Back in Midwestern Town, I rolled out of bed and almost instantaneously discovered this. It's the all the New York Times' presidential endorsements, from Lincoln to Obama.

I have vanquished 3/3 midterms! I am victorious. One I slogged through, one came cascading out of my brain, and one I kicked firmly on the derriere and sent packing. Of course I have two papers to write over break, but that's nothing...much. Now I've just got two classes, and then I'm winging my way back to Midwestern Town.
Time to take stock.
I still have:
ten fingers, ten toes, bad eyesight, three more-awesome-than-words-can-express roommates, a burning need to write things down, a burning need to cross things off lists, a semi-laudatory sleep schedule (down from last year's level of impressiveness), a bit of an intellectual crush on Master Awesome, a fondness for Athena and her roommates who I don't see enough, a lot of books I need to read, and a fascination with cookies, France, civil rights, and stationery.
I need:
to quell my budding walnut addiction, to restart Unofficial Friday Night Film Club, to work on my stories oh-my-goodness-I-miss-creative-writing, to take creative writing next semester, to figure out the RCA/Princeton in France/whatever-else-I-have-to-apply-to-that-I'm-forgetting applications, to keep enjoying the world that is the Orange Bubble.

I'm off!

Top misheard song lyrics. A perfect way for me to kill time while I wait to meet with my preceptor about my Fin du Siecle paper topic.
Personal Favorite: # 10. "Healthcliff! It's me; I'm a tree, I'm a wombat."

I am probably going to Liberal Hell for saying this, but I would totally watch a talk show starring Mike Huckabee and guest starring Sarah Palin. It would be a talk show where they would receive small electrical shocks if they said anything offensive, though, so don't consign me to the fiery pit too soon.
Anyway, they both scare(d) me as nominees, but did eerily well on SNL. Thus a talk show. They could talk about the weather (but not global warming), traffic (but not gas prices), television (but not HBO). You get the idea. Safe stuff like that would be great.

...or maybe I've been studying for midterms too long and too hard. I don't know. Still, I don't think it's too much to ask for Obama in the White House, to have Huckabee and Palin on a really hilarious and unoffensive corner of the airwaves.

Went to a screening of Recount, and then a discussion afterward with the writer. It was great. And then, oddly unrelatedly, I got handed some True Blood paraphernalia. Princeton = free stuff (once you're here).

This is called something along the lines of how the debate SHOULD have sounded:


The best part about watching that on youtube is that in the comments section someone wrote, "It's obvious that Obama won that one too!"
In all seriousness, I feel really good about Obama right now, although the fact that I'm an Illinoian transplanted to a college campus in another blue state may very well have something to do with this.

On another note, this past week has been really great in a lot of ways.
Friday
I went for a bike ride on the towpath and found a VERY relaxing spot to sit and read. I may go there tomorrow, or some other day this weekend at the very least. It is a bench looking out over Lake Carnegie.
That night, (Ex)RussianRoommate and I went to watch the screening of the silent Phantom of the Opera at night in the chapel. The chapel organist accompanied it throughout, and had worked up quite a sweat by the end. What made the evening even more creepy and awesome was the dressed-in-black-and-staring chapel choir who surrounded us in the pitch black and, by the light of candles they were holding, sang as an opening act to the movie.
Saturday
Got up very, very early for someone who only got in bed at one the night before and took the train up to NYC to meet CornellBoy. It was his first visit to the city and had brought a rather large suitcase for the weekend. We lugged this over to TKTS, got tickets to The Seagull (with Kristen Scott Thomas! and that really adorable looking girl from Bleak House), lugged it around the theater district looking for lunch, lugged it into and out of the sandwich place we eventually picked, lugged it back to the theatre where, thank goodness, they had a bag check just for people like him, saw the play (SOOO GOOD. Not stagnant at all, which, sadly, has been my past experience of Chekhov), lugged it down to Columbus Circle, had coffee with one of his friends who graduated last year (really fun!), lugged it back to Penn Station, and rode back to Princeton.
Ice cream with HSClassmate and then awesome Indian food preceded hanging out with Roommate J and playing guessing games until it was time for bed (I was dying at this point).
Sunday
Epic walk with CornellBoy all around campus. First, though, we went to church. He was curious and I was happy to oblige. Luckily it was a friendly homily and the singing was sufficiently bad to boost CornellBoy's ego. Returned to the dorm to play Apples to Apples with HaHa, Roommate J, and (Ex)RussianRoommate before messing with the magnetic poetry on the refrigerator to form poems either salacious, nerdy, or dumb. Then we watched Four Weddings and a Funeral. Another convert.
As a Result
After CornellBoy left early Monday morning, I was two days behind and up to my ears in reading. Never so hectic before in my life. But I was victorious, so...
Today
Found a relaxing spot to sit on campus that I have never seen before. I sat there and finished reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man while the fall leaves swirled down.

http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-105800
I love this sooo much. Please for the love of God, watch this. The election will seem so much more fun, all of a sudden.

*resurfaces*
I am in the midst of typing a 4-5 compare-and-contrast paper. I hate compare-and-contrast. Compare-and-contrast is inane. I acknowledge that there is a time and a place for it, but when this 4-5 page paper is in technical, jargon-y French I find it hard to stomach.
Anyway, this break is by way of saying that reading Daniel Deronda, and talking about weird, sadistic Grandcourt marrying a woman just make her life miserable, for one English class at the same time as we're reading Wuthering Heights--where Heathcliff marries a woman just to make her life miserable--for another English class, doesn't give one a very good feeling about nineteenth century men.
Comparing and contrasting that might actually be interesting...
No, no. Focus, Nom de Plume, focus.
Salsa was fun today.
It's definitely fall now.
...
No more procrastination. Done.
*gulps, dives back under, en français*

I am taking Roommate J with me whenever I go shopping from now on.
1) She goes at the same pace as me.
2) She urged me to try on a dress I would never have noticed otherwise, and it fit so perfectly I wound up buying it.
We braved the NJ Transit buses to and from the mall, and came back bearing awesome clothes, and the self-imposed inability to spend any more money for the rest of the month (my exceptions: theater tickets with CornellBoy next weekend, and pains au chocolat).
(Ex)RussianRoommate and I had a flash of inspiration over dinner the other night: are there any French vampire movies? We couldn't think of any, although we're sure there are some, and then we came to the almost simultaneous conclusion that the French don't need vampire stories because they're not as sexually repressed. Feeling rather pleased with ourselves, we patted ourselves on the back, downed our salad, and went off to finish our homework before the inspiration passed.

New Maps of the World.
Slide #16 is especially striking.

Dear John McCain,

Although you are quite often the best of a bad lot, your judgment is very, very suspect.

Sincerely,
Nom de Plume

This morning there was that first nip of fall in the air. I had forgotten how happy that makes me. I walked to class, tea in hand--to fight off what felt like a cold this morning, but what may have just been the result of sleeping with my face covered (non-lethally! obviously) by a pillow all night--and very buoyant.
Last night, instead of working on my religion paper due Monday morning, I went through, copied, and pasted all of my Hall of the Revels entries into one word document, which I then backed up on my external hard drive. The reason for this? I realized that it's now been over a year since I started this blog, and to have all this writing, all this journal-ing--because it is a journal, even though I do censor myself and address a very tangible "you"--in one place seems absurd. Risky, even. If anything were to happen to Hall of the Revels and I hadn't backed anything up, I would be losing (tongue firmly lodged in cheek as I say this) verbal time capsules of every thought worthy of mass-sharing that I've had over the past year and a half.
Of course there are thoughts I've had that have been lost because they were more private and less bloggable, because I never wrote them down, but reading through my oldest entries last night I could still catch a glimpse of myself changing, and it was pretty fun to see.
Now I just need to add this one to the document, and I'm all set.