beyond the wide world's end

Leaving in half an hour! Oh, God, airport hassles coming up. Alone, unless other Washington EPGYers are on the same flight, which is entirely possible, since there were six or so of us on the flight in.

The Paper of DOOOOM is DOOOOOOOOOOOOONE!

Guys? I am writing the paper of doom. As in, a 7 to 10 page comparison of two of the texts we read this past couple of weeks -- in my case, Plutarch's The Life of Alexander and Taira Shigesuke's The Code of the Samurai.

No, it doesn't make that much sense to me either.

Also, not eating much. A, cafeteria food, B, workworkwork, C, friend doesn't like cafeteria food.

Also, should I get two CDs, or a CD and a book, or two books? The CDs are of the Stanford Band and Talisman, a Stanford a cappella group; the books are White Gold, about the white slave trade in the eighteenth century, and London: The Biography, which is about...uh, I think it's obvious. Opinions! I can only afford two of each.

So, right now I'm currently in sunny California, a.k.a. Palo Alto, a.k.a. Stanford University, as a resident of the Stanford University EPGY Summer Institutes -- more specifically, Investigations in Humanities: The Classical Era and the Renaissance. Or, as I've explained to friends and teachers, classical and Renaissance lit. Which means there's a lot of reading. No, really -- a lot. Like, tons. Like, three or four hours per day. And a reading journal, which is basically a paragraph or so every day on what we read. We're reading a lot of stuff: parts of The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Republic of Plato, Dante's Inferno, John Donne, Milton's Paradise Lost, The Bhagavad Gita, Macbeth, The Tempest, Plutarch's Greek Lives: The Life of Alexander...I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot. And we're fitting all of this into three weeks, with a seven to ten page paper due at the end of the course. School just ended!

I'm in a dorm with a bunch of other people -- the other Humanities people (Film is the other group) and the Expository Writing folk. Mostly girls, with about a dozen boys. Actually, I'm not sure how many boys; I never counted. Now, the problem comes with the boys. There are two floors in my dorm: most of the girls are on the first, with about eight on the second. However, although the boys are also on the second floor. And the only second floor bathroom is right outside my room.

Yeah. Guess who gets it? The boys.

The girls' bathroom is downstairs, which means that the upstairs girls have to go downstairs to go to the bathroom or shower. We also have to go down the stairs -- which are outside, with all the boys' windows looking out on the mini-courtyard. Joy. On the other hand? The water pressure in the showers is amazing (my house has basically no water pressure).

Also, yay California and no parents. However, I'm craving chocolate something mad. The dining hall has no desserts. Actually, it doesn't have much variation in food at all, and they're not letting us go anywhere alone for the first couple days. Wah. This could get old fast.