Oh, the Weather Outside is Frightful

So finals are this week. I've got an exam on Tuesday and one on Wednesday, and I've got twenty-something pages two this weekend. Fun fun, fun in the sun. Or rather, fun in Vermont. Mutually exclusive events.

Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.

Before I get in to what has been occupying my time over the past seven days, I'd like to make note of what I foresee happening in the next twenty-one. Starting today and going 'til Friday is my last week of classes this semester. The week after that is finals. I've got two exams and two papers, the last of which is due on Saturday the 17th, which is, incidentally, the day I fly from Burlington, through God knows how many connections (or does He?), to Salt Lake City, where I will be staying (well, not in SLC itself, but in the nearby Wasatch range) with my family until Boxing Day (eh?), at which point we shall fly back to Orange County. At least zat is ze plan.

I drove my feet though a desert whose mirage fluttered like a host.

HI MS. WALTERS!
HI ANYONE ELSE SECRETLY READING THIS THAT I DON'T KNOW ABOUT!
HI REGULARS! (I haven't forgotten about you lot yet.)

Now Dawn the yellow-robed scattered all over the earth.

There shouldn't have been anything particularly surprising about the alarm going off at 5:00; after all, I did set it to do exactly that, but then that's never stopped me from being surprised. No matter how much you want to accomplish something that necessitates an early wake-up, you never really want to actually do the waking up. But you all know this. What you do not know, however, are the specific circumstances surrounding this particular Saturday morning, and I am here to rectify that deplorable situation.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to put on a warm coat and walk into the middle of a cornfield and spend the night there? Well, I have . . .

Note: I didn't actually spend the night in a cornfield, which would have been very difficult this time of year considering the harvest has come and gone, but I think it would be kinda fun. But maybe I'm just weird. Yeah, that's probably it. Does anyone remember that cornfield you have to run through in Left 4 Dead 2? That was fun. And this isn't the last reference to zombie video games in this post.

You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.

"It's funny 'cause it's true." - John Michael Gunn

 I saw this on a blackboard a little while ago. I don't know how well you can read it, so I'll spell it out for you. The y-axis is labeled "People's attraction to me" and the x-axis is "How well they know me." The rest should be self-explanatory. For most of you. And really funny. 'Cause think about it: you don't know this person at all and you love him already. (Sorry Rachael and Nicole for assuming that it was made by a guy. But seriously, there's no way that's not a guy.)

Saturday began as the worst day I can remember. We had a cross country meet in Albany. I thought the bus was leaving campus at 9:45 that morning. It actually left at 8:45. I missed it. I didn't race. Albany was the qualifying race to move on with the team into championship season. So, all things considered, it could have been worse. I could have woken up at 6:00 six days a week for the entire summer and ran obscenely long distances and then have it all not matter at all because I never got to compete in a meaningful race. Oh wait, that's exactly what happened.

Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist.

Salutations, fellow bloggers.

I'm gonna talk about Winkler for a little bit right now because he kicks ass.
Throughout the old man's lectures, he incorporates loads of demonstrations, often involving volunteers from the class. I won't try to remember all of them because that would be nigh impossible, but I can certainly recount a few from the last seven days.

Galileo Figaro Magnifico

It will come as no great shock to any of you that the first thing I think of when pressed to summarize the most recent seven days that I have lived through is work. Classes have really started to pick up and accordingly I have been spending a great deal of time studying. The nice thing about my workload is that it is mostly reading, so even if I have, say, five hours of work, as was the case yesterday, I'm spending four and a half of those hours attending to something written by someone other than me, which is considerably easier, I think, than attending to something written by me and by that I mean writing it myself.

Ubi Est Italia?

According to my usually reliable memory, nobody reading this (assuming my audience here is what I think it is) has been to Middlebury. This being the case, I'd like to devote a few words to a description of the campus.

Middlebury is rather hilly. There are few places to which you can walk and not undergo a noticeable elevation change. This creates an interesting dynamic for many of the buildings on campus. Very often, if you walk into a building on the ground floor and you cross to the other side of the building, you will find that you are no longer on the ground floor. For instance, if I want to exit my dormitory building from the west, I can walk directly out without using the stairs, but if I want to use the eastern exit, I must first ascend a flight of stairs. The larger the building, the bigger the elevation change tends to be from one end to the other.

A Sea of Stars

I didn't proofread this, so there might be errors. I'm tired. Sorry. Not really. I'm never sorry.

A week ago I left you, following my first weekend in my dormitory, on the eve of general move-in day. So let us visit my last Tuesday, the twenty-four hour period responsible for the doubling of the population of my little cubiculum.

My roommate's name is Jack Hunsicker. He hails from Minneapolis, Minnesota, though he attended a private boarding school in Massachusetts (just like everybody else here) prior to his arrival at Middlebury. I, regretfully for the sake of this column's entertainment value but thankfully for the sake of my sanity and my comfort, which to me but not necessarily to you trumps the former, have no qualms about Mr. Hunsicker. Also, he is very tall.