Update: Sunday-Thursday.

[hermionesviolin]

Sunday afternoon i visited Hertfod (college wasn't closed, so i just walked around, though i couldn't get much past the front garden -- where people were playing croquet :) -- without going through closed doors, which always makes me feel like i'm invading, so i just left) and decided that really i'd had enough college visiting (they all look kinda the same anyway) so i just came back to Trinity. Was having sleepy (and crampy) day anyway.

Trinity has a set of 8 postcards, so of course i purchased them. I have way more scrapbook postcards than sent postcards, but i did finally get my postcards sent out on Wednesday (and thanks to Ken for donating stamps).

I think some brain cells committed suicide while i watched Austin Powers the first one. It honestly wasn't as bad as i had expected, though. The second one was so much worse. I think, anyway. I really don't remember much besides Mini-Me (thumbs up), Fat Bastard (thumbs down), and thumbs up to Seth Green and Heather Graham. This actually had character development (plus the henchmen bits). Austin Powers is so very unattractive (physically and personalitywise), but he's so loveable when they're playing Twister and then that poignant bit where he's so out of place in the 90s. Does the 2nd movie have anything besides lots of 8th grade male level humor?

I should have gotten in touch with chrisvenus earlier to hang out in Oxford. He IMed me on Sunday and we made plans to hang out Tuesday night. (While i was looking forward to being all done on Wednesday, that added to reasons to be glad that Val moved the due date for the paper to Thursday.) We hung out for a good three hours or so and it was lovely. He showed me around Keble College where he went. Only brick college in Oxford. Very lovely. So much bigger than Trinity. Felt like the grounds just kept going and going. He said it has about 600 students. I think that's about 3 times the amount of students at Trinity, so no wonder it felt large. I realized after i said it that Smith graduates about 600 students a year. And sometime this week someone mentioned that UMass Amherst graduates 5 or 6 thousand students every year (about double the entire undergraduate population of Smith). It's all relative.

I definitely didn't get any work on my paper done Sunday night. First chatting with Chris, then discussing politics with Alex and Ken. (I took the Political Compass test again and am still about halfway between center and Left/Libertarian. The libertarian makes sense, and economically liberal is accurate as well. I'm just so used to feeling Right of most everyone around me that i forget that i'm really not what one would traditionally consider Right or Conservative.)

Around 11:30 Adam came in to print out a paper. He was talking about how he just has no time for some of the people on the UMass program. He said he definitely didn't mean me, though, that i'm one of his favorite people and i said that he's one of the people i really wish i spent more time with, so he invited me to go out with him and his visiting girlfriend, Sara(h?). One would think this would be supremely awkward, but she's been her since Friday (shh, don't tell Miriam she's been here that long) and we got along really well. We went to Mood. That was a mistake. He said it was fairly quiet last time he went, but it was packed (and thus of course so loud you can't hold a conversation), plus expensive. $3 cover and $3 for a gin and tonic. After we finished our drinks we went back to his room and hung out with Josh (his roommate) until close to 3, at which point they went to bed. In Adam's room i had 2 more gin and tonics in the space of probably an hour or two. Going downstairs to the bathroom i felt just a little bit dizzy. People talk about alcohol warming you up (though i think actually it lowers your body temperature, being a depressant and all) and that night with G&Ts i definitely felt it. I headed back to my staircase, there were people on the stoop, i hung out with Long-Haired Brian until about 4am.

Monday evening we went to Stratford-upon-Avon to see the RSC do Measure for Measure. No one told me we were supposed to dress up, so i was in my "smart is sexy" t-shirt and jeans. It didn't matter, though, so that was good. The air-conditioning on the bus didn't work, so i think most everyone felt nauseous. I had an apple and a bag of chips, but the egg salad baguette was so not happening. Beautiful fresh air outside the bus, though, thank god. I had another couple bags of chips and a pack of Cadbury white chocolate buttons while we hung out near the water recovering from the bus ride.

Measure for Measure is a "problem play," and i'm not currently up for discussing it.

End of program meeting Wednesday afternoon. Apparently there was conflict between the website (info from last summer) and the brochure and people were confused, so i think the classes are going to be 4 and 3 credits instead of 3 and 2. At least, that's what UMass says. I suspect some of the non-UMass institutions will still only give 5 credits. I don't really care what Smith does since i don't need any extra credits, but we shall see.

I had lunch around 2 and drinks on the lawn started at 7:15. I could actually taste the alcohol in the Pimms, unlike last time when i felt like "These have alcohol in them, really?" I still had 3 in a half an hour, though, which was a mistake. I learned that there are 6 kinds of Pimms: 2 gin-based, 2 whiskey-based, and 2 vodka-based; these were gin-based. I didn't like dinner much, so i didn't eat much. I'm apparently acquiring a taste for white wine, so instead of having lots of water i had 4 glasses of white wine in an hour and a half. Another mistake. I sat in the Beer Cellar for a while sobering up before i could join people on the dance floor because the thought of dancing made me want to throw up. Lots of alcohol makes me light-headed and dizzy and impairs my (fine) motor control. There is no reason for me to drink more than one yummy drink an hour.

In class, Val informed us that really his band is not Dixieland but rather neo-New Orleans. Tee. They were really good. During the interval Mandy went up to the microphone and sang and stuff, with Karen, then Sam, then John, joining her.

I love Mark the Porter dearly. I learned on the lawn that he's only been at Trinity a year, that he has known Val for ages (since he was 12 and Val was "little more than a student himself"), and that he (Mark) did English in university and prefers the French feminists.

Jim thanked scads of people at the dinner, including the Porters, and Alice stood up for that and i followed. Mark got an individual thank you afterward, and most everyone stood. I heart stuff like that.

He (Mark) danced with a number of the ladies down in the Beer Cellar. (We had heard rumors of Mark gettin' down since Georgetown's closing banquet was the previous night.) Mandy, and Jenny, and then i got the last dance before he left, and a kiss on the cheek.

I ended up not taking my mother up on her offer to reimburse me for another disposable camera, and while it would have been fun to use up an entire roll of film on that night in the Beer Cellar, i got good pictures of most everyone i wanted, so i'm happy.

After they sent us out of the Beer Cellar (11? 12?), Jenny and some people went out to DTM (and you always get in free when you go places with Jenny, because she develops hook-ups wherever she goes). I have a weakness for hip-hop (or is it more R&B really? i'm bad at categorizing music). They have free iced tap water, but Kieran bought me a Smirnoff Ice and later a glass of something dark and stronger than beer.

Some sleazy guy was all over me at one point and for a while i was going with it, but i just really can't keep that up when i'm so not attracted to the person i'm with. He wasn't big with the leaving me alone thing, but Jenny and Kieran did the human wall thing and both were willing to beat him up if it came to that.

i say i think he likes you
you say i think he do too
go and get him girl
before he gets you
i'll be watching you
from the wings
i will come to your rescue
if he tries anything

By the end of the night i had decided that i really didn't know if Kieran was gay or straight or bi or what, and really i didn't care. I met him a couple weekends ago (Sunday, August 3) when Jenny first brought him over, and i like him a lot. (He's possibly the only person who can get away with calling me "girlie" [noun] because the tone is somehow different than i ever hear anyone else use.) Last night when i was wondering if he was other than heterosexual i remembered when he came to dinner and they were talking about how she doesn't act obnoxious in clubs and she said, "I could start stripping," (she keeps saying she has cellulite on her thighs and she doesn't want to subject people to it and people like Sam and i keep threatening to hit her) and he got this look like "That would be obnoxious how?" and i said, "He's a heterosexual male, what do you expect?" and i instantly regretted saying it because i of all people know one shouldn't presume anyone is heterosexual (though it's an indication of my sensibilities that i indicated "heterosexual" instead of just saying, "He's a guy, what do you expect?"). I almost said something like, "Sorry, i shouldn't have assumed you're straight," but i think enough time had passed before i thought of it that it would have been awkward, and anyway he didn't correct me.

Did she (not Jenny; my mind jumps around making connections and i don't always provide transitions) just come out to me? "I'm a registered fag hag, and bi to boot?" Is that really what she said? 3 of us out of 43 students. That's nearly 1 in 10, and we're all bi, which either says something about the increased fluidity of women or the increased fluidity of our generation (both non-heterosexual male friends of mine are sometimes interested in females) or is just coincidence and says nothing.
It's frustrating having to come out as bi, because it's not as easy as mentioning i like girls, i have to mention i like both. And yes really it's no one's business but mine who i'm potentially attracted to, but....

Interval for two tangents from that first evening with Kieran.
Tangent 1: The mini-quad outside the dining hall has a raised grassy area with stone edging wide enough to sit on. It's an octagon, so Jenny decided that since octagon is like octopus, this meeting area is now deemed the Puss. I just... yeah. What can i say, really?
Tangent 2: Jenny said something to Kieran about British people being so polite and he made a "What? Are you fucking joking?" face/snort. I said how antheia had warned me about how rude British people are, saying, "If they're nice to you, it means either they don't feel they know you well or they don't want to." Jenny was a little hurt, thinking of all the guys she's met at clubs who have been nice to her, but Kieran laughed and was all "Yes, exactly!"

DTM closes around 2am, but then we just hung out inside Trinity near the Porter's Lodge until about 4am. Yeah, i didn't get too much sleep.

Usually i'm not big on going out clubbing, but sometimes i really enjoy it, and i'm glad i went (though i don't regret not going the last time she invited me because i was tired and didn't feel like going out at all, whereas this time i was very much in a partying mood), and Jenny's got the people at DTM to open up a section for us tonight, free party, so i'm gonna go to that as well, though i'm definitely not drinking much if at all. (I also learned that alcohol does indeed dehydrate you. I swear my body started leaching moisture out of itself to excrete because i so did not consume that much liquid.)

I can appreciate what we are. We're different people, trying to coexist under one roof, like those assholes on The Real World only without all the cool furnishing and the free MTV vacation and the Requisite Gay Roommate. We've been raised in different ways, by different people, with different tastes and ideas. They like to go out and socialize. Pyzo can't understand why I sit on the computer. "That thing is eating your brain." No, going out and drinking every night would eat my brain. I can't do that. It doesn't make me happy. It's fun every once in a while, but I'm different. I'm me.
-anniesj

Ken commented a while ago about how the Georgetown kids always go places in packs whereas the UMass program is very fragmented. The Georgetown program is an MBA program (though i think there might be an undergraduate one here, too), so i wonder if they just all knew each other beforehand, but regardless, i like the fact that we have lots of smaller groups. Okay, cliqueish-ness always annoys me (pause for moment of dread re: another new year at Smith College), but there's a variety of people and i definitely don't want to spend time with all of them. Also, i prefer smaller groups in general.

---

In other news,

tymothytoastman posted this and explained about the Inclusive Scouting Award:

it's basically a square knot patch award you earn by wearing it. One of the ropes is silver and purple, symbolizing all religious beliefs, including atheism and agnosticism. The other is rainbow for all sexual orientations. The idea is that people will ask what it's for, and you can explain. At that point, they may confront you, and you can open conversation. On the other hand, it's a public way to show your support without being in-your-face aggressive. Any like-minded Scouts and Scouters can recognize you as a safe person to talk to. Additionally, it is so that gay scouts, who may be facing strong dilemmas, can come and talk to you.

My father alerted me to a story which Reuters reported as "Heat Wave Claims Frostbite Victim." The Guardian article is here.

Comments

[akronohten.livejournal.com]

Ahh, so the people playing croquet at Hertford were still there? I thought they would have been home for summer vac. I always found that to be rather cute, but at the same time rather odd. Plus there was a guy always playing who is a) heavily involved in the Union and b) very New Labour - almost to the point of being a Tory with a Red Rose. So that always got on my nerves.

Seeing Mark dance must have been enjoyable. Now I regret not talking to him more (since my tutor was always late. I almost went home beacuse of how late he was for the last one. I don't know how he's going to handle giving lectures next year, but he's still a wonderful guy).

A comment from the guy with frostbite was interesting. He said he doesn't need to use his left foot, which means that the pedals are on the same side as ours, although the steering wheel (obvisouly) isn't. However, they do have to shift with the left hand. Not somthing I'd want to try to do.

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

The Hertford croquet people might be summer kids. I know the Georgetown students played croquet at Trinity a lot.

Should i tell Mark hello for you when i say goodbye to him tomorrow?

[akronohten.livejournal.com]

Ahh, that could be it.

Tell him I'm the American who had Tadgh (don't try to pronounce it - he can't either) last term. Thanks! And have a safe trip home!