Spring!
Spring is just barely, almost here.
There are *flowers*.
After a barren winter, daffodils seem almost obscene.
The birds have started to chirp again. I hadn't noticed they had stopped until they started again.
The trees are covered with little buds, almost-not-quite ready to burst into bloom. The quantity of buds is somewhat alarming.
Prospective students came to visit. They all seem very nice and fun, but since every single one of them also got into MITCMUBerkeley(UCSDStanfordUW), I probably won't be seeing any of them in the fall.
I have been informed that my new favorite hair style is apparently a political statement in Ukraine. Unfortunately, it's obviously not real--her hair is only shoulder-length. Apparently once opponents accused her of using fake hair, she put up her real hair in order to take it down. Real hair, in May 2002. Fake hair, in January 2002. Perhaps it's hair snobbery, but I'm shocked that people can't tell the difference.
For the third time this semester, I arrived in my room after a week of absence to find an enormous dead cockroach belly up on the floor in the middle of my room. When I picked it up to throw it away, its legs started moving.
The bathroom attached to my room ran out of toilet paper over break. The dispenser takes those foot-wide rolls of scratchy single-ply industrial goodness, so we couldn't exactly run to CVS to pick some more up. My roommate called campus building services for replenishment. They took two days to respond. Finally a guy knocks on the door with an enormous garbage bag full of toilet paper. "I didn't know what kind you needed," he said, "so I brought some of everything." Two standard-sized rolls, two eight-inch rolls, and a twelve-inch roll. He shoved the bag at me and ran.
The dispenser has some sort of complicated locking mechanism to which I don't have the key.
This is more toilet paper than I know what to do with. It took two girls seven months to get through the 12-inch roll. (The internet informs me that this is 4000 feet of toilet paper.)
In my search for clues on how to open the dispenser, I ran across Wikipedia's entry on toilets.
Tonight was one of those nights that made me happy to be at Princeton. The usual dinner table crowd was joined by a handful of visiting humanities students. In jest I challenged one who was introduced as a specialist in Renaissance languages to summarize his research in 30 seconds go. He told us, in much more eloquent language, "Medieval scholars only studied the Bible in Latin. During the Renaissance, they re-discovered Greek, and read the Bible in Greek, and then in (other languages), and then in Aramaic, along the way realizing how much was mis-translated, the first step to discovering that the Bible was written by man, not God, and setting the stage for intellectual exploration. This is Christians learning from Muslims and Jews. It's also my way of giving the finger to people who think Orientalism is only about colonialism. These people were Orientalists centuries before oil was discovered."
The watch was stopped at 47 seconds. We applauded.