I felt strangely warm and as they say fuzzy yesterday morning, as I gave up on trying to shower in the cold water, walked briskly to campus with Nori and found myself in a delightful wooded room complete with fireplace and empty built-in bookshelves (and an elaborate ceiling pattern cut in half with a crude plastic hallway partition.) Mr. Schuldenfrei (as he put it on the syllabus) seems like a terrific fellow indeed: relaxed, amiable, slightly sarcastic without seeming bitter at all, truly philosophical, I guess. I didn't speak up a whole lot, but I enjoyed the conversation ("what is the purpose of college"; "why do we say 'social change' when we mean 'radical liberalism'"), and the dichotomy of bright-eyed freshmen (tee-hee) and PDC-bagging juniors (Nori and Emily Clough). It's a very tempting class, and seems especially well-suited to auditing, since the meat is in reading and discussion, and the papers are somewhat extraneous. There are certainly problems with auditing 8:30 classes, but there are advantages as well (at least to auditing them over taking them).

Next up was French, my first class with Micheline Rice-Maximin, who is spunky and speaks quickly, but seems nice enough (she spent a few minutes after class digging up an extra schedule for me). Then to DuPont (around the back the long way, since I was just following my nose) for Intermediate Syntax. I was quite confused to find a somewhat flustered, soft-spoken clean-cut young man leading a low-key discussion of interfaces between linguistic modules, but eventually I figured out that Kari was away (her father has apparently just died.) She wouldn't be in Semantics either, of course, so instead of that I went with Alyssa (whom I had encountered at lunch, over curly fries and an articulated discussion of Turkey with Adrienne) to her Cognitive Science class, for which ironically I was enrolled and not she. This was in the same lovely room (Papazian 324) as the philosophy class, and had the same sort of eager freshfolk, including Jonathan "but happy" Schneider (but not J. Bronstein), Joy Mills, funky haired robotic clown Ed (who had been in French as well), and Elena C. Unfortunately this prof wasn't nearly as compelling, mostly content to stand silently and let people "respond directly" to one another. Alyssa and I refrained from entering the debate, despite our complementary mind definitions, but it was quite amusing regardless, as folks argued for the sentience of sunflowers, the impossibility of new ideas, the idiocy of moths, the temporality of the mind. "Actually, I don't know what's in a quiche." I had never really had the intention of taking it, but I kind of enjoy first class meetings. I talked Alyssa into going to another one with me, my fifth in a row, and in Sproul of all places: Historical and Comparative. That seems like quite a far-out class, touching on everything from Old Icelandic structures to computer programming to Iron Age cuisine to Tolkein Worship. Shame but I don't think it's for me, at least this semester. Sean Crist is endearing though, as much as a professor as as a square-dance caller and a muller of wine (my only previous experience with him.)

And with that (and a trip to the bookstore for pens and, perhaps ill-advisedly, Hindu goddess books) we headed off for ml, past running Schmidt, to Alyssa's room, where I "whacked and unwrapped" a "raspberry," ordered half of my anthropology books for literally half what it would have cost me at the bookstore, and read what Schmidt had to say about my paper. Blair came by to see about Sharples, but I only walked with her partway, and then headed home. Dinner here was already underway, even though nobody had answered my call fifteen minutes earlier, and soon enough Laurel and Jenny and Sean arrived to partake. It was Joel's old favorite dofoo curry with coconut milk with a new and excited audience (had he thought we were criticizing the peanuts rather than the repetition?) Joel and Rebecca left partway through the meal, and the juniors got to intense majors-requirements-PDCs talk, spurred by Nori's recent ambition to become a CS major. When the dust cleared, she seemed set on CS and Ling double-minor with a music major, while Jenny toyed with various "special" combinations. I re-read the requirements, shifted my thinking to Arth major Ling minor rather than vice versa (but no rush to choose, so that's nice.) I read some and went to tango, which was as I should have known flushed with new folk and a lesson on the basics once again. After about fifteen minutes I noticed there was gender balance without me, so I slid back out again. Took the chance to visit some Lodgers, primarily Matt, who played me his three new tunes (including the expanded "save the homosexuals") and the Jay-Z unplugged disc, and Kate Minear, who has a fabulous new haircut and is applying to go to Madrid (her roomies were out involved in theatre and cinema). Back here and wrote this.

Today's classes were startlingly normal: French drill with good old Bénèdicte and Camilla in orange, and Goddesses, which both piqued my interest in the subject further and made it seem like the subject matter might end up being the most worthwhile thing about the class. Alyssa met me in the foyer as promised, we lunched here. I took care of some matters (called home and Tony) and here I am, so that's up to date. I'm going to go get binoculars soon.

i saw her leave the luau with the one who parks the cars
and the fat one from the swimming pool - they were swaying arm in arm
now i can hear their ukeleles playing down by the sea
she's gone with the hula hula boys, and she don't care about me

they're singing:
haina 'ia mahiana ka puana
haina 'ia mahiana ka puana
haina 'ia mahiana ka puana
haina 'ia mahiana ka puana