Living the Life...of a College Student

For the record...

Here I am back home again for the second weekend. And you know what that means: when no one else is to be found at the lake, it's laundry on a Friday night. Yep. I could be bonfiring in Syracuse or going out to dinner and the movies in Connecticut, but no. Ever since I started my internship, everyone in my life has decided to ditch me. Or more likely, I have (necessarily) ditched them. At any rate, I've never really been one to shun staying in on the weekend, and this one in particular is my LAST WEEKEND OF BEING UNDERAGE! That makes me feel better actually. It's the last time I have an excuse to be lame. But I am sort of ready to get at it, because I haven't legitimately been out on the town since London. What better way to reintroduce me into the going out scene than to spend a weekend in Vegas celebrating the big
2-1? It would be really something if I were able to get a blog post out that night, which if I were to guess, would look a little something like this: a;lsdjfkhdgkjdsahfoaweiruglvnjfkna;sdlfkjsdfkl. But alas, I will be heading straight from the bars to the Vegas airport to catch a 7:30 a.m. flight back to Hartford for Katie's high school graduation.

I love my birthday. And I know that sounds weird and I'm sure most people love their birthdays, but I just love the month of June and that fact that it's the longest day of the year and the first day of summer. That being said...so far my month of June has been unlike all others, in that I'm living in a college town with college students during the summer. I've never even set foot in my own college town during the summer, and here I am living the college life with some other college kids. Frankly, I feel like a little bit of a traitor.

But anyway, this is the first time I've ever lived with guys. And everyone's cool. It's not that weird, sort of like living in a dorm, except that you don't have to share a bathroom with them in a dorm. And I don't know if it's kosher to say this, but I have to: someone apparently feels that either they need to save water by not flushing, or they just forget to. And then there's the showering at 5:30 a.m. every morning. And then the showering at 7:30 a.m. with the blaring shower radio right on the other side of the wall from where I'm sleeping, and my alarm doesn't even go off until 9:05 when I'm working! Oy vay. Mostly I just hang out by Lake Champlain or on Church Street if I'm not working. And then, as you know, I come home on the weekends.

There were some pretty nasty storms that broke the heat wave earlier this week, and being from out in the Midwest, it's funny to hear those Vermonters talk about tornadoes. I walked into the newsroom on Tuesday in the 95 degree heat, and it was all abuzz with talk of possible afternoon or evening tornadoes. Before long, the whole state was under a watch. One intrepid reporter has been doing blog entries entirely devoted to tornadoes recently, and he said he would go stormchasing that afternoon. Later, when storms actually came through, he decided to forgo the proposed storm chase. Then when I got back to the apartment I was greeted with "Isn't it crazy there's a tornado warning!" To which I had to explain that we were under a tornado watch, because a warning would mean that a tornado touched down nearby and that we should take cover immediately. (And by the way: as someone who is from the Midwest and has spent an evening in a bathtub with my sister and our cat while the tornado sirens went off, and who has crawled into a likely rodent-infested crawlspace to avoid being swept away with another tornado, I hate the damn things. And I was secretly praying that nothing happened because I had very little faith that if one rolled through that neighborhood in Burlington, that crappy house I am temporarily inhabiting, would stay rooted to the ground.)

BUT alas the bylines are picking up and the internship is going well. And it's going to be half over before you know it. Hopefully, I will be able to update you on the Vegas adventures soon after they happen, but we will have a full house for the graduation right after that happens. (And then, I'll need to update you on THAT. Which should be very interesting.) More later.

B-town

For the record...

I’m writing this to you five days into my Burlington summer adventure. On Microsoft Word. Because I don’t have Internet. And I’ll have to copy/paste it into a post when I am reconnected with the rest of the world. Things are a little rustic here. As I mentioned earlier, I had come up to look at a place a couple weeks ago, and wound up subletting that same place, for lack of time and other options. I think my parents were a little leery when they dropped me off and the place reeked of cigarettes and pot, but my ‘Super Odor Killer’ air fresheners and leaving my molding windows open whenever I’m in the room has helped a little bit. As for the musty smell throughout the rest of the apartment...well, at least it’s just for 2 months.

I will have three roommates—one of them is moving in tomorrow and the others are already here. One is cool...the other is a little on the anti-social side. He wakes up at 5:30 a.m. and doesn’t get back until 9 or 10 p.m. (I know the 5:30 part because I hear the toilet flush around that time every morning, get paranoid that my alarm didn’t go off and look at my phone, only to find that it’s 5:30.) But anyway...things are going well so far. The internship is going pretty well: the newsroom is a lot bigger and younger than in Rutland, I got to go out on a good story assignment on my second day, and there are other interns. People are nice, but much more serious about their jobs than anyone in Rutland was, which puts a little more pressure on me to do a good job, but it’s great to be at a better paper. Here is the link to my first BFP story: http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008806040308
And (supposedly) at the end of all of this interning, I’ll be getting paid for some work that I do...from my musty apartment as a freelancer. Oh and the best part of all? I have Mondays and Fridays off, which obviously means four-day weekends. (It’s kind of like a dream come true, even for someone who is undoubtedly Type A and likely to be a workaholic for the rest of her life.)

Last but not least, let’s face it. Burlington is a great town. I just went for a run in Battery Park and took in a sunset over Lake Champlain, which can only be considered majestic. It has a distinct flavor and personality where Rutland has...very little going for it, to be perfectly honest. The only things I can really think of at the moment are: A. It’s at the base of Killington and B. It’s in the southern part of Vermont, making a trip to get the hell out of there that much shorter. Oh and it’s an hour from Saratoga. (Still, let’s keep in mind that Burlington is in Vermont. Meaning you’ll still run into some characters. See: woodchucks*)

So there you have it. I’m getting psyched up for Vegas (where I will be landing 2 weeks from right now) and my twenty-first birthday (T-16 days) and then relaxing with family who are in town from Illinois for the following week. (Although as experience has had it in the past, time with the extended family will probably end up less than relaxing. I remember back on the day of my graduation, when my parents and sister ditched me, and I ended up having to chase around one of my four grandparents, who shall remain nameless, because they were cutting the grass around the house with scissors, while I was trying to shower and get dressed. But I digress.)
And Burlington is cool, and I think it’s going to be a really good experience and I’m meeting good people, but I’m hoping it doesn’t prove to be a lonely summer. Even though I was working two jobs last summer and wasn’t home all that much, it was nice to wake up to a fresh pot of coffee, courtesy of Dad, that I could have with breakfast before going to my internship, and to have someone to talk about my day with when I got home from my restaurant job that night in either my Mom, Katie or even Rusty. But this is how it’s probably going to be next year when I start up on a job God-Knows-Where...being in a crappy apartment and not knowing much of anyone. I’ll survive, as long as there aren’t rodents.

*Woodchuck. A name given to a native, backwoods Vermonter, who may be seen wearing flannel, sporting long greasy locks and missing teeth. Essentially it’s a Vermont redneck. Perhaps named a Woodchuck because both the people and the animals are a nuisance? Also important to note, it was a pair of Woodchucks who first told me what a Woodchuck was.