Last Day

So I'm sitting here on my bed. There are no posters on my walls, no books on my shelves, no clothes hanging in the closet, no food in the fridge, no papers on my desk. My friend Kristin is all moved out - I helped her carry all her stuff to her car - and I'm nearly all ready to go. 

This afternoon is the first day I'm allowed to do anything resembling physical exertion again, so Stephen and I are going to the playground about a half mile up the road and we're going to play catch. This morning, Kristin and I went into town to The Coffee Grove and then walked around and looked at some shops. 

This was a good year. Much much better than last year, and as I've said before, it's been a while since I was reluctant to leave a place. To be sure, I'm glad that the classes I took this semester are over. Verbs was really the only useful one. And I am looking forward to getting to live in the new building next year and be an RA and take some cool science classes and play lacrosse some more and go to the Dominican Republic over Easter. 

Plus there's a lot of cool stuff I want to be able to do this summer. And I like moving, especially when I know it's the end of the year and I start thinking about how somebody else will be living in my room and sleeping in my bed and how it's not really mine anyways. 

Tomorrow I go back to Erie. I guess Erie's okay. I'll be looking forward to seeing my family and eating real food and getting some sleep in the first couple of days back. I'm looking forward to the beach and to making some money so I'm not so worried about things all the time. I'm looking forward to getting to shadow some surgeons, to getting my blonde hair back, to running (and hopefully running that half marathon!), to birthdays and visits and playing soccer in the park. 

This is the last time I'll be writing till August, probably, since I'll be home and I can just tell you things. But this has been a good year. A really good year.

Till August 14th...

finals

Taking a quick break from studying so that I can fill y'all in on what's been going on. 

Friday I had two finals: Phonetics and Spec Mind. Phonetics was 18 pages long but okay. I'd studied really hard so I'm hoping that went pretty well. I was the first one out of the room 1 hour and 55 minutes after the exam began and the last person left 2 hours and 45 minutes after we started. I think it was okay. We'll see.

Spec Mind I probably got a B on. (Please allow me to remind you that B's are really quite good grades around here). Even the exam itself made me think. One of the essays made us write about a situation in which someone we knew had to use a certain tactic to confront somebody they thought was doing something wrong. I wrote about Chris and Ashley. 

This afternoon I had Civ Arts. I studied really hard so I probably got an A. The essay on that one was really cool - he put up on the projector a picture that we'd never seen before and, based on what we'd learned in class about different artists and periods, we had to tell him what period of time the painting was from and who created it. I couldn't help grinning the entire time - it's essays like that where I feel like I really learned something. So cool.

Monday I have my last two tests - Verbs and CivLit. We'll see how Verbs goes. We have only one exam in that class and it's worth 50% of our grade so I'm really really nervous about that. Lit will be a breeze, so it's good to have that for my last exam of the year. 

Finals are a really strange time. I can't tell what day of the week it is, ever, because every single day feels like a Monday. I got up at 6:45 this morning to study. That's no way to spend a lovely Saturday. But this is what I do. And it only gets worse from here. :)

Anyways, I'm counting down the hours till I'm done with exams and looking forward to sleeping in on Tuesday. Mmm lovely. 

growing up

There are some days when I'm here that I stop during my day and wish that you could see me. I'll do something that I'm really proud of or see something that I think is really cool and want you to be able to know what's going on. There are things that I wish I could tell you about school that I can't because you don't know the people I live with or am friends with. You don't know my professors. You kind of know the buildings that I'm talking about. But overall, things don't make sense to you. And on occasion that makes me a little sad.

Anyway.

Finals are fast approaching (and I'm currently taking a study break) and people are starting to flip out a little bit. What's funny is that everybody flips out about the tests and nothing else. Nobody is at all concerned with moving back with their families or getting jobs over the summer. Last year I didn't know any seniors, but this year I know a whole bunch of them and they're a fantastic group of people. Three senior girls were on my lacrosse team this year and I'm going to miss them immensely.

Another funny thing? Being a senior is not a big deal in college. I thought people would be MORE excited about graduating from college than from high school, but this is not true. Maybe it's just the way things are a GCC, but most kids just accept graduating from college as the normal pattern of life. It's not as big of a milestone. Maybe it's because when you transition from high school to college you're gaining a whole ton of independence all at once. I think when you graduate from college, you're getting a whole lot of unwanted responsibility chucked at you. 

On the other hand, I happen to find it pretty intimidating that next year I have to start looking at grad schools. I found out - whew - that I don't have to take the MCATs, but I do have to take the graduate school admissions exam, which is like the SATs on steroids. The rest of the sophomore class is flipping out because it just hit them in the last ten days or so that about ten days or so from now they will be halfway through college. It's a strange thought to somebody like me who still remembers when eighth-graders were scary. 

P.S. - I added a link to the top right hand side of my page. It says "Online Pictures" or something like that. If you click it, it goes to a page where you can see pictures. This way, I can show you some pics without having to email them to you one at a time. :)