Just in case you thought I was dead, an overview of my post-semester movements: five nights in Harrisonburg, a day and a night in Nashville, Kentucky and Tennessee and Illinois and Missouri in twelve hours, and now Springfield, Missouri. Fewer than seven days till I am home.
Nine months ago today I arrived for the first time on the college campus I now find myself leaving for a week in the Midwest. The school year is over.
It is strange that the year abroad I never had any intention to come on, was desperate to avoid once I had a place on and tried to turn into a semester several weeks in, has in fact been the most exciting experience of my life.
It began with a four hour taxi ride through rush hour from Dulles airport, which showed me an America of strip malls, churches, abandoned gyms and supersize drivers in supersize cars. I spent most of the first week crying at my desk wondering how difficult it would be to return to England. I told my orientation group that I was a middle-aged divorcee with two young children, fielding questions about my youthful skin with a bashful ‘Aw, you’re too kind’. That seems like a long time ago now.
I went through rush and joined a ninety-strong sisterhood. Though by the start of second semester I had moved into the sorority court, and soon realised it was not the anti-feminist cult I had been led to believe by the secret handshakes, passwords, prayers, songs, symbols, words and initiation rituals that had been taught to us in a series of educational lectures, I was at first terrified.
I worked as a telephone fundraiser until I was fired for working illegally in the States, being paid for the first time three months after I had left and was couchsurfing across the Caribbean.
I had my first thanksgiving, in New York, and fell in love with the city only two months after I had said the same about DC. I forewent clubbing every night, underdressed and intoxicated for wearing tee shirts for the first time, and stalking through the late-night library looking for my ever-studying friends.
In the two years of university that had led to this one, I had lived a life of leisure that was only occasionally impeded upon by the appearance of essays. Class was minimal, optional and rarely attended. In America, the opposite was true, as final grades rested in part upon class attendance and participation.
I became well acquainted with the Virginian capital, Richmond, and its Wednesday night, gay clubbing scene. I was robbed by an overweight freshman from Virginia Tech and had my passport stolen from a nightclub for the second time in two years. I lived in a library for five days, mostly for anecdotal purposes, and found a secret Korean restaurant in Newport News that soon became the place that a friend and I would run away to when campus became too claustrophobic.
When waiting for a new debit card to arrive, I spent my final twenty dollars hopefully playing the American lottery for the first time. I lived through my first hurricane and earthquake, and on my only trip to Virginia Beach, spent the early hours of the morning rearranging the city’s nativity display. I walked home from my first formal down a motorway and was robbed by gypsies as my friend passed out in a roadside ditch. I spent my second formal breaking into others and passing a bottle around a hotel room.
TBContinued since being now stranded for the third day on campus, the last remnant of the recently fled student population, it is probably time I left too. Over and out Williamsburg, it’s been good. X
My final final finished almost four days ago, and although they went disastrously I don’t mind as much as I perhaps should. Now that the students have left campus and I am left alone once more, boredom has set in with a vengeance.
Yesterday, so desperate for something to do I decided to reconstruct my room. I pulled three giant beds together and built a ‘triple bed’ or trampoline, which now menacingly dominates my room. I have also just stopped building a ‘reading corner’ to write this entry, and am considering turning the triple into a double and building a sofa.
It comes as little surprise to learn then, that since the series of tearful goodbyes came to a standstill and everyone fled for home, I have become desperate to return to London. I was never meant to be a builder or an interior designer, this truly is a new low.
Either I am having early onset menopause or it really is so hot that I am abandoning tights for the day. Curious.
Last night I returned to the bar I was ejected from last week. The bouncer with whom I had had a ‘reasoned’ argument with, insisting that I had not been drinking and was a law-abiding member of the Under Twenty One Club was at the door. The last words I remember him saying to me that night before I finally admitted defeat were ‘I just watched you wash the crosses of your hands downing shots and know you are underage. Get outta here’.
As I presented him the ID I had borrowed off a very caucasian friend of mine he explained the situation to the bearded, middle-aged woman smoking next to him.
Thankfully for me her response was ‘I don’t give a fuck man, I don’t work here.’
And this time triumphant, I was allowed back inside.
I was rudely awoken this morning by an oversized Dutchman farting on my leg.
http://issuu.com/rocketmagazine/docs/rocket_spring2012_bloom
Page six.
Just came out of an exam that asked for graphic details of the sexually liberal Oneida community’s midnight orgies. A friend of mine claims I misread the question, but I’m pretty sure she’s the confused one. I hope.
First final down and yes, I am hoping for a miracle.
I find myself with fewer than twenty four hours before an exam for which I am meant to have read over forty texts – novels, theoretical and classical examples – hoping that a critical analysis of Wikipedia articles will get me through.
It has been a memorable week. Let us begin with last Sunday and “Senior Roast”. This is a sorority tradition during which the seniors (myself included) are publicly humiliated to a rapturous audience of sisters in sundresses. Each victim takes a seat in front of the baying crowd whilst behind them, the “roaster” reads a speech detailing the most awkward and embarrassing moments of the “roastee’s” college career. It is an illuminating exercise that does at points, leave one wondering what this bizarre collective will do once they are unleashed on American society. One can only hope that blackmail does not come top of the list.
After this, seniors will down items to students in the lower years. I decided to will down the gigantic goblet I was given as part of my clue week with “hot and dangerous” painted across its rim in blue and gold. I gave this to my entire pledge class in anticipation of a new ritual I explained was to be initiated the following Thursday (for the sake of ritual secrecy, though I did conduct the first of many ceremonies for this tradition, details will remain only with those who were there).
On Monday, I went to my final Pi Phi meeting after which I held a brief concert, meaning here a manic three minute performance of ‘The Cheese Song’. As soon as the song was over, I asked my ‘audience’ if they liked cheese, the response an unequivocally enthusiastic ‘Yes’. It was then of course, the obvious next step to withdraw a giant tupperware box from behind a curtain, slam it down on the table and announce ‘In that case…’
What followed was a ten minute ‘cheese awards ceremony’. If there were ever a question of me being a strange candidate for the Greek community, it was surely in this. I had, in a moment of unprecedented procrastination, gone to Wawa and bought a number of cheeses, which I had then brought back to the house and glitter glued with words such as ‘obscenity’, ‘love’, ‘adventure’ etc. These were then given out to various people with humiliating explanations for why each recipient deserved them…
The rest of the week was punctuated by nearly missed deadlines, and one evening where I was ejected from a bar and had to be taken home after the bouncer believed I was too drunk and underage to be allowed back inside. Bastard!
Moving on.
This Friday was “blowout”, defined by Urban Dictionary as
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“End of semester celebrations that occur on the last day of classes and generally involve excessive and early morning drinking, denial about upcoming exams, puking and rallying, and the making of poor life decisions. Spring blowout is generally a larger ordeal, as the weather is conducive to outdoor drinking and slip and slide and seniors like to return to their freshmen dorms to give it a little toast. Like many great legacies, such as full-contact beer pong, this festivity had its beginnings at the College of William and Mary.”
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And it was insane.
