nawl

It is raining.

The cat is asleep on my bed. She was here when I arrived home half an hour ago. Somehow it always feels like a blessing to walk in and find her here on the foot of my bed, or wake up in the morning to see her sprawled out casually between my legs. Leo commented a while ago that waking up with her was an auspicious way to begin the semester. Perhaps. Perhaps she's just using me for a place to sleep out of the rain.

Really, I should be doing my problem sets, but the rain is making me introspective.

Many things have happened in the past week and a half. They can be categorized into ivy league things, and grad school things, and previous life things, and things I did do, and things I did not do.

Some of them I forgot to write about last time, like the wine and cheese social for first-year grad students at the university art museum. There was a harp player in the corner who was playing pop songs, and waiters who walked around with trays offering salmon on toast, and various people who gave speeches about how they hoped we could use the museum in our research, and we all wandered around and looked at the paintings in the rooms where we were permitted to be with food and drank large quantities of lemonade. What a strange world this is.

There was a 70s party at the dbar, which was dark and smoky and full of loud music and strangely dressed nerds and reminded me ever so much of a Cloyne party. Diana, if that's how you spell her name, was the star of the party getting down and dirty with a life-sized cardboard Legolas.

The only really constant part of my daily routine is the mile-long walk across campus in the morning on my way to class, wherein I ponder such things as how quickly and easily the routine changes, and I find myself in an entirely new place with a new routine and a new set of people populating my life. I also have homework, now, so I think about that too.

Ian came to visit en route to the west coast. Maybe he'll blog about his adventures. I think he walked around Princeton, which I haven't managed to actually fully explored yet, and walked around New York, which would take years to fully explore. We ate in a couple of nice restaurants, strolled through Central Park, and he performed the amazing feat of finding me, completely unexpectedly, in a Korean restaurant at 2 am on a Sunday morning with the late crowd of ballroom dancers who had decided to have a midnight meal before bed.

I am a bad hostess.

There are things I did not go to.

The eating clubs had their lawn parties, apparently an integral part of the Princeton cultural experience, right up there with the steam tunnels.

Elie Weisel spoke on campus. I did not see him, but walking through campus one evening I realized that the speech and applause I could hear from a second-floor auditorium with its windows open must have been, and we stood below the windows listening.

The Dalai Lama spoke at Rutgers. Everyone who went talked nonstop about it. Apparently he seems like a pretty cool guy, someone you'd like to sit down and have dinner with, and not at all like a politician, and it was really awesome when the Shah of Iran stormed the stage and took over the mike. Oh, and that we should all have more compassion for each other.

"The Game", a puzzle hunt for grad students around campus. There will be more, I'm sure.

To make up for my recent lax behavior in enjoying the ivy league, I did have lunch today in Prospect House, the professors' cafeteria. The food is, indeed, way better than the grad college, they have white napkins and nice plates, *and* it's cheaper than the cost of a meal on the meal plan.

This morning I breakfasted with a couple of plasma physicists. Said one to the other, "A gyrokinetic simulation with node interactions is an embarrassingly parallel process."

"Voulez-vous dejeuner avec moi? A trois le plaisir est bien plus grand."

I am finding myself lusting after things, math books on subjects I wish I knew, (and now after hearing about this, some new popular science as well), expensive dance clothes, hair implements, small electronics, a bicycle. The pleasure of buying things is conflicting with the pleasure I take in *not* buying things, and the eventual guilt I will feel when I buy things I don't use. (Thought: libraries. Eenteresting.) I am shocked at how much a duvet cover costs.

Hilarious. (And lyrics, thanks Josh!)