My Weekly Have-Done List

I've been rather silent in the blogosphere the last week or so, not because I haven't spent every waking hour of my day at or close to my computer--I have--but because so many of those hours were filled with transcribing Sundanese, waxing verbose on syntax assignments--as specifically instructed by one of my professors, who told us that verbosity was the secret to grad school; can you imagine how happy I was to hear that?--reading Indonesian literature, beating Alea at online Scrabble, and conspicuously not replying to emails.

During the few times I've stepped away from my computer in the past week, though, I have:

• stepped on, and cracked, my iPod. I should have learned two things from this--iPods purchased for $30 in Cambodia definitely aren't real and don't charge things on the floor-- but, since I already knew the first and am ignoring the second, I guess the masking tape holding my iPod together is a constant reminder of, well, nothing.
  
• spent Friday night huddled up in a movie theater chair, futilely trying to cover my eyes and my ears at the same time, to avoid the movie on screen, Resident Evil: Extinction. While I ordinarily wouldn't stand in line to see a movie based on a video game--oh, sorry, the third movie based on this particular video game--in the complex system of social rules in my head, I am obligated, as the new and mostly friendless girl in town, to accept any invitation I receive, especially when they come from people who have to move a bow and arrow from their backseat before there's room for me. Not even my girl-crush on Milla Jovovich could redeem the movie, but the fun company could and did redeem the evening.
  
• realized, as a direct result of the aforementioned movie, that when disaster strikes, I will be the first to die. My survival instinct, I'm pretty sure, is nowhere near as strong as my curse-God-and-die instinct.
  
• enjoyed the jokes of my fellow first-years; when I heard one of them, today, try to transcribe a sneeze ("Was that a nasal ejective?") instead of just saying "Gesundheit," I knew I had found heaven.
  
• added to the piles of books in my room, making it a grand total of 47 books I have checked out from the university's library and will probably never read, seeing as how I can only finish off a book every two days or so during my daily walks to and from school.
  
• gone grocery shopping, an experience which never fails to make me self-righteous about my poverty; lugging two weeks' worth of on-sale cans of green beans and tomato soup home in a backpack makes me want to stop into the upscale grocery store I pass on my way home and say to all those tax-hiking, goverment-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak shows in there, "you may be buying locally-made organic cookies, but I am walking home. Who loves the environment now, you old hippie?" (I could ride the bus, but, really, the grocery store is only a mile away, and both the exercise and the suffering are good for me.)
  

Oh, and I've also gone to institute, watched Casablanca on the big screen for the third time, gone to a barbecue with Indonesians, helped build a sukkah in the backyard of one of my professors, watched Shakespeare in the park, cooked dinner for four, gone to the temple, done my laundry for only the second time since I moved in a month and a half ago, and of course, faithfully studied for and attended my classes, which have quickly and without warning nearly doubled in number and time, because of various seminars plus colloquia plus invited speakers plus working groups plus study groups plus, I don't know, linguistics yoga groups or something. (I wouldn't put it past this place.)

Things are good, and if I could only add "went to bed on the same day I woke up" to the list, I might venture to say, with Tony the Tiger, that they're grrrrrrreat!