second semester, day 1

Now Playing: "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" soundtrack by Harry Gregson-Williams. Track 9, "To Aslan's Camp", one of my favorites on this CD.

I just finished Volume One of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and am now working on archaeology homework, with two Books of Augustine's Confessions still to go (you'll be pleased to know, SwanElf, that I have to read both Einhard and Notker, who stammered, on Charlemagne for my Honors class).

After breakfast this morning, I walked over to the bookstore to pick up my textbooks. On the way, I met Rachel. "Rachel!" "E--! Good to see you!" A brisk hug. "How was your vacation?" "Good." "How was yours?" "Good." And so on. She told me about her brother, who got a haircut while she was there, and about her sister, who's turning ten next week and kept joking about breaking into the "double digits". In the bookstore, we had some confusion over which window to go to. As Rachel observed, there are far too many booths and windows in the bookstore. There were several other confused students standing around, waiting "to be helped", and three or four frazzled elderly women retrieving heavy sacks of books for the students from the stacks in the back of the store.

In the bookstore, Rachel and I ran into Jenny and Tara, who were browsing through the bookstore, looking for textbooks, and then on the way back to our dorms, we met Jenny H., who is almost-but-not-quite recovered from being sick just before Christmas. She was chatty and bubbly, partly thanks to her cold medication.

My first class this morning was at 9:00 in Zink Hall, the English building. The professor for Major British Writers II is a plump blond woman, noisily cheerful, very friendly and outspoken. She kept commenting on how quiet the class was. She plied the class with questions about society, culture, and why people comply with standards. She told us that the first novel was Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. "It's awful!" she exclaimed. "Ridiculously allegorical. Characters named Chastity or Prudence, who stand for the qualities of their names." Everyone nodded wisely, agreeing with her, while I frowned indignantly.

It would appear that our class is one of the most "diverse" I've had yet: a "returning student", as my father calls them (a woman who's probably got a family of her own by now); a young man from Venezuela, wearing a red Nike soccer jersey; a very dark-skinned young Black from a French-speaking country; a young man with a learning disability; and a young man who looks Arabic and has extremely thick, bushy black eyebrows.

At 10:00 came archaeology class in one of the little, weird, triangular rooms in Kendall Hall that look as though they were modeled on one of those unsolvable wooden puzzles--no matter how hard you try, you never can get the cubes and pyramids to fit perfectly into each other. The professor for archaeology is a short, older man with a bushy white beard and glazed blue eyes, wearing the requisite khakis and vest. He seemed quite eager to teach, and left most of the class period open for the students to ask any questions they liked, which was encouraging.

As soon as archaeology was over, I took my flute and music down to the practice rooms in Tyrrell Hall. I had reached the Poulenc sonata when I heard a terrifying howling, screeching sound coming from the practice room next door to me. It sounded like a fire engine--but then I realized that it was only a soprano doing her warm-up exercises.

When I left Tyrrell, I met Alisha walking to lunch, and fell in step with her. She described her break, and I told her about the ball. We compared notes about our first day of classes. The cafeteria was crowded when we entered. Danielle was there, bouncing happily from friend to friend. She put hot pink highlights in her short, brown hair over the break. Alisha and I sat with the two Jennys, near Matt and Andrew and Katie and other RUF people. All day it's been like this: the quick hugs with the girls, the bright exclamations, "It's so good to see you, Alisha! or Tara! or Jenny! or Nicole!"; the brief, shouted, "Hey! Matt or Alex or Andrew or Austin!" to the boys.

At 2:00, I marched to Chapman Hall for Honors class. The professor is a tired older woman dressed in plain, neat business clothes. She plied us with questions about our interests, and Nicole, Rachel, Russ, and I did our best to answer some of her questions. She inquired, "Has anyone read Augustine's Confessions?" Rachel and I both said that we had, and she pressed us to tell her our impressions of the Confessions. "Wow, my highschool education was sadly lacking! You two both read the Confessions in highschool?" Rachel and I admitted that we were homeschooled. When I piped up with an answer to one of Nicole's comments on the Black Plague, the professor seemed immediately to think that I have a specialty in the area of the Plague. "Ok. Now, has anyone read Don Quixote?" Rachel and I were the only ones who raised our hands. "Wow! I'm very impressed. Have you read all of it?" Rachel and I looked confused. "Did Don Quixote die?" the professor asked. We nodded. "Now I'm amazed. Later in this course, we'll be talking about the 'Song of Roland'. Has anyone read that?" Sheepishly, I raised my hand and muttered, "Yes, for fun." "Good grief! You must never have been allowed outside to play!" she cried.

After Honors, Rachel and I laughed about the professor's impression of us.

The wind drove misty clouds across the skyscrapers downtown, and my blowing bangs felt damp as I strolled to my dorm. They've finished the construction in front of the dorms, and now the lawn below the library, which is flanked by dorms and classroom buildings, looks very elegant, with broad sidewalks lined with straight rows of trees, alternating with lights. Strips of sod mask the scars left by dumptrucks and bulldozers, and the expansive sprinkler system keeps the new grass in a state of perpetual muddiness.

I spent the afternoon reading Pride and Prejudice and listening to the "Phantom of the Opera" soundtrack and "Invocation", a Celtic CD by Anuna. A.C. and I ate supper together. She described for me how her parents usually bake ham for Christmas dinner, and about the ornate nativity scenes that her mother sets up for Christmas (her mother is Catholic).

A weeping saint, haloed with gold leaf, sits beneath a tree on the cover of the Confessions, which lies on the desk beside me. Outside, fluffy clouds scurry past, blurring the lights of the skyscrapers with their speed and wetness. Right now (thanks, most likely, to having read too much Jane Austen), I feel as detached and satirical as any social commentator, and it probably comes across in this exceedingly dull post. Congratulations to anyone who managed to finish it. *haha*