Tuesday, November 8, 2011

“I can't believe you people. I come for you, and you want to stay, I let you stay and you want to go.”

^Meet Joe Black

I’m in college. Whoa. What a weird thing to say. I’m more than halfway through my first semester at Temple University, and I’ve already scheduled my classes for next semester. Things are rollin’!

I came here thinking that I would be overwhelmed with homework and ridiculous amounts of long papers and all of that kind of great stuff, but this semester was shockingly easy. I’ve spent most of my time watching TV shows on Netflix (I’m currently hooked on about 20 different shows at the same time. It’s kind of a problem) because I just don’t really have any work to do. It won’t be that way next semester, though, because I’m now a double major (Broadcasting and Linguistics), and, since I added Linguistics halfway through the semester, I have to catch up. I guess it’ll be real college then, eh?

I’m absolutely loving being right in the middle of the city, though. There’s a subway station not even a block from my dorm (so that I can pass the ghetto where Temple’s campus is), so2011-2012 005 (4) I can go pretty much anywhere I want. I went out by myself a couple days ago to write a paper in a coffee shop, and it was glorious!! Except when I accidentally stumbled upon the Occupy people—I purposely went back to campus from a different station so I didn’t have to walk through it again. There’s a train station just a little ways off campus, too, which I took with a couple of friends into Delaware to see Andrew Bird (which, by the way, was incredible!! And also quite an adventure). 

On an unrelated note, I sometimes get these weird compulsions to make lists of stuff, and it’s never really relevant to anything, but I really like lists, so I make them. So Sunday night I was on my Facebook and suddenly got this brilliant thought (sarcasm, anyone?) that I should document every one of my statuses. Ever. So I spent hours going back through my profile, typing out the dates and times of every status update since August of 2007, when I got my Facebook. A couple of hours in I realized what a dumb idea it was, but at that point it was far too late to stop, so now I have 77 pages of status updates. As tedious and kind of stupid as it was, it was actually kind of fun to re-live my life backwards and try to figure out what I was talking about when I left some cryptic note about events. It brought back a ton of memories, good and bad. And it was fun to see myself mature through Facebook. What a weird way to reflect. I guess I have my ridiculous anal-retentiveness to thank for that! I don’t recommend this, though. It sucks up time like no other.

Anyway, I can’t w2011-2012 005ait until Thanksgiving!! I haven’t been home since I got here at the end of August, because Temple prides itself on always being open, even when every other school in the world gets holidays. Pretty much everyone here hates this, even professors. We talked about Thanksgiving in my Italian class the other day, and since I’ve been eating pretty much nothing but school food for 3 months, I’m desperate for some home-cooked food!!

I’m sad to report that I haven’t watched a lot of movies since I’ve been here, since I’ve been so busy watching a gazillion different TV shows, but here are a couple.

1) Meet Joe Black—I watched this one because it was snoMmmmm.....wing (yep, in October. It was weird), and I was in need of a very long movie. It ended up being really good, too, and Brad Pitt was, well, Brad Pitt, only even more beautiful than usual, somehow. Basically, Brad Pitt plays Death, who makes a deal with Anthony Hopkins: Hopkins guides him around Earth to learn about humans and Hopkins gets to live for a few more days. It was fantastic!! If you have about 3 hours to spare, I highly recommend it.

2) Nosferatu—I watched this one for some Halloween fun. It was the first-ever adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (which is one of my favorite books), and probably one of the more accurate ones, too. It was made sometime in the 1920s. The character Nosferatu himself was actually kind of creepy, I admit. It’s worth watching, if only because it’s completely a classic.

I’ve just about run out of ideas, so have a lovely day!

~Snooty Crumb

On this day last year, I posted the following on Facebook:

“Heart-shaped waffles!!!”