Hey kid, it's just what I needed today.

I'm sitting on the floor of my dorm room, horrible florescent out and cheery twinkle-lights on, with some brilliant person's youtube playlist playing "Five Years Time" by Noah and The Whale to me. It's midnight, and I'm waking up in 6 1/2 hours... and as long as I'm up, I really should be finishing Oedipus Rex (which I ALWAYS sound out phonetically in my mind whenever I see it printed... it's horrible) or writing a paper. Or two papers. But I'm not. I've been spending too many nights hunched over notebooks and typing up papers; I'm taking tonight off. Well, at least this next half hour or so. And then I'll give in and go to bed.

Speaking of bed... I AM incredibly tired. So this will be brief. (We'll see... I always say that, and then it never is.)

The last few days have been really busy, and really good. Wednesday was fairly normal, with the exception that the fire alarm in the cafeteria went off literally the second I opened the door to go in and eat lunch. So the whole building was evacuated and nobody was allowed back inside for a good half hour - at which time I had to go to class, so I didn't eat lunch that day. But I did run into the pastor of the church I've been going to; he waved me down and we spent a good 20-25 minutes talking about our families and literature. I'd say it was a lunch break well-spent; I've promised to look up his son's photography magazine, and he's promised to read The Little Prince.

Wednesday was also the beginning of a large number of happy run-ins with people congratulating me on getting into Workout. Some were people who have been hearing me talk about it through the whole process; some were people I hardly even knew. Gretchen's been really sweet about it, and has been telling all her friends that her roommate got in - and then she reports back to me, with things like, "So-and-so was so excited that you got in in your first year - that's huge!" Apparently new people don't usually get in for their first year. So that's cool. She also said that that meant they saw something "extraordinary" in me, which I think confirms my secret suspicion that Workout members are actually superheroes in disguise. Also, one girl who's already in Workout found me the other day and gave me this big hug and said, "I'm just so excited for you. When I found out that you got in, I thought, this is gonna be a good year." That made me pretty darn happy.

So Wednesday night, Gretchen and I went out for frozen yogurt to celebrate with two girls who live a few floors down, and that was lovely.

Nothing extraordinary happened on Thursday during the day, but at 5:30 I met my Theater Survey class in front of the theater awning and we boarded a school bus, Chicago-bound. Downtown, crammed in between so many buildings that you wouldn't see it unless you were really hunting for it, stands The House Theater. It's a fabulously small, over-decorated, quirky, old-fashioned and yet very modern place. The play we saw was called The Iron Stag King, Part I - and it was brilliant. Agh, describing it would take too long - suffice it to say, I loved it. The staging itself was genius. ACK. PROFESSIONAL THEATER. SO GOOD. We're going to see three professional plays, total, this semester - and for each one, we're supposed to write up a play report right afterwards. And since our professor wants us each to develop our own opinions, we weren't allowed to talk about the play on the 40 minute drive home. That was SO FRUSTRATING. I got back to my dorm at about 11:30 and wrote until 1:30; and any time that I ran into a classmate today, my first question was always, "Did you write your paper yet?" And then we'd debate opinions and such. I love this part of school.

Today has felt very long - I think it's because I spend Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays being in and out of so many different buildings and parts of the campus that it begins to feel like one day is really made up of several. I finished my classes at 3:05 today, studied in my room until dinner, had dinner with some other girls, and then holed up in the library for a few hours. At 9:45 I headed across campus to go to the first Workout meeting. It was only about a half hour long - long enough to make some introductions, then stand in a circle and grow very quiet for a few solid minutes, and then receive our instructions for tomorrow. It's the Workout Retreat, so we'll be gone all day - only, nobody but the director and the seniors know where we're going. All we were told was "wear comfortable clothes". Oh, and we're not allowed to speak to each other until we get to our destination. I am intrigued.

But mostly I'm just incredibly excited. I'm starting to feel like myself again, and it's wonderful to be plugged into a group like this one.

I just really need to make sure that I don't let myself procrastinate in school so much, now that time is going to be a bit... limited, shall we say. Cause I've got two papers due this next week, and a French test... and I haven't really done what I need to do to prepare for those things yet. Ah well... I've still got a few days, right? ;)

I just zoned out and stared at the twinkle-lights for about five minutes. I'm going to bed.