My friend saw this and was convinced I had joined a sorority. Nope. We just learn their slimming arm-pose techniques.

It’s been a long couple of weeks. We’re hitting the point in the semester where the work is piling up in forboding sorts of ways (I have an English paper, a response paper, a Women in Cross Cultural Perspectives response and essay, an annotated bibliography for Social Problems, and a lab for Bio Anthro due by December 7th), and it’s rainy and honestly all I want to do is take a nap.

But, it has been a good few weeks too. I went up to Blue Ridge with Elizabeth and my family, and we climbed Amicalola Falls (and by “we” I mean “Elizabeth and my parents” because my sister and I were too lazy to go more than halfway up), and it was lovely and there was tons of food and I napped. I even got to sit on an easy chair and I swear to god, of all of the stupid things I miss since entering college, furniture is high, high on the list. It almost makes me want to rent a house rather than live in the dorms next year.

The weekend before last was Fall Formal. I managed to have a great deal of fun, despite being stone sober, so I think that’s a sign of maturity and/or losing shame in my complete inability to dance. I was elected Formal Queen, which was sweet. I’m hoping the jokes about it die out soon. (Protip: Yes, Queen is a title of royalty. You are not the first to figure that out, I’m sorry.) Huzzah, maturity/lack of shame.

Along with my friends who are taking Bio Anthro with me this semester, I went into the woods and flintknapped the other day. Flintknapping, for the uninitiated, is making knives out of rocks. Like so:

We’re knapping with obsidian, which is basically volcanic glass. We all managed to cut off chunks of our hair with the points we made, so it wasn’t too bad for a first attempt. We did, it must be said, mostly work by throwing the rocks against the ground, and that’s how chimps do it. So that was somewhat embarrassing.

I managed to spend this most recent weekend in Atlanta with two professors (one Texan, one Swedish) listening to a tour of the Atlanta Race Riot, a shameful bit of history that Atlanta has managed to more-or-less completely hide. The fun part about those events if often talking to professors, and these two were no exception. I got to gossip about my school system with the Swedish one (both I and the other professor were politely trying to convince her to move her kids away from my middle school), and the Texan told us a story about a student she had a few years back who was just completely convinced that slavery was Not That Bad. Given that the Texan is an African American history specialist, she was put out.

Otherwise, it has been a cold, rainy sort of day. I’m thinking of Thanksgiving and it’s become more or less the light at the end of the first-semester tunnel. I’m making bourbon sweet potatoes and the pecan pie. I plan to eat all of them by myself.

Now, to nap!