Monica's Journal: la la city and cruger

so i'm living in the same dorm as i did last year. know what that means? that means there are new freshmen living across my hall. it's weird, this year the bard administration made freshmen's 3-week orientation (called L&T) totally dry and increased the workload for the writing class. they also decreased the amount of social activities. what this means, at least for our dorm, is that the freshmen were already a tight little circle when todd and i moved in here. they have two online photo albums, and their own blog. these are just the kids in my hall. imagine how many of these there are for freshmen all over campus, and even at the rest of the colleges in the rest of the world!

    here's a picture of the two guys that now live in todd's former room.

    anyway.

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    todd and i went to the city on saturday, just for fun. his friend who goes to harvard emailed him on thursday and said "wanna get together in nyc saturday? here's my cell phone number" or something, and so we did. we hung out with chris and his friend jim from harvard too. they're cool cats.

    i'm not sure what i think about the city. i compared it to leon botstein, the president of our college. most students think leon's their own personal lord and savior, but there are a few students who refuse to blindly believe that and remain skeptical of that botstein character. i'm kind of like that with new york city - like, yeah, it may be the greatest city in the greatest nation on earth, but whatever. i go there, it's pretty fun, but it's not shangri-la or anything. it's all dirty and everything's paved.

    mostly on our trip this time we hung out in delis and cafes and stopped by The Strand overrated used bookstore for about an hour. we saw a wall in i think grand central station with genuine "missing person" flyers which i assumed had been there for about a year. we didn't go to ground zero or anything, but that kind of made a lot of people's loss a little more real to me. there are all kinds of panel discussions and memorials and whatnot on wednesday. sometimes i want to go to them all and sometimes i just want to try to forget it and just go to class.

    todd and i also braved the croton train station, for real this time, like people are supposed to. he posted about the trip, too.

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    oh, and we just want to know one thing: his site has a sitemeter, which tells him where his viewers are on the net and from what site they came to his. there's someone from the university of iowa that comes to his site every day from a link here in my journal. we're just curious, but who are you? neither of us really know anything about the midwest, except that i think st. louis is an exciting town that i might want to work in some day. what can you tell us, u-iowan, about where you live? and why not just bookmark his site every day, why come to mine first? you're definitely welcome to read us, and we'd be fine if you totally ignore this paragraph. we're just curious.