I know I complain about how the workload for my classes increases exponentially as the semester progresses - it’s getting right up there now, with less than a month to go - and while it does get a little tiresome shuttling between class and the library and the ACF labs and home to bed, I have to admit I’m enjoying it on some level. I like being kept busy, I like being challenged, and this semester is nothing if not challenging. It’s also frustrating and exhausting and in some cases baffling, but it’s definitely challenging. I’m done with the core curriculum after this term, so I’m hoping next semester will be more my thing although (with three classes for my major at once) I don’t expect it to be any easier.

I won’t miss the Morse Academic Plan stuff, though. I’m currently taking a Linguistics class to fulfill my social science requirement, and it makes me feel how I suppose some other people feel in Logic, the ones who sit in the back with that cornered rabbit look and take twice as many notes as everyone else. I’m one of those people in Linguistics. I figure some people must get it - after all, how else would there be a Linguistics department - but I do the reading and I take my excessive notes and I’m completely mystified. I don’t like being mystified, at least not when the survival of my merit scholarship is included in the mystery.

On the other hand, the science classes I’ve taken (also for the MAP) have been fascinating despite not being up my proverbial alley in the least. I haven’t shut up about the more gruesome chromosomal disorders for weeks and tomorrow we’re doing a DNA fingerprinting lab. Take that, Linguistics!

Somehow, Thanksgiving is next week, and finals are in less than a month, and I register for Spring 2003 on Thursday. Spring? I’m picking out my classes for T-shirt weather while I’m still sleeping with socks and a hoodie? And seriously, Thanksgiving means Christmas isn’t far off and I mean really, didn’t this semester just start?

It doesn’t seem fair, somehow, that I spend half the year sweating through the warm months, waiting for fall to get here, and then it’s over within all of, what, thirty seconds? It was eighty degrees on the first day of October and in the low forties by Halloween. I do prefer cold and rainy over sweltering and sticky (or so I keep telling myself on the walk to class every morning, along with things like “I should really buy gloves”), but I miss the in-between seasons.

I suppose it could be worse. I have this crazy-ass gingerbread-flavored tea of which I was highly skeptical, but it’s like sex in a mug. I have many, many layers and when I’m wearing all of them I can sometimes even feel my toes. I have a Hale & Hearty card, and it’s totally soup weather.

During Saturday night’s Harlem Adventure, it was decided that all New York City residents should be required to complete a similar process before they can claim they live here. Buses of incoming college students and aspiring actors should get dropped somewhere on Frederick Douglass Boulevard between 9pm and 4am, and made to find their way back to their dorms or freshly-whitewashed studios. It should also be raining.

Because seriously, numbered streets or not, who knew there was a God Damned park in the middle of everything that makes walking east on 116th a bit of a challenge?

The last day to order a shirt is one week from today. Still deciding? Check out some action shots from the last print run.

Another set of exams over with, but more on the way. This weekend is for recovery and catching up on all the regular work that gets neglected during midterms week. Last night my usual bar turned into a bit of a #caoine reunion; Crispy and I were joined by not only the mysterious MrTails but also the sprightly Jons. It turns out that kicking people and getting away with it is a lot easier on irc. Of course, stealing sips of MrTails’s vodka vanilla coke is a lot easier at the bar. Silver lining, etc.

Chris got a new tattoo, and it’s really, really cool:

And finally, this is the Mighty Beast that terrorizes the upper West side. Sure, he looks innocent enough, but you’ll note in the last one he’s springing into action. It may start with sniffing the camera, but it ends in pain and suffering.

When you have, in fact, been up since 4:30am, you start to do things like (for example) attempting to login to your Moveable Type account using either your NYUHome or NYU CS login information. If you’re already a little on the agitated side because maybe you have an exam in just over an hour and a half, you might sit staring at the MT login page for quite a while before you realize your mistake. There may also be profanity involved. It’s possible.

And when you finally do realize, and feel appropriately stupid and then get over it and manage to log in and everything, you may realize that what you actually wanted to do was log in to either your NYUHome or NYU CS accounts, which was maybe why you kept typing in the wrong username and password in the first place. You might think this should have occured to you sooner - if you’ve got a CS exam in an hour and a half, it seems more likely you’d be checking the course announcements page or your NYU inbox (to which is sent material from the course mailing list) than that you’d decide to sit down and write a leisurely post.

And yet.

During midterms (or finals, or really almost any time after the first month of classes) you start to see students in various states of unconsciousness sprawled all over campus. Not just on the couches in the study lounges, although certainly there, but also dozing at desks in the library, on the stairs outside Main building, on benches in any given hallway, and once in a while on the floor. Having been up, myself, since 4:30am, I sympathize with the person from my lab section this morning who wondered aloud why NYU doesn’t just give in and set up an official Nap Center of some kind. She even had the logistical details worked out: you could leave your ID at the front desk in exchange for the loan of a travel alarm clock and space on some sort of bed or couch or cot or what have you. You’d get your little airline pillow and token blanket and drift blissfully into your hard-earned twenty minutes of slumber before returning to study for your next midterm. Oh yeah, my next midterm. I should probably go study for that.

One exam down, one more to go (this week, anyway) and a presentation tomorrow morning. It’s one thing when you’re creating a schedule months in advance and realize that on paper it looks like it’s going to be a fairly demanding term; it’s another when you get to the demanding part. But we’re past the halfway point now, and once I make it through this week things ease up a little until Thanksgiving. Or so I keep telling myself.

Yes, shirts are still on sale!

Indian food last night was as delicious as anticipated, although I hear that Contempt weren’t so bad, neither. I’ll make an effort to hit it up next time around, I think, as I hear it’s back at Mother (which isn’t Mother anymore but I’ll be damned if I’m ever going to think of it as anything but Mother). Worth dropping by if only for the nostalgia factor.

I want to say something about having successfully fought off the cold or whatever that I’ve been feeling the beginnings of for the past few days, but I know that mentioning it will just jinx everything and I’ll end up dying on the floor tomorrow. Oh well.

Hey look at that, I’ve got an exam in eight hours (give or take). I’ll catch you buckeroos later.

When I was but a tiny Emmaling, I was the pickiest eater imaginable. No, really: I was the pickiest eater imaginable. I’ve mentioned before that I wouldn’t even touch ketchup until well into my teens, but that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Condiments and toppings and garnishes of any kind were completely out of the question - when ordering a hamburger for me (I still ate hamburgers then) a patient parent had to be prepared to remove any and all foliage, and not even the tiniest trace of mayo or sauce or dressing was acceptable. Pizza was plain cheese or nothing, and I wasn’t even comfortable having pickles on the same plate as anything I intended to eat.

So I imagine it was a bit of a chore to take me out to dinner when attempting the whole family restaurant experience. I remember many nights of plain rice and chicken fingers and Shirley Temples at one particular Chinese restaurant, and a few other Emma-safe establishments were frequented as well, but still. My parents, being not insane, enjoy sampling a variety of cultural cuisines, but I suppose they also enjoyed avoiding my temper tantrums.

All of this pondering has been prompted, incidentally, by plans to grab some Indian with Crispy tonight. I remember the first time I actually ate Indian food, at this now-extinct place near Harvard Square. Having been warned of the family dinner plans ahead of time (I was something like sixteen at this point) I’d taken the liberty of getting a sandwich a couple hours earlier. I met everyone at the restaurant and ordered a Coke, prepared to smugly abstain from any and all weird food, but then the appetizers showed up. Everything smelled so insanely good that my resistance was lowered and I believe it was my Dad who finally got me to try half a samosa. And of course after that, there was just no stopping me.