his mother is moving in from Spain, so he talked about how faith has kept him together through all the emotional wear-and-tear, and how it's sad when someone doesn't have anything or anyone to believe in. Naturally, he mentioned religion specifically, and he didn't necessarily throw atheists and other nonbelievers under the proverbial bus, but he did question how someone can use science to justify everything, and he got a general survey of beliefs in deities from the class.

Now, as an equal-opportunity heathen, which is the term I prefer because it has a nicer connotation than "atheist," I didn't necessarily feel targeted by the discussion, but I also knew I was the only one on the non-god-believing side. In horribly broken Spanish, I explained that even though atheists don't believe in a god, they do believe in other things (like food and baseball, but I didn't say that), so it's not like we're poor, hopeless souls with nothing to look up to. I also brought up that not all things can be explained scientifically, and that some things just have to be left to chance. Knowing that I'm a journalismly/sciencely-inclined person, my professor gave me a few examples of books/articles/whathaveyou that... well, not necessarily prove the existence of a divine being, but highly suggest it, though it was hard to tell at that point if he was playing devil's advocate or honestly trying to figure out how/why I think how/why I do.

Naturally, I then proceeded to make myself look like even more of a teenage hooligan when our professor asked us what our presentations were about, since we didn't have time to present them. Most of the topics were important, serious things, like stereotypes in Latin America or the effect that the US has on the culture of other countries. Mine was about all the creative ways that Cubans use condoms. (I kid you not, it was a legit story.)

I personally don't mind discussions that question what you feel. If you can withstand the opposition and support your case, you know that your beliefs are genuine and strong and that you're doing the right thing for you; even if you don't, it gives you an opportunity to rethink things, and worst case scenario, you learn something about yourself and can make positive change.

I also sat on this idea for a good portion of today, and with all the minor existential crises I've had over the past year or so, it gave me yet another opportunity to rethink my life and if what I'm doing is the right thing. Thinking about college has done that a lot: I question if I'm in the right major, minor, even school, and I can't help but feel sometimes that I've messed up somewhere. Academically hasn't been so much of a problem because I'm a horribly compulsive plan-aheader (planner-ahead? Planner-aheader?), so I know that by the time I leave here in (I hope) four years, I'll have a solid foundation and the ability to launch myself into the real world. What worries me is my lack of social abilities. I wasn't exactly a social butterfly in high school, but I knew a lot of people and I was comfortable. With college, my non-partying preference seems to put me in either my friends' rooms or alone on the weekends, and I'm only just barely starting to make friends beyond people I met and hung out with at orientation. I don't want to have to become an inebriated baboon to make friends (nor do I want friends that become inebriated baboons, it works both ways). I don't want to have to join seventy different clubs and meet a bunch of people but end up sacrificing my academics or my sleep. And as much as I love the fact that the wifi is significantly better on Friday and Saturday nights when no one else is around to use it, I don't want to be in quarantine for the rest of my college career. I want people to take me for who I am. The task now is finding those people.