Fourth of July and Naked Women

Happy fourth of July everyone. Two days late. Our fourth was fantastic. We had draft conferences during the day. My piece for this week is very experimental and I had so much work to do when I left the conference. I eventually rewrote the second half and added three pages, bringing it up to fifteen. I'm pretty pleased with the end product, but on Wednesday I was still freaking out.

The fireworks almost didn't happen because there were supposed to be thunderstorms and there was a tornado watch. But we went anyways. For some reason. Because we're insane, probably. I have honestly lost my sanity. After spending fifteen minutes, in the pouring rain, talking with two of our program advisers (our PAs are so great, I love them all) about crucifying people, I turned to them and assured them I'm not usually this crazy, or this talkative.

What was I originally talking about? Right, we got on the bus and drove to this other town I don't remember the name of. It was pouring rain. We went to this baseball field with the rest of the town. Now as someone who usually just goes to a friend's house and blows shit up for fourth of July, the idea of having a community event was sort of a novelty. We hung out on beach towels and huddled under umbrellas and I vaguely remember kissing someone's snow cone. Because orange is the bastard child of red and blue. After a while people got so miserable a bus load went home. I stayed. Because I'm insane. At that point trying to stay not soaked was pointless. I got completely drenched, when I got home all three layers I was wearing were soaked. But it was grand fun. I had a ball. Maeve and D showed up, we played the ninja game* with the science people, I found out the science PA is actually nice and not the spawn of satan, I swing danced with Mary Kate in the rain, I tried to learn some bizarre country line dance thing and totally failed, I got really hyper and did planks in the mud. The fireworks, when they finally did happen, were spectacular and so loud they made my ribs rattle. And we swam through the rain all the way home.

Yesterday we had class and in the afternoon went the Barnes Foundation. Basically a homage to Renoir. Specifically Renoir paintings of naked women. Sexist, but I did okay. There was a lot of other incredible paintings. Some great Picassos, a Gaugain I really liked, some of the Degas charcoal sketches that were beautiful and a giant Matisse mural. It was fun. Not nearly enough time. I rushed through the first floor and didn't have time to get to the second.

I love this environment. You can hang out in the common room and people will come up to you and say "read this" and then you talk about what they're doing and word choice and mood and style. The atmosphere of creativity is intoxicating. And the depth of discussion in class is great, yesterday we spent an hour and a half talking about four poems.

I have now seen three toads but have not seen a toad threesome.

* - unless you were at the Federal Way debate tournament a year and a half ago, you should not know what this is.

The Science People

I love camp, I just heard the best dirty joke:

A hippie gets on a bus and sits down next to a nun. He asks the nun to have sex with him. She says no and gets off the bus. The driver asks the hippie if he wants to know how to get the nun to have sex with him. The hippie says yes so the driver tells him that if he goes to the cemetery on Tuesday night she'll be there praying to God. All he has to do is dress up as God and she'll do what he asks. So the hippie does and the nun says she'll have sex with him but it has to be anal sex so she can keep her virginity. Afterwards the hippie pulls of his disguise and says "Haha, I'm the hippie!" Then the nun jumps up and says "Haha! I'm the bus driver!"

I love it!

I'm having so much fun. The people, so far, are really cool. They're fun to hang out with and really inviting. Some are really quirky. A few of us went into to town to go to Starbucks tonight. My mocha was 2.76. What the fuck people. Really. Earlier today we had a "mapping the community" exercise where we talked about what we want the group to look like and how we want people to treat everyone. And everyone was really... sincere. Which was cool. And I actually felt more connected to everyone afterwards. Which was cool.

Class this morning was really intense. Everyone was very into the discussion and it seemed very fast paced to me. But I can see how much I can learn and that's exciting. I really like the book we're reading.

We have the first draft of our creative piece due tomorrow. I'm sort of satisfied with mine. It's good enough for now, but has some work still.

We're having fun, the science people (who are very antisocial with everyone else) have taken over the third floor lounge. So tonight while they were downstairs watching the Disney Cinderella the third floor writers and the fourth floor kids and some other people took over their lounge. They were not happy when they came back. We also asked if it turned out okay for Cinderella. And insinuated that they've been capturing the squirrels and using chemicals to burn the hair off their tails.

I don't think they like us very much.

Other news: US women's soccer beat Brazil 2-0. Fuck yes. And I'm in love with Madeline Kahn.

Maybe I like this place

You know, I might really like it here. It's pretty damn cool. Day one was fun.

Got up, took a shower, went to breakfast. Food, unfortunately is all the way across campus and is the farthest thing we have to walk to. And they put spicy stuff in their potatoes. WTF. I was very annoyed. The rest of the food is pretty good. I'm still alive.

We have our first class at 9:30, which sure as hell beats zero hour. They're in a building across the street that looks sort of like an obese cottage. Very cute, just large. We go in, past stairs, to the left into our lecture hall. Everyone sits in a circle in a very strange chairs. My teachers are... really, really, really awesome. I'm not awake enough to come up with more interesting adjectives, but they're really cool. They're very laid back and are just as interested in listening to us as talking. We had seminar for an hour where we discussed last nights reading and basically said... whatever we wanted. We're reading really cool stuff. Then we had workshop with writing prompts. Oh yeah, there are the most brilliant window seats in the lecture hall, they're about two feet deep, made out of marble-y looking stuff. I saw a chipmunk out the window. It looked like a normal chipmunk just had its tail straight up in the air like it was constantly being electrocuted. The prompts, like everything else so far, are very open ended, but I liked them. After we discussed what wrote and gave constructive-ish criticism.

Then lunch. More food. Some questionable. Then... Topic conferences, that's right. I really liked this. We have two profs, right, we signed up in the morning to meet with one. I met with D, who's very cool and easy to talk to. And we just talked ideas for twenty minutes. We have a creative piece due on Wednesday and we talked that around. It was really helpful and I came out feeling a lot more sure about what I was going to do.

We did our reading and wrote the paper for tomorrow in the afternoon, had a tour of the computer lab and did a group journal exercise. The sunsets here are gorgeous and I saw a good bench to watch from I just didn't get a chance to get down there.

Tomorrow: Go to library, buy postcards (not at the library)