The Long Wait

If there’s one thing that will teach you to watch your money care­fully and cut cor­ners where you can, it would be a home eco­nom­ics course.  (Un)Fortunately, I have dis­cov­ered another path to fru­gal­ity:  Doing your laun­dry dur­ing college.

It costs $4 to do a full load of laun­dry here at CU: $1 each for the washer and dryer per load, and seper­ate loads for col­ors and whites.  I ended up spend­ing $5 because I had started my (color) bed­sheets as a seper­ate load before real­iz­ing I could have com­bined them with my color cloth­ing.  I will heed this les­son in the future.

Aside from this mun­dane domes­tic fiasco, col­lege has been loads of fun.  Just yes­ter­day I joined a hand­ful of girls from my dorm in watch­ing the extended edi­tions of  every Lord of The Rings movie; there was quite a bit of fun ban­ter and analy­sis of the homo­sex­ual rela­tion­ship between Frodo and Sam.  I’m think­ing about ask­ing them to give Dun­geons and Drag­ons a try.  I’ll let you all know how it goes.

My classes have been fun and inter­est­ing so far.  In Lit­er­ary Analy­sis we’ve been intro­duced to the vil­lanelle, a poetic form that is odd, com­plex, and cir­cu­lar, quite odd to read but entranc­ing at the same time.  Intro to Lit­er­ary The­ory hasn’t really begun any­thing in earnest, but the pro­fes­sor is both nice and knowl­edge­able enough to have writ­ten a book on the sub­ject.  It just so hap­pens to be on our required read­ing list for the class, but hey, we all have to eat.

Anthro­pol­ogy has Pro­fes­sor Van Ger­ven, and that’s all I need to say on that subject.

As for dorm life, there’s been a large num­ber of inter­est­ing things.

One inter­est­ing thing I’ve noticed is how easy it is to get pulled into philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sions, espe­cially late at night.  Last week (I think it was wednes­day?) I sat in the hall­way dis­cussing the mean­ing of a qual­ity watch as it per­tains to one’s phi­los­o­phy in life.  Dur­ing our dis­cus­sion, we were inter­rupted by another hall-mate, who declared that he did not believe time existed.  After forc­ing the intruder to admit he could not prove that time did not exist, I got into another argu­ment with my pre­vi­ous com­pan­ion about prob­a­bil­ity and chance and whether there was any sort of higher/transient power (explic­itly not God.)

Good times.

My artis­tic abil­ity has also been noticed.  Each dorm room has a white­board on the front for mes­sages and other things, and a short while after I moved in I took the time to draw my car­toon avatar (along with an announce­ment that I’m search­ing for D&D play­ers.)  This was noticed by Lau­ren, a cute short orange-haired girl who isn’t our Res­i­dent Advi­sor but is such a nat­ural social but­ter­fly that she’ll prob­a­bly become one in the future.  She told me that if I ever felt like post­ing my draw­ings on the hall announce­ment board, “to brighten it up,” I was wel­come to go ahead.  Fast for­ward to yes­ter­day, when on a whim I drew a small pic­ture of Ben (our RA) and Lau­ren under a “Wel­come to the 3rd Floor!” sign.  Upon show­ing it to Lau­ren, she asked me to do draw­ings of the entire hall.  In my own time, of course, but the fact that she liked it enough to make that big of a request filled me with golden but­ter­flies that lifted me off the ground for the rest of the day.

Speak­ing of art, I have an inter­est­ing story to tell you all about regard­ing my new friend Ben (A dif­fer­ent Ben than the Res­i­dent Advi­sor.)  Ben is actu­ally the same guy with whom I had the dis­cus­sion about watches and prob­a­bil­ity vs. divine intent.  He’s a smart, well-off guy, and has already made large amounts of money both in the stock mar­ket (insane, I know) and by run­ning a small loan busi­ness in his high school.  Dur­ing one of the late-night talks, I men­tioned my tablet and how I could draw on it, then brought it out to show it off.  Ben imme­di­ately asked if I could draw him as a awe­some samurai/ninja guy, to which I responded that I cur­rently didn’t have a tablet pen but was con­sid­er­ing pur­chas­ing a new one online.  With­out blink­ing an eye, he states that he’ll pay for it with his credit card just so I can start draw­ing on it again.

See­ing as it was late at night, I asked him to delay mak­ing a deci­sion on that until tomor­row after­noon, when he would have had time to think about it with a clearer mind.

The fol­low­ing after­noon, he was still cer­tain about his deci­sion, so I drew him a paper draft and agreed to draw him a large-scale color ver­sion as pay­ment for his kind­ness (the pen was about $30, so I’m treat­ing it as a high-quality comis­sioned work).  The pen hasn’t arrived yet, and I’m still both shocked and flat­tered that some­one would invest their money in me like this.  Ben is crazy and awesome.

That’s about all I have for today.  Keep an eye out for draw­ings to start show­ing up in a week or so; I’ve resolved to fin­ish Ben’s piece before I do any other art.  It’s the least I can do for him.

Keep on dreaming,

Jake the Dreamaniac