Natalie Portman is coming to Princeton to speak. Oh my goodness. Words cannot describe how excited I am right now. Besides being one of my favorite actresses (maybe my absolute favorite, since a little of Mary Louise Parker, another runner-up, goes a long way) she's also smart and an activist.
We can forgive her for going to Harvard.
Yesterday I got my first chance to volunteer again with the same Trenton group I was with for CA. It felt odd to return to the church and I actually felt a little homesick for pre-orientation. Things were so frightening then, but they were also fresh. The kids were adorable, especially one little girl who kept coming up to me and showing me pictures she was drawing. She mumbled, so I never managed to catch her name, but she knows mine, so hopefully she'll attack me again three Fridays from now.
The only down side (and it wasn't, really) was standing in a parking lot in the pouring rain for half an hour while the leaders ran and got the keys to the University vans we would be using. My umbrella from Pylones proved its mettle, and now I can safely say that it's practical as well as cute.
Yesterday ended well with pizza and movie night (I watched V For Vendetta, coincidentally) and then another movie, Hot Fuzz, which was showing on campus for $2. I took Mr. CA Chatterer and DownstairsChatterer with me. Oddly enough, both are from the same town.
Hot Fuzz was great. It's humor was wonderful, and the only downside for me was the violence which, although played for laughs, was excessive and very often gruesome. Still, I think it's a movie Subcontinent would enjoy.
This morning I went on my pain au chocolat run, bought stamps at the post office, and went to the public library's book sale. (It felt as if I were at home. Seriously. Those are precisely the things we often do on a Saturday morning.) I bought three books and then took my English reading and went on a bike ride down to the tow path. The leaves are changing and I took multiple photos and read on my bench for a while.
For English right now I'm reading The Book of Salt by Monique Truong. It's incredibly good. Being, as it is, about a Vietnamese chef working for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris, there is at least one description of food per page, and reading it is always an exercise in how long I can go without getting up and eating something. The book is amazing though, subtle and beautifully written, and is definitely my favorite thing that we've read so far for class.

DORM IRRITATIONS, PART TWO:
The fact that they changed, over lunch, the mechanisms for flushing the toilets from manuel to automatic. I now feel vaguely as if I am living in an airport.