Please forgive me if I act a little strange, for I know not what I do

Okay, okay, okay.

I'm not dead.

I do of course realize it has been over three weeks since my last post, but I assure you (oh faithful five or six readers that include Trevor and Kevin and Jenn and Latigo) that a three week dry spell is not what I was planning. The internet is fickle here and it took me three days to register my computer to the network...I wrote out a post all about my first week and first day of classes two Mondays ago but the fickle internet ate it and I was too frustrated to type it out again. As the days lengthened into weeks I began to doubt if the quality of my post could make up for the extended absence...but now I have reached a point where I can finally deliver. DRAWINGS! PICTURES! LINKS! RANDOM GIBBERISH! BLAG! SNARG! RABBLE! THIS IS THE POST YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR!



I am currently residing on the fourth floor of West Mary hall in the Ford buildings on the campus of Berry College, in the city of Rome in the state of Georgia in the United States of America, North America, Northern Hemisphere, Earth, the Inner System, the Solar System, the Local Fluff, the Orion Arm, the Milky Way, the Local Group, the Virgo Supercluster, the Universe. And if you try to find my college on GoogleEarth you will be sorely disappointed.



Living at Berry is like living in a microcosm of the real world.

This is partially do the the fact that the workforce is almost entirely populated by eighteen to twenty-four year olds. You go to the post office on campus and there's a student behind the counter. In the health center, it's a student who asks you to fill out the three forms requesting the same information you filled out on the two forms given to you earlier. In the dining hall and Valhalla, it's a student who takes your order and prepares your food. You walk out the dorm hall and it's a student mowing the lawn, blowing the leaves, preening the garden. It's a student behind the desk in the business office handling your banking transactions. It's a student on the phone when you call Tech help. Of course there is very practical reasoning behind this, as everyone knows college students are desperate for any income whatsoever and will literally work for peanuts. Not even peanuts. Half a peanut. God knows I would. And Berry is twice as bad as the average college, being a private school with a hefty pricetag...these kids are running in here with built-in money guilt, already ten thousand dollars out in loans if they're lucky. So they're willing to strap on a leaf-blower in ninety-eight degree heat and ninety percent humidity for $5.15 an hour. That being said, it's probably very telling that Berry employs over ninety percent of its student body in on campus jobs.



Some of the faculty live on campus (on the road imaginatively named Faculty Drive) and there is an elementary school on the mountain campus, and a middle school in the Cook building. There are two coffeeshops on campus, three churches, the old mansion of Martha Berry, the house the students built for her before she died. There are far reaching miles of woodlands filled with wild animals, including entirely too many deer. The deer to student ratio is currently riding at eight to one. Which is kind of neat sometimes, because there's a certain quality to waking up in the mornings in the pale early light and seeing deer sleeping down in the courtyard beneath my window... But there is also something creepy about all those deer, especially at night... More than once I was walking down to my car when I heard a rustling, and I looked over to find nearly ten deer bedding in the grass, staring at me with their eyes reflecting the streetlight. Sometimes I get the feeling those deer are quietly biding their time until they can enslave us all. The other animals we have to watch out for at night are skunks, particularly the albino skunk that lives up near the Ford buildings, for it has been known to chase students around. So far I have only seen one skunk from a distance away, so hopefully in my two years here that's as close as I'll get to one.



The campus is ridiculously beautiful. It is amazingly, hilariously, ridiculously beautiful. The buildings I live in were built in the 1920's by Henry Ford who they say was not sleeping with Martha Berry at the time, but come on children. This is a serious complex.


I find it hard to believe a man would build this for a lady if he wasn't getting a little something something on the side.



This place is the kind of beautiful that just makes you feel better about being alive. It's the kind of beautiful that makes you happy you have eyes to see it. I wake up and open the blinds and sunlight comes in and the reflection pool glitters, and I walk across campus to class and all the trees are green and the architecture is gorgeous. When the sun is out, it is impossible to not to gaze at the fields and the woods and the sky, and when the sun is down, it's impossible to not be amazed by the fresh wind and the streetlights and the stars.



I have all my classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Which is great in theory and sometimes pretty good in practice, but I spend alot of Thursday nights working furiously until two in the morning, because I'm kind of a master of procrastination (if my timeliness of posting is any indictation). I spend most of my time in the Science Building, which is a BEAST.



And I mean that in a good way, like when I say my laptop is a beast or a snowplow is a beast.



I'm currently taking two math courses (three if you count my computer science course, but I don't); one is Discrete Structures, and the other is Proof Structures. Discrete Structures is...well...it's hard to pin down exactly, because sometimes it feels like a bunch of random stuff thrown together, like the misfits toys box of math. Proof Structures seems to be the hardest class I'm taking this semester, and I am seriously grinding my brain through it, but it is also the most enjoyable class I am taking. There are ten of us in there, and even though it's only been three weeks, I really get the feeling those guys are good people.



When it comes down to it, I only have two serious complaints about Berry. I don't know where the twelve thousand a semester goes (I imagine it goes to the pendulum) but I can tell you one thing for certain: it certainly does not go into the dining hall. So much of that food is incredibly dubious. Sometimes I walk through the grill line and go "aaaah, I think I'll just have a sandwich, thanks." But the cookies are good. Not that I'm eating cookies. Everyone tell my mother I'm not eating cookies, because I'm really not. (I'm really not.)

My second complaint has to do with the guys, or the serious lack of them. At Berry, the girl to boy ratio is something like 6 to 1. And on top of that, all the boys here seem to be on the smallish, girly side! It's a little disconcerting to see boys prettier than me wandering about in their khaki shorts and pink plaid button-ups. But what can I do? That's not to say there aren't a couple of crushworthy boys (there are, and believe me, they are intensely crushworthy) but the chances, they are not good. So all boys out there, come to Berry. You are in high demand. You can totally strike out six times.

I guess that's about all the interesting bits I'll get to for now, so I'll leave you with the handful of doodles illustrating my first week at Berry that were lazily colored with a touchpad and were alot funnier two weeks ago.