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.