It was a mark of the strength of their friendship that Ron did not laugh.

It's 7:05 am as I write this, and I am not terribly happy to say that I just finished my first ever homework-induced all-nighter. Which is kinda bad and all that, but interestingly it wasn't fueled by extreme procrastination. I spent the whole night writing most of a paper that's not due 'til Monday. But I have three other papers due next week, so I guess it sorta makes sense to knock this one out now.

At some point in the last seven days, I hopped on a friend's Facebook account and grabbed some pictures from the last few months to put in my iPhoto library because, you know, that's my equivalent of Facebook. Lots of pictures and all the friends I need, i.e. none. (That's not a serious comment; please don't take it as such. Thank you.) So maybe I'll look through those and see if any are blog-worthy.

Pre-pre-season, sometime between late August and early September.

Me running in God knows what meet. Wait, I think that's our home meet. Guess that makes me God.

Breakfast at the hotel in Indianapolis.

Gearing up for Nationals in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Ditto. 

16 hours in the car a bunch of sleepyheads does make.

Hats on hats.

Yep. I'm gonna go eat some breakfast now. I'll finish this post . . . not now.

And now it's four in the afternoon. In other words, four hours since I finished my last class of the semester, in which I wrote my name in Arabic, which was kinda cool.

Mmm, culture.

I'm going to be writing about 40 pages between yesterday and the end of next week. Hopefully some of them will be decent. The nine I wrote last night were decent, I think. Cool maps involved. My paper's working title it "Mapping the Frontier". Wanna see some of the frontier maps I'm writing about? Too bad, you have to. These pictures are super duper high resolution, so I've provided the urls in case you want to have a closer look. Which you won't, but when I read this again in twenty or fifty years (will it still exist?), I will.

The World, 1500. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4a/1500_map_by_Juan_de_la_Cosa_rotated.jpg

The American West, 1814.                                                                                                    http://www.themapdatabase.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/lewis_clark_nima.jpg

A piece of the moon (please someone get the reference), 1969. http://www.moonpublicity.com/images/lc/jherschel_geo.jpg

Fun fact: none of my professors this semester grew up in the United States. My intro geography professor is from Germany, my cartography professor is from Wales, my Qu'ran professor is from Iran, and my Russian lit professor is from Russia.

A thing my Qu'ran professor told us this week: When he was an undergraduate in Iran, he was more of a Muslim fundamentalist, whereas now he looks at Islam from a scholarly perspective. Huh.

I talked to one of the study abroad people here, and I am pretty confident that I will be able to spend most of the first half of 2014 in New Zealand.

The following is something I've thought quite a bit about.
I don't really talk about my friends that much on this blog. That's really for two reasons. First, I don't like the idea of putting someone else's personal information on the internet. Second, when reading all of your posts, I've always found the most interesting parts to be those focused on you, not on your friends. It's just not that interesting to read about people you've never met. I don't mean to discourage you from writing about your friends; I wouldn't have brought this up if I didn't feel the need to explain why I haven't blogged about my friends that much. And in light of what I'm about to say, such a discouragement would be hypocritical on my part. Because I'm about to say something about friends.
I've realized that this blog is turning into something I want to be able to go back to and read many years, hopefully decades from now. Like memoirs, or an autobiography, but better because I'm writing it while it's happening rather than looking back on old memories.
And if I'm writing my autobiography, I want to focus on what's important to me, not what I think is interesting to the average viewer. And nothing at Middlebury is more important to me than my friends. I  don't think I could really call these four years of autobiography a true picture of my life if I didn't include what was most important. So from now on, I'll toss in some more about the people I've grown close to.

Chuck. Also present in most of the pictures up top.

I'll start with Chuck. Chuck's my best friend here at Middlebury. He's my year, a probable biology major, and (obviously) an XC guy. He hails from the island of North Haven, off the coast of Maine. North Haven's got a few hundred year-round residents, and Chuck's high school graduation class had a population of eight. He was the only runner on the North Haven cross country team, which means his team was only about 199 people smaller than ours at CdM. And now I realize I've set myself the task of describing him as a person. Hmmm. Not possible. You'd have to meet him. He's . . . pretty quiet. That's everyone's first impression of him. But that doesn't mean very much. Yeah, you'd have to meet him. Same with every other human being though, I guess.

Chuck stories. Hmmm.

The week after his XC season ended this year, Chuck ran a marathon by himself. We all did a ten mile run, but he added on sixteen more. Kid likes to run.

Chuck knows the LotR movies backward and forward. Might be the second most LotR-knowledgeable kid on the team, which is saying a lot. But he knows Star Wars even better. When he was eight or something, he was so excited to see "The Phantom Menace" that he threw up in the theater. The theater that was more than an hour's commute from Chuck's house. Because there are no theaters on the island and the only way off the island is an hour-long ferry ride.

We're convinced Chuck still believes in Santa Claus. He's just the type of guy who would.

People call us ChuckandDerek. As in, "Who's coming to dinner?" "Uh, Mac, Pat, Sebastien, ChuckandDerek, Kevin, Sam, and Melake."

His real name is Charles Dylan Jones. Middle name after Bob Dylan. But people always call him Chuck. Sometimes with variations, e.g. Chuckles, Chuckleberry, Chuckwagon.

When something goes wrong, people tend to blame it on Chuck. As in: "This dinner is terrible. Come on, Chuck." Or, "It's way too cold outside. Definitely Chuck's fault." Or, "Dammit, I left my shoes in the locker room. Fuckin' Chuck."

———

Well, gotta get ready for the XC banquet tonight.