(no subject)
So I logged on to LJ to see if any of my friends had posted, and when I saw very few had, I was annoyed. Then I remembered that I hadn't exactly updated, so I could hardly cast the first stone here.
Therefore, I will rectify that right now. A lot has happened anyway in the past few weeks: I went through Initiation and mid-terms mainly, which don't sound time-consuming by themselves, but actually were.
Initiation was the culmination of six weeks of utter chaos, lots of busy days and nights, and memorization of things that don't really matter (quick: who were the founding members of Alpha Chi? Answer: Bertha Denison, Olive Burnett, Anna Allen, Bessie Grooms, Estelle Leonard, Amy Dubois, and Nellie Gamble, in you happen to care). I actually had to take a test on the history of Alpha Chi. Since I am the queen of "how is this going to help me in life?" it was almost impossible to motivate myself to study. I guess I passed, since they didn't kick me out and I was initiated.
Which I can't actually tell you about. So, haha, you curious folk out there, you'll never know.
But I can tell you it was at 8:30 in the morning. ON A SATURDAY. It was also pouring down rain, and I have never been so wet in my life. My big and gbig wanted to take me shopping, which I really wanted to do since J Crew was having a sale. However, I was exhausted and cold as well, so they just took me home and I slept the afternoon away as I am wont to do. That night we went out to dinner, which I was inordinately excited about since I haven't eaten anything but campus food all semester.
That day I also met Thing. Thing is my Big's boyfriend. He's twenty-two, never been to college, does not have a job, is not looking for a job, drinks all the time, sort of smells, and has broken up with my Big before before she took his sorry butt back. My Gbig hates his living innards. It's really funny actually; she came up with the nickname 'Thing' to describe how odious he is. Thing just came up the week of mid-terms, has inspired Big not to study as much as she would have, has stolen Gbig's playstation consistently to play video games all day while Big is in class, and hasn't said so much as a word in greeting to Gbig and my Big's other roommates.
Basically Courtney could do much better than Thing, and Kat and I think she needs to dump Thing right away. I'm beginning to figure out that Courtney is one of those girls who are extreme romantics (i.e. she believes he will change), and that this trait is coupled with a seeming inability to go without a boyfriend. Such an Elon combination. Girls really need to have better self-esteem around here. Girls with high self-esteem do not saddle themselves with boys who have no job or education.
Gbig and I are in agreement: Thing needs to go. Otherwise it is highly possible that long-suffering Courtney--who makes excuses for all of his personal habits--will end up supporting him for the rest of her life. She better not marry him, although she says she 'loves' him.
So it was an uncomfortable twenty minutes in the car together with Big, Gbig, and Thing. Thing didn't say a word, just cuddled with Courtney in the back while Gbig and I rolled our eyes collectively until he got out.
Other than that, it was a great family dinner, and I started to realize how awesome my Gbig is.
I'm going to skip mid-term hell/ drama/ way too many all-nighters for now, because I want to talk about shopping with Gbig. We postponed the proposed post-Initiation shopping spree until Wednesday, to celebrate my survival of said mid-term hell. She needed both a semi-formal dress and a graduation dress. I didn't need anything, but I managed to successfully kid myself I could find a semi-formal dress under $35 so as to not upset my parents after I emptied my bank account with sorority dues.
Fortunately I didn't buy anything, although I found this beautiful dress: http://www.dillards.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=301&langId=-1&storeId=301&productId=501823029&view=20&No=0&N=1000930+4294967276&searchUrl=%2Fendeca%2FEndecaStartServlet%3Fview%3D20%26No%3D0%26N%3D1000930%2B4294967276&R=03003815 (wow, that's a long URL). The only difference, and I think it is key was that the dress I tried on had a gold band under the bust. My Gbig said the gold matched the color of my hair, which was sweet. <3
Also tried on this dress: http://www.dillards.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=301&langId=-1&storeId=301&productId=501813258&view=20&No=0&N=1000930+4294967279&searchUrl=%2Fendeca%2FEndecaStartServlet%3Fview%3D20%26No%3D0%26N%3D1000930%2B4294967279&R=03005785 It is much more red in real life than it appears in the picture. Also, a yellow one which was surprisingly not that bad on me (usually I look terrible in yellow), and a green one, both of which I can't be bothered to find the URLs for, since I didn't like them as much.
The real excitement of the day was that my Gbig found a graduation dress... which I cannot find to save myself. Which is a disappointment, since it is quite a find: classic, 1950s tailoring, navy with white trim, hitting just below the knee, with thin, but still present, straps and a matching navy sweater. Quite demure, classic, with clean nautical lines. Perfect for graduation. Kat is a size 16, so finding dresses can be a challenge, but she's an art major and has a good eye for proportion so she makes it work.
We wandered aimlessly for a while after finding her dress, as it was a nice day yesterday. We talked a lot (read: plotted how to get rid of Thing). My Gbig is very interesting; she's interested in arts and culture and very knowledgeable, and she also just knows a lot about life.
Hopefully she'll never read this because I hate divulging things about people, but when she was ten or twelve or thereabouts, she lost her older sister. Two years later, she lost her mother. I can't even imagine going through what she's been through, and coming out of it as alive, sane, funny, and compassionate as my Gbig is. I just have all the respect in the world for her.
It's strange what adversity does to people. Some people it crushes, and others (the majority, actually) it matures.
Anyway, I had fun and the day was successful for Gbig since she found the dress her father has been nagging her to find since January. Then I came back and slept for fourteen hours. Why, you may ask?
Cue convenient transition to discussion of mid-term hell. Please note, not all of these were mid-terms, some were 'quizzes,' but even so, many of them effectively count as mid-terms since I only have three 'quizzes' in Psychology and English. So, from last Tuesday onward, I had a psych quiz, English quiz, honors mid-term, health final, english paper, and two french papers. The majority of these were due on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday after Initiation weekend, where I devoted half my weekend to Alpha Chi and did not exactly have sufficient time to complete all the assignments to the best of my ability. Still, I locked myself in the library every day, and still found myself pulling all-nighters on Thursday and the following Wednesday.
However, sometimes interesting things happen in libraries during all-nighters. At two in the morning in the computer lab, after I had made minimal progress on the english essay, the computers performed their nightly memory wipe, which I'd forgotten about. They performed their nightly memory wipe right over what I had of my essay. And half of the nine-page paper that the other guy in the lab was working on.
The other guy in the lab happened to be tall, curly-haired, and to have a fabulous smile. Which I hadn't noticed beforehand, but believe it or not, when the computer erased half of his paper, he caught my eye and gave me one of those smiles and we started talking. We passed a very entertaining all-nighter sharing bits and pieces of what we were working on and fantasizing about getting eight hours of sleep. Then I left at 5 AM, which was regrettable.
My second all-nighter was the night before last, and it was a true all-nighter, meaning I left the library at 7:30 in the morning and got bagel sandwiches with the girls I'd been working at the same table with, who were all AOΠs, members of the sorority I originally wanted to be part of. It started with Abby, whom I've known from the first day of class because she's in French with me. I sat down next to her, she showed me incriminating videos from AOΠ post-initiation parties (side note: what's with people sharing incriminating evidence with me lately?) and complained about how hungry she was and how few meal plans she had. Then her friend Alli (not my roommate) arrived, and we discovered she was an Honors Fellow too, and she complained about the same situations as Abby. Then another AOΠ arrived, and another. They, too, were hungry and without meal plans. So I got sick of their complaining, handed over my phoenix card, told them to limit themselves to five or fewer meal plans, and have at it. They came back with pizza and chips and were a lot quieter. Everyone was happy.
Incidentally, the guy from Thursday was there, and Abby even knew him casually, and told me his name, which is Drayton. I chatted with him briefly while printing something out, and invited him to come sit with us if he wanted a break from studying. He never did. I read that as rejection, from my extensive experience. If it isn't going anywhere, better to break it off quickly or never start, is my view. Oh well.
So I worked through the night, producing a paper I was rather proud of in light of the extreme circumstances. In the morning, we got egg sandwiches, and it was awesome. Then I went back to my dorm for an hour and accidentally slept through my first class. Fail.