Monk, the Monkey Man, which is to say, the Man

"Being an NS kid just requires a lot of weeding through shit. Science...is like...gardening." --Kate, 5:03 am

As you can probably tell from the time of this entry, I'm pulling an all-nighter. It's not totally necessary, but Kate is leaving tomorrow--er, later today--and Ben and Harry showed up for studying (read: talking about Robocop and drinking hot chocolate) at my mod, so it happened. I've gotten two of my five papers done, for those keeping score at home, with progress being slowly made on the rest. I'm just sort of going for broke until my Winter Break actually starts--my sleep schedule is ridiculously off at the moment and I've come to accept 1 am as an acceptable time for dinner and 4 pm as a pretty okay time for breakfast. This week totally puts the "Al" in "finals"--if Al was a big guy who smelled like rotten salmon and beat you constantly with a frying pan until you cried. (Guys, it's 5:30 am. I'm really not responsible for anything I type.) But it will be over soon, and I will have learned something from all of this, and that something is: never go outside at 4:30 in the morning without a coat and roll around in the snow (the exact path of snow which, for some reason, you thought it would be a smart move to throw failed Jell-o the night before), no matter how good an idea it seems at the time. Because it really isn't. Trust me on this. I'm an expert in Arctic Scien...tology.

Okay, so before you do anything else with your lives, even reading the rest of this entry, you need to put aside about 54 minutes and listen to 700 Hobo Names. And yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. I'm always really comforted by the discovery of things like this, because it's like, "Huh. There are other people out there like me who don't attend Hampshire and who think it's a necessary thing to record 700 hobo names, scattered throughout the mental asylums and recording studios of the world." It just gives me confidence that someone, some day, will pay me money to hear my own magnum opus, "4,536 Things I Found Under the Dumpster, Categorized by Color and Smell." That, my friends, will be truly glorious day.

So Friday we had a Snow Day (read: Katharine Falls Over a Lot Day), and I have to admit it was pretty fabulous. I mean, even in college, the whole "snow day" concept doesn't lose its allure, and even though I ended up burning snowmen in effigy (no, I don't know how that would work, don't question it) because I hated snow so much by the end of last year, it is kinda fabulously gorgeous right now. We've got like, a little Christmas village thing going on here in Enfield right now, because the snow's so high and there are just these small paths through it and it all feels very North Pole-like. Snow days also automatically mean you're going to have a pleasant, cozy sort of morning, so I slept in and made scrambled eggs then did work until Kate, Amy, and Kel burst into my mod in that angry, loud way they do. They annouced we were going out, which was the last thing I had ever considered doing on such a day, but somehow I found myself dressed and suited up and ventured out into the snowfall. We met Ellen at the bus stop, which was fairly uneventful, but getting off the bus was a little more of a trip. See, the bus in Noho pulls up to the sidewalk, but the sidewalk was currently covered by about a foot and a half of snow, so there was not so much a side to walk or step down onto. So I got off the bus first and just sort of--fell. Face first. Into the snow. I then rolled over and lay there like a slug, because there was no surface I could really use to pull myself up, as everything around me was, well, snow. My friends all got off the bus and proceeded to attempt to help me up, which just resulted in more facefuls of snow, while the people still on the bus (first-years) just sort of stared at us as we laughed helplessly at our own incompetence. I think they probably assumed I was just very drunk--I really think I need to start some sort of club for people like me, who have no motor or social skills. We'll call it, "We're Not Intoxicated, That's Just How We Are!" It'll be like D.A.R.E., except with a lot more inappropriate phallic references and awkward silences.

So we ate dinner at Fireside Cuisine, née Cafe Casablanca, which I think was a much cooler name. If you're going to change something's name to contain "Fire," you should at least write everything in that fiery-looking font, or just have a lot of people with flamethrowers around. Yeah, I should probably never be allowed to run a restaurant. They still have basically the same menu, with crepes (omgcrepes) and some of the best mousse you will ever witness in your life, except that they spell it "moose," which makes me wonder if maybe moose have really been full of chocolate deliciousness all along and we just didn't know. After dinner we went to Haymarket, land of heavenly smoothies, and studied, because we are, above all, repsonsible members of the academic community. Also, it's much easier to write about sixteenth-century literature when you're drinking a smoothie, somehow. We headed back to Hampshire, where I fell over again, but this time not off of a bus, so it was an improvement. Then we went back to my mod and watched a couple of episodes of Arrested Development: Season 2, which I ordered from Amazon.com about three years ago but which has not surfaced--curse you, SecondLongestRiverintheWorld.com. CURSE YOU.

Saturday I must have woken up sometime, and probably got dressed, though I'm not going to say that one's for sure. I finished one of my papers and then went with Ellen, Kate, Kel, and Gengjess Khan to go see RENT! at the mall. We got there early and went to Target to find snacks to smuggle in, which somehow translated to us buying the biggest bag of everything we could find. We got some of those caramel-filled Hershey's kisses, because, in all honesty, I think they may be the most orgasmic foodstuff in the universe. I'm usually not even a huge caramel fan, mostly because I can't ever decide how to say it, but man, these things are like whoa. I also bought a 1/2 gallon of milk, which, besides being really sketchy, meant I had to pee really, really badly about halfway through the movie. Planning? Not my strong suit. RENT! was, overall, pretty good, though there were some ridiculous, "what-are-we-doing-in-a-bad-90s-music video" moments. And they assumed that since it's no longer the early 90s, we've all forgotten what AZT or Life Support or AIDS is, so every time someone had AIDS (which was pretty much all the time) they were like, "We're going to a Life Support meeting. It's a meeting for people with AIDS. People like me. Do you get it? I have AIDS. Mark, you can come, even though you don't have AIDS and it's for people with AIDS. Like me. I have AIDS. You still with me on that?" It was still really depressing, though, when *spoiler* *spoilered.* Kel and I both cried, because we're little girls--well, a little girl and a little emo boi. I really enjoyed it, especially seeing it with people who know the show backwards and forwards, but nothing can compare to the stage performance. Especially since they kept a lot of the dialogue almost-but-not-quite the same, and when things rhyme on Broadway, it's just the way it is, but when they rhyme on screen, you just wonder if the characters have developmental disabilities. It was also good because it distracted me from thinking about work for two-and-a-half hours, but then I was like, "Ohhh...right. I will never have a moment of happiness again." So I went home and worked until Kate, Harry, and Ben showed up at around 3. Harry's doing charcoal nonsense, Kate is writing scientific babble, and Ben brought no work and is just sitting there being sketchy--he just spent his entire life working on this film project and now seems to be pulling all-nighters purely out of habit. So, that, in sum, is life at the moment, which this cartoon (courtesy of Kel), may just completely describe and explain:

See, when it comes to a showdown between Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's foremost novelist, and the Dinosaurs/Girls in Bikinis Team, I just think it's no contest. I mean, you can be a master at describing your homeland's dualist soul, but when that T-Rex comes around with Candy, the Pantsless Wonder, you just don't stand a chance.