Summary

Screw Date:

Remarkably painless. The person my roommate picked for me reminded me of a Nordic version of Rob L. Practically the second after we met up, we had to run to the A Cappella concert. The Gales did pretty well for what was totally last-minute (if you go to my Facebook page, you can even see a few videos). After that, we headed to the play (Measure for Measure, which has been the bane of my existence for the last few weeks thanks to a set that looks simple but was in fact incredibly complicated and an overzealous department secretary with a penchant for firing off panicked, alarmist emails). We wound up in the student center where the usual Friday night dance was going on (the week’s theme: Rob Oden’s (the college president) Bar Mitzvah), where we watched the fun from a safe distance and talked until after midnight.

Is it strange that I’m prouder of the fact that my roommate had a fun time with the guy I picked than the fact that my own night went pretty well? Every time I looked over and saw them laughing together, I breathed a sigh of relief. Score one for matchmaking.

Overall, it was definitely a friend-connection rather than a romance-connection (which is kind of the point of the event), but still worthwhile. I’ll be getting Screwed next year for sure.

Halloween:

For someone who bought her costume from a secondhand store at 3:00pm on the afternoon of Halloween, it went pretty well. I went trick-or-treating for canned goods in one of the Northfield neighborhoods and it was great for a while, until I looked down and realized I was so cold that I hadn’t noticed the gigantic blister that was dripping blood down my ankle. After we got back, we went to the fall term concert of another (very good) a cappella group, then went on to the annual Halloween concert and costume contest (the group category winner was Brown vs. Board…funny stuff).

 

In other news, I’ve coined a new nickname for the girls in the room next to us (I have never actually met them other than during the first week floor meeting): The Alarm Clock Terrorists. Almost every day, they set their alarm for some random time (usually around 10am), then leave their room way earlier and forget to turn off the clock. And almost every day, it’s me who gets to sit in her room and think evil thoughts on that awful alarm clock as it goes off for hours…and hours…and hours.

 

After spending years cultivating the beach-blonde look with lemon juice and sunbathing, my sister decided to dye her hair back to its original shade of brown. Now she looks exactly like I’ve always pictured her in my mind (since she had normal hair for a good 12 years before the blonde phase), but she thinks it’s a big change. I find that hilarious.

Er…

Tomorrow night is the all-campus Screw Your Roommate event (that’s “Set Up Your Roommate” on any campus publications).

Here was my date selection process:

1) Screen the entire zoo book (it’s like a yearbook for freshmen that comes out the first week of school) for possible candidates. Eliminate any guys on our floor and cross-check for anyone in Deborah’s classes.

2) Stalk the remainder on Facebook. Screen for possible dealbreakers, which include (but aren’t limited to) 1) shirtless profile pictures, 2) lists of quotes from Family Guy, 3) a preference for lousy grammar or swear words, and 4) girlfriends. Also anyone “interested in men”.

3) Write down the short list, and bring it to Gales practice. Ask the other freshmen what they know about the guys on the list. Cross off/promote accordingly.

4) Do some more in-depth Facebook stalking of the final few. Rank in order of preference, tapping into unused matchmaking skill set.

5) Contact roommate of Choice #1 to see if he’s available. Surprise! He is–as soon as the roommate can talk him into it.

6) Submit Screw Date form online. Done!

Today we all got slips in our mailboxes that said “you are ____ looking for ____.” Examples: peanut butter looking for jelly, Hannah Montana looking for talent, etc. Tomorrow night at the designated time we all descend on the student center and awkwardly go around looking for our dates (“cookie? cookie? chocolate chip looking for cookie?”).

Now I just have to wait and see who Deborah picked out for me. I’ve never been on a blind date before, and I don’t exactly expect to relish the experience. Oh well. At least I might get a story to tell–and a new friend.

Hem

“In war, truth is the first casualty.” -Aeschylus

Apparently, middle school is never over. Not even when you’re in your late 20s and married with children. Not even then.

The worst part is, all of this is happening in a virtual world that does not exist. Two women who do not really know each other through any vehicle other than the internet are fighting over a boy who does not exist. One of them quit the site because of how ridiculous the conflict became, but the other one was so upset that she took off work to recover from the stress of a place that does not exist.

There’s more. Half my friends on the site also quit out of solidarity, leaving me all hung up in a prickly perch. And my gang has flown on. I’ve been left in a Lurch. I’ll come down from the Lurch with an unpleasant bump. And the chances are, then, that I’ll be in a Slump.

I might be going mad.

I have, however, passed the worst part of the H1N1 experience. Now I’m just left with the joyful task of making up two papers and a midterm that I missed. Send me some virtual diligence, will you?

Croak

On Saturday night, I get to blast the D/D# in the descant for “Gotta Have You.”

By myself.

In front of a couple hundred people (including eight other a cappella groups) at Acappellooza.

Heh.

EDIT: On the positive side, it’s a gorgeous song.

Bleh

So I’m sick. Again. But this time, it’s the dreaded “flu-like symptoms” that strike fear into the hearts of administrators and wellness officials alike.

If you’ll flip back a few pages on my Twitter page, you’ll see that I saw this coming.

Parents’ Weekend was great. My whole family flew up to see me, and got to spend an entire day camped out on the lounge couches watching reruns of Say Yes to the Dress instead. The high point was Saturday night when the Knightingales had their first performance, at the A Cappella Fest, and five out of the nine of us were running fevers. Needless to say, it wasn’t our best effort–we consider ourselves lucky that no one passed out onstage.

At 1:30AM last night, somebody burned food in our kitchen, prompting the fire alarm and building evacuation. Another “this would be so hilarious if it wasn’t happening to me” moment to add to my collection.

I should really be working on the two papers I have due this week, but my headache is too distracting for me to do anything but sleep and watch bad TV on Hulu. I hope you guys are staying well.

Drifting

I figured I owed you all a post.

It snowed all day here. Since the leaves are (for the most part) still on the trees, the branches were pretty weighed down. Around the middle of the day, the temperature rose to a few degrees above freezing, even though it was still snowing. It made for an interesting trip down the sidewalk: walk a few steps in the open, and it’s snowing…walk a few steps under a tree, and it’s raining. Apparently this is not normal weather, even for Minnesota.

Either way, it was cold.

I’m reasonably happy, I guess. I have a lot of those “hi”/”bye” friends to exchange waves with on my way to class, but it’s not like I really hang out with anyone other than my roommate on a regular basis. I guess I thought making friends would be a little easier and natural, but it isn’t. I’ll have to work a little harder if I really want to make anything happen. Most of the time I don’t really mind, but it’s kind of embarrassing when my parents ask me who I eat with in the dining hall and I have to tell them that I usually eat alone.

Hmm.

My classes range from the so-so (Intro to Religion) to the decent (Puritans in Love) to the interesting (Life in the Age of Networks). I’m getting good grades, for the most part (especially in the one class that I have to take pass/fail…I love how that works) and my professors are all good at what they do. I’m already sick of writing papers, but I know that isn’t going to go away any time soon.

I’ve been in pretty decent health, for the most part, except for a short but horrible bout of the stomach flu a few weeks ago. I thought getting sick and missing class was bad in high school, but being sick away from home in college is way worse. I got a flu shot a few weeks ago, and we’ve been told to expect H1N1 vaccines soon.

In other news…I went to the homecoming dance and enjoyed the hour-long period between the “nobody’s here” phase and the “get me out of here” phase. Deborah and I hid our belongings in a corner near a table. When the drunk:sober ratio took a turn for the worse and I went back to get them, I almost gagged: somebody had barfed all over the side of the table. It appeared to have missed our stuff, and for that I was profoundly grateful.

Turns out I was wrong, but we won’t go into that here.

I also went to an interesting presentation entitled “I ♥ Female Orgasm.” Title really says it all, doesn’t it?

I hope you all are well.

Addendum

About two nights after I wrote the last post, I woke up at 5:30 in the morning to an urgent pounding on my door. It was the Knightingales…coming to kidnap me!

They dressed the four of us in ridiculous clothing, and we skipped down the dark streets of Northfield. We ended up playing on a playground for a while before heading to breakfast at a Spencer’s-like place downtown.

It was fun. In middle and high school, I was always the one arranging the kidnapping, never the one being kidnapped.

It made me feel kind of special.

We had our first practice on Thursday. As a result, I have had the harmony line to “suckin’ too hard on your lollipop, oh, love gonna get you down” running through my head for the last three days. I’ll just say this: the concert on Parents’ Weekend is going to be interesting.

 

Also, I feel terribly sorry for Freud’s children. He had six of them. Can you imagine?

My Audition Saga

What follows is the tale of my a cappella group audition experience.

 

On Friday, I signed up to audition for two a cappella groups: the Accidentals and the Knightingales, both all-female groups who said they would take 2-5 new members this year.

On Saturday, I was quite nervous. I had both the auditions in the afternoon, starting with the Accidentals, and there were over 40 names on each signup list.  It turned out to be a pretty interesting study in the effects of nerves on vocal capabilities. For the Accidentals, they did warm-up type exercises (range: F# to A#?), then  I sang about a minute of my solo, then some aural retention stuff. The Knightingales one was just about the same. Range exercises (range: D# to D? Somehow I grew another octave in an hour), my solo, aural retention, and sight-reading that was super super easy (I can still remember it: do re mi fa sol fa mi re do. Do mi sol mi do…sol…ti do). Both of the auditions were in front of the entire group, since they’re entirely student-run, but the girls seemed really really nice.

At about 4:00 I got an email from the Accidentals with the callback list of about 12 girls. I wasn’t on it.

At 9:00, I walked back over to the concert hall where the Knightingales posted their callback list. There were 12 names (lots of overlap with the Accidentals callback list)…and I was one of them!

On Sunday morning, I went to the Knightingales callbacks. It was actually a lot of fun. The whole thing lasted two hours, but it felt much more like a rehearsal than an audition. There were 6 current members, and they taught us a short four-part song (three auditioners on a part). Then they taught us a second part, so we each knew two parts. Then they called us up in quartets to sing the song, eventually adding a current member or two to each group. Finally, we went around the room and sang 30 seconds of our audition solos one more time. Then they turned out all of the lights and we sang Don’t Stop Believing by Journey.  They said they’d email us all with the final decisions sometime between 1:30 that afternoon and midnight. After the audition, I went to lunch with a bunch of the other girls who were called back, and we had great time. I felt like I could really be friends with some of them.

Basically I really, really, REALLY wanted to get in. Think I’ve used enough “reallys” in this post?

I waited around all day for the email, kind of on the verge of a nervous breakdown. At 10:30, I got sick of waiting so I looked at the Facebook pages of some of the other girls from callbacks. And two of them had changed their statuses to say that they’d gotten into the Knightingales. So I started to prepare to be disappointed. I figured they’d sent out the good news first and were waiting to send the bad news until afterward. Then another hour and a half of torture passed.

Finally, at 12:08am, I get an email.

And…I got in!

I guess all of the angst was worth it after all.

College (because Katie said so)

 Now I realize why no one’s been posting lately–college students are ridiculously busy.

New Student Week passed in a blur. Eventually I was so exhausted that I started skipping scheduled activities to get much-needed naps.

Notable events included the NOlympics, an enormous competition between the freshmen and RAs of different dorm floors in such events as Human Bowling, Frisbee Toss, and something that involved thawing a frozen t-shirt. All of the teams had themes–some of the better ones were Lord of the Flies (they had a conch shell horn and a ritual Piggy killing), Clue, and Thriller. Our theme was Pop Stars and Monsters, or Monstars for short. I had 15 minutes to put together an outfit using the stuff I had in my dorm. I wound up dressing as a zombie bride by tying cut up Target bags onto my limbs and using my white mesh laundry bag as a veil.

Also, the streakers crashed the NOlympics. The sad thing is that the upperclassmen aren’t even supposed to be here until tomorrow, so they must have all agreed to come to campus a full day early just to streak for the freshmen.

We spent many hours crammed into the stuffy chapel listening to campus issues presentations on topics such as “The Buzz: The Truth about Alcohol on Campus,” “Stand in it with Me: Diversity,” and “Not on OUR Campus: Sexual Violence.”

I had my student employee orientation a few days ago and I start working tomorrow morning. It seems I’ll be doing just about the same thing I was doing for KH Players, only getting paid $9 an hour to do it. Unfortunately, I’m not so sure about my coworkers. You know how the kids who run tech are always griping about how snobby and useless the actors are? Well, in my experience, techies have their own special kind of arrogance–the kind that involves running around looking frazzled and important, enjoying their backstage privileges a little too much, and taking immense pride in the inferiority and complicatedness of their lighting and sound equipment. Judging by the tour of the theater, these kids aren’t any different. We’ll see.

My applied voice placement audition really wasn’t a big deal at all. The choir director actually seemed really nice, despite all I’ve heard, and I didn’t even have to sight-sing. He did, however, ask me to sing a natural minor scale a cappella “in any key.” I did my best, but he shook his head and said “no, actually that’s a HARMONIC minor.” Then he asked me to sing a MELODIC minor scale and I just shook my head and said something to the effect of “I don’t think so.” He said that if I don’t wind up finding an a cappella group I can email him and he could see about getting me into choir, which I really appreciated.

The a cappella info session was good in that the four panel members seemed nice and emphasized that people who don’t get into their groups aren’t necessarily bad singers–they just need different voice types in different years–so to be sure and try out again. All the same, I think I’d rather try out once and get in the first time.  They also explained a bit more about the type of music each group sings. Based on what I heard, I think I will definitely try out for the Knightingales and the Accidentals (two women-only groups) and maybe Exit 69 (the group I heard at Accepted Student Weekend) if I’m feeling brave enough. Those auditions will be next weekend, since the Activity Fair is next Friday. Whee.

The not-so-good part: Each group is only accepting 2-5 new members, and they said that all of the groups usually see anywhere from 20-50 people at auditions. I know there’ll definitely be some overlap since kids try out for multiple groups, but still…it’s not a nice thought.

To give you an idea of the guy situation…there’s this guy in my new student week group whose name is Andrew, but he goes by James (as in James Dean). He has worn tight jeans, a leather jacket over a white t-shirt, and black and white converse, and he styles his hair in the gelled pompadour made famous by Danny from Grease every day since we got here. Not to say they’re all like that, but well…these things take time to digest.

Other than that, I guess I’m doing okay. I haven’t made any friends yet, but I have a lot of acquaintances. My classes so far are interesting, but the reading load is a little nuts. My roommate is considerate, though a little timid (I think it’s a cultural thing). I’ll keep you updated on what happens next weekend.

I hope you all are well. Keep posting when you can.

Implosion

I think it’s time for me to leave.

The first part of my day was completely normal. I ran errands with my mother. The second part was out of control…and ended with my mom storming off to the recycling center (?) and me jumping in the car and winding up sobbing in a church parking lot a few blocks over.

I’m trying–I really am trying–to see where she’s coming from. After all, this is the woman who cried when she dropped me off at summer camp for three weeks. My mom expresses her feelings a certain way, which doesn’t happen to be the same way I express mine. Mom is very easy to read. She allows herself to become saturated in her emotions and tends to take on others’ worries as her own. And that’s fine; it’s part of what makes her such an empathetic and caring person.

But I’m different. It’s not that I feel any less deeply than anyone else. I just have a way of pushing emotions to the back of my mind so that they’re not as apparent to other people. It’s the only way I know to keep from losing it. At the same time, people (especially people like my mom) sometimes interpret that strategy as disinterest and detachment, which leads to clashing.

Arghbarkajkljdjkjl. I can’t write about this anymore. It makes me tired.

On the lighter side, here’s a picture of my dorm room that my roommate sent me. She’s there a week early because international students have an extra week of orientation. The room is pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. The walls are yellow and we have TWO windows. I couldn’t ask for much more.