Events from the past week:

1. First week of school over. Nine more to go in this quarter! Art skills await me, I feel it.

2. First Saturday night drinking in Savannah. First (and, oh god, second) shots of Jagermeister taken, on top of two or four beers.

3. First time driving my roommate’s falling-down-drunk ass home.

4. First Savannah hangover.

5. Have gotten marginally better at riding my bike through the town, in that I haven’t damaged myself or any other public property yet. (Knock on wood.) I did almost get hit once already, by a college bus no less. Maybe I should learn those arm signals after all…

6. Am working on two paintings simultaneously for one studio class – an arrangement of green peppers and a lemon, and an arangement of two apples. Am developing a hatred of fruits and vegetables, which might well lead to my developing scurvy any day now.

7. Have made the acquaintance of two nice young men by complaining, on two different occasions, that I have no car with which to haul stuff around. Boys here are very gentlemanly apparently, because one told me to call him anytime I needed a ride anywhere(!) and the other told me to call him whenever I wanted to borrow his pick-up truck(!). As my friend S from home put it, “Heh. Nice ‘pick-up’ line, indeed.”

8. I have almost finished finding a place for all my stuff. I only have one box left to unpack. (Never mind the fact that I simply ignored two boxes entirely and just put them directly out in the shed. I don’t really need a TV or a DVD player. This week anyway.)

9. I got my wireless card finally, obviously. I installed it too! It was easy! And then the little man who lives inside the computer automatically found our wireless signal and got things all configured up and ready for Internetting, with no calculations or work on my part. I love the Mr. Mac Man.

10. First time cracking a textbook in about four years. Did you know that prehistoric peoples rarely included humans in their cave paintings? That’s some Art History 100 for you right there, baby.

Things I still need to work on:

1. So, I’ve got a bike, right? Which is faster than walking, and provides a breeze, which is great. But as I have discovered, sometimes it rains. (Yes, even Georgia gets rain. It’s not just a big ole flat plain here, apparently.) So what good is my bike then? Should I buy one of those stupid “umbrealla hat” thingys? Because I’ve been wearing a raincoat but the hood blows off my head whenever I pedal faster than, like, a snail, so it’s not helping all that much. How did this potential issue never occur to me before? Am I a half-wit? Where is my mind?

2. There is absolutely no more space in my room for any more crap, so that final box might not be opened for another year or two. I hope it doesn’t happen to contain anything timely, like imported tropical fruit, or an ant farm.

(Speaking of ant farms, did anybody else ever have one of those? When I was about seven, I saw an ad for one in the back of a magazine or something and convinced my mom to order it for me. When it arrived, it had the plastic box thing that the ants would eventually tunnel through plus a little plastic vial of ants. The ants had been frozen so that they’d be comatose for a few days, allowing you to pour them into their new farm without them running away. Brilliant, no? What was less brilliant was the packing job done by the ant farm shipping people. The box had a long tiny crack in the inside of its roof, which we discovered a few days later, when I went to inspect the progress of the ants’ tunneling and discovered that not only had those lazy buggers NOT TUNNELED ANYWHERE, but that they were, technically, not in the box anymore. At all. They were tunneling their way all over my room. My mom never bought me anything ever again.)

3. I need to make some friends. My roommates are great, and those two offers of transportation are all well and good, but otherwise I’m currently a big friendless loser. The people in my classes seem to fall into one of two camps: surprisingly friendly and nice, or surprisingly bitchy and ice-queeny. It’s sort of what I expected, I guess – the weird atmosphere of a school that’s partially Southern and partially arty and private.

4. I need a job. It feels weird not to be earning any money at all, like I’m a derelict or a drain on society or something. I have a birthday coming up next week, so at least that’ll be good for a little income.

(Oh my god, how sad is that when your birthday is your main source of revenue??)

~~~~Coming up in my next post: Photos of my house and dog! An account of how I freaked out after the third day of class because I had decided that I wasn’t good enough to be here! Plus, the highs and lows of being the owner of a yard-sale-procured noise machine, which may or may not be* haunted!

*Um, it totally is.