October 18, 2007

Now Playing: Coldplay, "Don't Panic." (Thanks to Philip.)

This morning when I woke up the room was cold and dim. I scrambled into my clothes as Emmaline's cellphone alarm went off. I pulled open the heavy red curtains hanging over the ten-foot windows and looked out. The morning was crisp and clear. Blue sky reflected opaquely in blue frost on the roofs of the chapel across the street. Black bare elm-branches along the road, with a few ragged yellow leaves clinging to them, and flying against the blue sky, a skein of seagulls, their wings caught gold by the rising sun, flying west over the dark chimneypots.

Emmaline was in a rush to get to her nine o'clock seminar, so I fixed buttered toast for her to take before she left. After she left I sat alone in the kitchen and quietly ate a bowl of cereal. I took a cup of Earl Grey tea upstairs with me and spent the hour or so before class studying. The walk to Late Medieval Literature class at ten o'clock was beautiful, a clear sky and sunshine. In LML, two professors team-taught the last lecture on Chaucer. One of them looks creepily like Doc Oc, in my opinion. I'm glad to be over with Chaucer. The professors took care to point out all the ridiculous excesses of the church in the medieval period, and even today, apparently, two years ago, eBay had to ban the selling of body parts because people were selling relics online. (!) After the lecture, I went to the tutorial, and after the tutorial, I went with the tutorial leader to her office to show her a rough draft of the paper that's due next week. Her office is a little chilly cubbyhole hidden in the back bowels of the English department, through a maze of cold corridors. But she was quite friendly and reassured me about the essay, so that was good.

By the time I got out of class, etc., the sky had begun to cloud over. I walked through the Botanic Gardens to the gym, smelling the rich, varied scents of the flowering shrubs along the way, and watching the colorful leaves slide to the ground. I went running in the gym and listened to my father's second Sabbath school lesson on the sacraments. Then I walked back to Renwick, showered, and made lunch for myself. I was eating up in the room and reading The Book of Margery Kempe for LML when Emmaline came in, tired from her long morning of classes. I went downstairs with her to wash my dishes, and who should ring the House phone but Claire. She was in the alley at the back and wanted me to let her in. So I ran out the series of back doors (there's a back kitchen door, then a back "garden" door (though there's nothing garden-ish about it, just a strip of concrete), then another back door, and finally the "car park", which has a big gate on it. I let Claire in. She'd come to use the internet because she had an article due for the Covenanter Witness that she'd only been asked to write the night before.

Rachel and Daphne were cooking in the kitchen and greeted Claire boisterously. Claire, Emmaline, and I went upstairs, and the three of us spent the rest of the afternoon working in the room. Claire sat at my desk and wrote her article, which turned out to be a children's page about Finding Nemo and Gospel themes from that movie. Emmaline and I helped her come up with pictures from the internet and Bible verses. Emmaline sat and tried to do math problems at her desk, and I sprawled on the floor in between, working on a paper for Beowulf class, which was actually pretty fun to write. The afternoon outside dimmed slowly, greyness coming up the street between the elms, people hurrying home from work.

When the article was finished, at about six o'clock, Claire, Emmaline, and I went downstairs. Emmaline disappeared into the kitchen to warm up leftover lasagna for supper. Claire and I went into the common room, where a bunch of people were hanging around. "Hello," I said to Rachel, who was sitting right by the door. She gawked at me for a minute and then laughed, "You sounded Northern Irish! I thought there was someone behind you!" I rolled my eyes at her and said good-bye to Claire.

Emmaline and I had leftover lasagna and applesauce for supper. Catherine, Charlotte, Daphne, and Rachel were eating their meal at the other end of the table. After supper, I went back upstairs to work on my paper and managed to get a rough draft banged out before having to go downstairs to Rachel's room at seven-thirty for CU small group Bible study. Though the English/Drama small group meets on Wednesday nights, I've never been able to go because I've never been able to figure out where they're meeting. So instead I asked Rachel if I could join the Maths/Physics/Computer Science small group, which meets just downstairs in her room. Her room is fairly small, but she had put chairs all around the edges, and Rachel and Naomi ended up sitting on the bed as well. All-in-all there were fourteen people in the small group. They were all quite friendly and funny. When I came in, I chatted with Scott, a ruddy-faced freshman. Other people started to come in. Two guys, Chris and Phil, kept everyone laughing while we waited on the other leader to show up. He finally came, Stephen, a boy built like a running back (see, there's my technical term for this post *cough*), and he and Rachel led the study.

It was a fairly good study, mostly practical application of the Sermon on the Mount. Everyone participated well. The study lasted for about two hours, and then everyone sat around talking for half-an-hour afterwards. I was getting pretty sleepy by the end since the room was warm and I was beginning to be overwhelmed by being surrounded by so many people. Rachel made tea, and I had a cup, so that helped. I sat in a corner and chatted with Naomi about the differences between American and Northern Irish universities (American ones are more expensive, but at least you get scholarships, whereas Northern Irish students usually don't). The other students were all chatting with each other, making jokes, discussing problems from homework assignments, complaining about professors. Someone started a conversation about The Lord of the Rings, which got the whole room listening and arguing and laughing.

Finally, at about eleven o'clock, though they were still going strong, I slipped out and went upstairs, tired and wanting a bit of quiet. I read e-mail, worked a bit more on my paper, and then got on Skype and spent the next hour-and-a-half talking with Logan via phone and webcam. Good to "see: him again, in a manner of speaking. Emmaline came in at about twelve-thirty, and Logan wanted to meet her, so I handed the headset to her and she sat down and talked with him for awhile. I stood looking out the window. In the corner of the left window frame there was a spider making a web: delicate thread-by-thread, walking over the spokes, the streetlight behind it shining through its translucent orange legs and catching flecks of dust already caught on the sticky strands of the web. Its plump grey body moved painstakingly back and forth as it worked. I said good-bye to Logan. Emmaline was sitting at her desk, studying. I did my devotions, changed clothes, and went to bed, though it took me awhile to get to sleep.