I did a bit of time-traveling last week: I left New Zealand an hour after I arrived in Portland, and stilly managed to get eight hours of sleep in there. KC came to the airport to greet me, and I stayed up talking with her and Ben before sleeping for the first night in my new dorm room.

And oh what a beautiful room it is! The third floor of ‘Ullivan is full of light and windows, and the vaulted ceilings turn living in a box to living in a house. I also raised my bed all the way up to make a fort underneath. Hurrah!

The weekend was busy, going to the airport twice to pick up friends, shopping for books, supplies and foodstuffs, and catching up with dormies, old and new alike. I needn’t have been afraid that everything would be horribly different; most of what has changed is good, and most of what was good has stayed. And the freshman aren’t scary at all — they remind me of Peaches, Jacob, Jessica, Kara and me last year. Of course, we already have a tight-knit group of friends on the floor, but there’s always room to grow.

Classes are good, especially Anthropology with Makley. The first day stimulated neurons that had been lying dormant since high school Humanities. I found ideas and questions flowing into the margins of my notes! The concepts are connecting to those of Steve’s linguistics classes, Discourse from last year and Prosody (which Steve has apparently been obsessing over all summer) this year. At last, my academic brain chocolate, you are mine!

Speaking of happiness… There is a long story I would like to tell sometime, now that it’s finally found a beginning: Once upon a time, there were two ninjas who thought they were very good at being sneaky, but in the end they only fooled each other. Suffice to say that the ninjas have retired now, and though I do not know the ending, they will live for now as if it were “happily ever after.”

(Which is, after all, the best way to live.)

Que sera sera.

…

New favorite word: memeplex.

New favorite book that I haven’t read yet: Giraffes? Giraffes!