Resolution

This has been one hell of a year.

It feels like a lifetime ago that I was having one of the best semesters of my college career (the semester in London doesn't count. That was the best five months of my life, college or no college), when I had two days off a week just to work on the manuscript that would become The Long Road Home, when I was taking great classes with my favorite professors, when I was still dancing, when I spent many an evening up far too late with my wonderful roommates.

I can't quite fathom that it was nine months ago that I stood in that stupid, ill-fitting black gown and switched over my tassel to the other side of my hat. Nine months ago that I stopped being a student and started being an adult.

Things have been... interesting since then. Don't get me wrong. Everything is, objectively, great. I live with my best friend, who is the coolest person I know. We have a fantastic apartment and two incredibly adorable cats (who persist in climbing the Christmas tree). I have a perfectly respectable job, and I'm paying my rent and my student loans and my internet bill. And I am grateful. I am so, so grateful for everything and everyone that is allowing me to take this stab at being an independent, adult-type person.

But being an adult is hard.

I was talking to a writer friend of mine who is also a recent postgrad. She was a psychology major, and she was explaining the concept of an "existential vacuum" to me. It's what happens when there's a sudden absence of something. We were talking about it in the context of "I've just finished this novel what am I supposed to do with my life now?" and also "post show depression," something anyone involved in theatre will know well.

Thinking about it later, though, it explains a lot about how I've been feeling about being a postgrad. I haven't wanted to talk about it much, since I would like to be professional on this blog and being constantly mopey isn't terribly professional.

And I've felt awfully mopey since graduating. I've felt so lost, so mired in worry that I'll never be able to do the one thing I think I'm actually any good at - writing novels. So afraid that I'll just spend the rest of my life saying "may I help you?" to people who often don't care that I'm standing there. So terrified that I'll actually never amount to anything at all, that no one will ever want to listen to the stories I have to tell. If all I have to offer the world are words that no one will hear...

I tend to be pretty good at just shuffling on through. I've done it for classes I've hated, shows that have been stressing me out, the hellish sublet Lisa and I lived in this summer. This too shall pass, I think, and I just buckle down and deal with it till it does. I'm worried I'm *too* good at that. What if it doesn't? What if I just allow myself to get complacent because I think "this too shall pass" and wind up stuck in a job I don't really want in a place I don't really want to be?

I'm a worrier, and that's never been more evident than it is now. I worry about myself, about my career, about my writing, about Lisa, about everything, in a constant loop.

Next year, things are going to change.

Next year, I am going closer to the mountain. I am taking another step towards being where I want to be, and who I want to be. Lisa and I are moving to New York City when our lease here in Ithaca ends. I'll miss my Ithacan friends, of course, and this town has done many amazing things for me, but I need to leave. I need to stop stalling in the place where I graduated from college. I need to get out there and start making the life I really want to have. I need to be in a city again, where there are convenient corner stores and an actual form of public transportation. I need to be in New York, where nothing ever stops. Because I feel like I've stopped. I'm waiting. And I don't want to wait anymore.

I want to run full-tilt at the kind of life I really want, sprinting towards it until I smash into it, until I catch it and tangle myself up in it.

And yes, I know it's going to be hard. Lots of well-meaning people have told me, in the same way that everyone said "Oh, college in Ithaca? It's cold up there you know," that living in New York is expensive. I know. I know everything won't be perfect when we move. I know I'll still worry about money and paying the rent all the time. I know there will still be plenty of days when I feel like a waste of space. But to be honest, I don't really care. I want this, and I'm going to go after it with everything I've got. 

Next year, I'm going to move to the place I want to be in. Next year, Lisa and I will have more city exploring to do. Next year, I'm going to find a job that's more engaging than simply selling stamps. I'm going to call myself a New Yorker, after years of growing up on the periphery.

And next year, I'm going to make a hell of a lot of really good art.

Here's to 2014. May it be kind to all of us.

Thoughts from Places: Oh, Canada

I seem to be shockingly good at forgetting that it's Tuesday. All the days have sort of started bleeding together a little bit. Never fear, good blog readers - pending some phone calls to make sure that I am not a serial killer, I am gainfully employed as a hotel front desk receptionist, so that should force me to remember what day of the week it is a little more often.

And now: I don't believe I told you about my recent trip to Toronto, did I?

You know those crazy plans that your friends come up with sometimes? And often they're not even so crazy - I suppose plans of this nature could really range from "hey, I never see you anymore, we should hang out," to "let's go back to London!!"

Toronto started out as one of those plans. Except we actually did it. My roommate extraordinaire Lisa drove me, her boyfriend Toby, and our two friends Brandon and Jillian up into the wilds of Canada (and by wilds I mostly mean completely mental highways where the speed limit signs are suddenly in kilometers per hour) to have a weekend of adventuring in Toronto.

While we were there, Jillian said something along the lines that all cities remind her of other cities, and it is very much the case with Toronto. Lisa and I decided that if you mashed up Philadelphia, Newark, and Dublin, you'd get Toronto, architecturally speaking at least. Culturally speaking it leans more towards the Dublin/small British city vibe - we found ourselves in this really fantastic pub in the entertainment district that had All the British Things on the walls, bowler hat light fixtures, and really good macaroni and cheese.

I suspect that Lisa and I may have driven our traveling companions slightly insane over the course of the weekend by bringing up our adventures in Europe pretty much every twelve seconds, but we couldn't really help it. This semi-spontanous trip was especially great - or just especially nostalgic - for me because it felt so much like our trips from last year. We felt like going to Cardiff one weekend, so we did. We felt like taking a trip to Camden Markets another weekend, so we did that too. And a couple of months ago, we felt like driving to Toronto and having another adventure in another country, so we made sure it actually happened. And then we jabbered about past adventures nonstop. Lisa told the story of our disastrous day of traveling over spring break. I talked about that time I became a random tour guide in Paris and the WWII bomb shelter in Cardiff Castle. There was a lot of reminiscing, a lot of nostalgia, which stung a bit for me on the first day, at least. And we maaaaybe prattled on a little TOO much about our adventures to our poor captive companions. (... sorrynotsorry)

Our adventure was brief, and probably lacking in things that would stereotypically be called adventurous. We didn't really go to any museums (we did go to a place called Casa Loma, which I keep calling Castle Loma because, well, it's a castle), didn't really get horribly lost (well, Jillian and I got minorly turned around, which was entirely my fault, but we got un-lost again rather quickly), didn't climb any Arthurian-named mountains or visit any cathedrals.

Instead, we found ourselves in a sports bar right when the Toronto Maple Leafs beat whatever Boston's hockey team is in a Stanley Cup playoff game. The entire bar erupted in cheers, and we sort of watched and soaked it all in. We went to a very delicious dinner at Toby's grandparents' house, which meant figuring out public transportation on the way there and stuffing Brandon into the trunk of Toby's step-grandmother's car on the way back (and no, Brandon, we will never ever let you forget that. Or that you volunteered quite happily for the position). We didn't climb any mountains, but we did climb the crazy stairs of doom from the Scott Pilgrim movie. Our first night there, we wandered into a restaurant that had a live jazz band playing. And our second night there, the boys went out without us and the girls stayed in our hostel room just chatting. So, perhaps a smaller-scale adventure than ones I've been on previously, but a grand adventure nonetheless. It was a kind of a last hurrah with friends - a last crazy college student thing to do before Senior Week and all its fun, and graduation sending us on our separate ways. I'm so glad that our random late night exclamation of "let's go to Canada!!!" actually became a real adventure that we really went on.

Especially since, on the way back, before the speed limit signs changed back into miles per hour, pennies came into existence once again, and hockey stopped being a big deal, we stopped to look at Niagara Falls for a little while.

From left to right: Toby, Lisa, Jillian, me, Brandon. Also a seriously giant waterfall.

Thoughts from Places: Pomp and Circumstance

On Sunday morning, this happened:

That's me on the left of the sign. They emailed me and said "hi there, you are a smart person and we like you. Want to carry a thing at graduation?" And I said "yeah, sure, why not?" They also gave me a wooden baton I get to keep, which my roommate (standing on my left) and I will use to bludgeon potential home intruders.

I marched into the football field - the one and only time I have BEEN to Ithaca College's football field - at the head of my school, sat with my very best friends (except the one who sat with the School of Music), stood with those friends when they asked those graduating Summa Cum Laude and Magna Cum Laude to stand, listened to David Boreanaz tell us not to get stuck on your sister's uncomfortable green couch and go out and DO the thing that you're meant to be doing, and flipped my tassel from the right side of my exceedingly stupid hat to the left.

I graduated.

To quote the brilliant John Green, because, as I have mentioned half a zillion times before, he says all the things I want to say, except more succinctly and more cleverly, "My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations." I can't quite wrap my head around the whole thing yet. It hasn't really hit me, in spite of the fact that I've got all the graduation paraphernalia stuffed in my suitcase in my room in the new sublet I'll be living in for the summer. It feels, right now, that it's just over for the summer, like always. It feels like I'll be heading right back to classes in August. I wonder how long it'll take me to realize that that's not the case.  

There are some not-so-nice things about graduating. Things like having your gown not fit AT ALL and having people ask eight hundred times what all your cords are for (Summa Cum Laude cords, history honor cords, Italian honor cords), being annoyed that you didn't get to throw your hat, getting frustrated to the point of tears when your lunch plans refuse to coordinate nicely, getting a raccoon-face sunburn so that everyone knows you've been crying FOR THE REST OF THE DAY.

Things like that.

But there are also some awesome things about graduating. (And the week before, which for Ithacans is Senior Week, in which every day is Friday. And then Friday is Friday to the power of Friday, which makes it EVEN BETTER.)

Things like getting to jump into Ithaca's famous fountain. It was freezing, but so very very worth it. It felt even more like a culmination of the last four years of hard work than actual graduation.

My roommate Lisa and I also went to pick up our honor cords from the registrar right after Senior Splash, in spite of the fact that we were soaking wet. It was the best idea ever.

Things like getting to spend every day doing exactly what *I* wanted to do. I read some books *I* wanted to read, I napped, I cooked, I sometimes got dressed up and went to senior events, and, most importantly, I hung out with my friends. I used my too-big graduation gown as a cape and made airplane noises swooping around in the gusts of Ithacan wind, and also as wizard robes in a chopstick wand duel with my roommates. (How nerdy is it that I've been planning that for four years?)

The whole thing is surreal. I keep waiting for a sense of accomplishment to hit me, a sense of "LOOK AT ME, I DID IT, I GRADUATED, WITH EXCESSIVE AMOUNTS OF HONOR CORDS TO BOOT!" But that hasn't arrived yet. I don't really know if it will. School is, at this point, really the only thing I know how to do. So, you know, I just did it.

And now I have to figure out how to do something else. How to be an adult.

It's weird, but I'll do that too.

For now, though, I think I'll revel a little longer in what just was. The hard part of all this is knowing that I'll never again be in the same place with ALL of my friends, those friends who provided a support network for all four years of college.

There really are no words to encompass everything my friends have done for me over the past four years. Whether it was forcing me to buy clothing that actually fit, making me dinner on my birthday, commiserating about terrible novels our thirteen-year-old selves wrote, going on European adventures, or simply talking very late into the night, the friends I made here at IC have really shaped who I am today. They took a shy, gawky, hellishly awkward high schooler and turned her into a (more) confidant girl who can at least pretend she knows how to talk to strangers and is capable of wandering around foreign cities on her own and can (sometimes) simply let herself relax and have fun and not care what other people think.

That, my friends, is entirely your doing, and I am so grateful. Sitting here in this sweltering Waffle Frolic (which has delicious food and free internet but, alas, no air conditioning), I miss you already, even though I only said goodbye to you yesterday. I WILL pester you all into keeping in touch if need be, and you may hereby kick me if for some inexplicable reason you do not end up on the acknowledgements page of my future novel.

I feel like this post is rather rambling and nonsensical, and for that I apologize. I wanted to say something Grand and Important and All-Encompassing, but I think my mind is still reeling from the shock of it all, and I can't quite find the words I want. Really, the most important words are: thank you. To everyone who helped me get to the point where I flipped my tassel from one side of my hat to the other, and left a football stadium an Ithaca College alum, you are the best. My family and my friends and my wonderful professors and my writer friends and you, dear blog readers: thank you. You helped me, in big ways and small ways, to get to the point where I could jump into a freezing cold fountain, have a chopstick wizard duel in overlarge robes, and write "graduated Summa Cum Laude" on my resume.

Here's to the next four years, then, hmmm?

Side note: if you are related to me and would like to keep in touch (or if you are not related to me and would like to keep in touch) send an email to coconne2 (at) ithaca (dot) edu and I'll send you my new address and all that jazz. :)

This is Home

Ever since I got back from London I've been struggling a little bit with the concept of "home." Home is, of course, the house I grew up in, the little red house with my bed and walls and walls of bookshelves and the view of the park from the front windows. Home is my mom and my dad and my sister and my cat. Home was the place I went back to from school, where there were home-cooked meals and less homework and catching up that needed doing. Ithaca wasn't ever home in that sense - Ithaca was a place where I went to school, that I missed when I was away more because of the other people who gathered there than because of any specific ties to the place itself.

And then I went to London, and things got complicated. Those old-fashioned streets where they drive the wrong way became more home to me than Ithaca had ever been. My little Victorian row house of an apartment started rivaling the little red house in New Jersey. I was independent there. I was my own person there, in a way I'd never really been before. I could catch a bus to Cardiff or a plane to Prague if I felt like it. But that home was the home of adventure and independence, not the home of home-cooked meals and mom and dad.

Things got weird when I came "home" from "home." Which one was really home? What was I supposed to do about it? I couldn't just up and move to London - for one thing, the visa stuff would be a nightmare, and for another, I couldn't permanently move across the ocean from my parents. I'd miss them too much.

And then one of the biggest connections to my first home broke. The girl who'd been my best friend since we were in the fifth grade stopped speaking to me, for no discernible reason, in August.

I haven't really wanted to talk about this online, partially because I was too devastated by it to form coherent, not-whiny thoughts, and one does not wish to whine about one's personal life on the internet, especially if one wants one's blog to remain a professional writing blog. I'm past the point where I think I would come across whiny, but that has changed everything for me. It's turned what used to be home into something like deja vu - something I recognize, but that's out of place, not quite right.

I'm not moving home after graduation next month. There are a lot of reasons for that, some probably better than others. I'm not moving home because I really love living with my roommate Lisa, because she's the coolest person I know and because she's my best friend and because she's super easy to live with, and because if I stay with her I won't have to find a new place to stay by myself. I'm not moving home because I don't want to have a kind of limbo waiting period - I want to start my adult life, I want to take care of myself, I want to have my own place, my own things, and here, I'm lucky enough to be able to do just that. I'm not moving home because I think I still need more time to get over the most epic of all friend break-ups, one that I'm still having a hard time keeping from coloring the past eleven years as some kind of lie. I'm not moving home because I can't afford to live in New York City yet.

Those reasons for not moving home don't include disliking home. I have an awesome relationship with my family, one that I think is far, far better than the one most people my age have. Of course I'm going to miss them a lot.

But I'm going to be in Ithaca, not London. I can always visit that first home, and I certainly plan to.  Hopefully my family will come visit me when they can, too. (I've already made plans to kidnap my sister after she graduates high school.)

Lisa and I just put a deposit on the apartment we'll be living in for probably the next two years. I'm trying to find a job to keep up with that apartment, but aside from a slight sense of panic that graduation is SO SOON and things are ending SO SOON, I'm extremely excited. I love the apartment. Our landlady is extremely nice. It looks like an area that will be beautiful when the leaves turn in fall.

I'm excited to carve out a new kind of home for myself - to get a real person job, to have my own place, to get my own cat (his name shall be Mr. Darcy and he and I shall be the best of friends). I'm ready for some new adventures. I'm ready to figure out just what this concept of home really means.

Thoughts from Places: Oh Ithaca, My Ithaca

I tend to refer to my college's town as "the frozen north," and it is never so appropriate as when nature fittingly gives us an April Fool's Day dusting of snow that's still clinging to the ground in the face of the next day's sun. And let's face it, it's probably going to snow again today. It precipitates so much in Ithaca, and often of such an indeterminate manner of precipitation, that my roommate's freshman year RA started calling it "Ithacation" and the term's stuck.

But for a place that is grey and dreary for about nine months of the year, it sure is gorgeous when the sun comes out.

This is the view from my apartment window. I'm spoiled forever.

My family stopped in Ithaca when we were on vacation in Watkins Glen, a few years before I was applying to colleges. We walked around the Commons - Ithaca's downtown area for pedestrians - and got delicious smoothies at Collegetown Bagels. (By the way, if you are ever in Ithaca, GET THEE TO COLLEGETOWN BAGELS POST HASTE.) I liked the vibe of this place, this strange little city essentially in the middle of nowhere. "There's a college here," my mom said. "We could look into it."

And now here I am.

I have a tendency to refer to Ithaca as "Hippieville USA," and it is. But I like that. I like that I can compost my plate in pretty much every cafe and that so many interesting people can be found here. I like that it's a little microcosm of a town set in between Ithaca College and Cornell University.

For most of my time here at IC, I was basically a hermit. I didn't really go much of anywhere. I stayed inside on weekends, watching Disney movies and doing laundry with my roommate. And now there's so much I have to catch up on before the great and terrible diaspora of graduation - things that technically speaking I'd have time to do later, but not with the people I want to do those things with. I have to go to the gorges and waterfalls that Ithaca is so famous for (we have t-shirts that say "Ithaca is Gorges," as well as various spoofs; my favorite is "Ithaca is Cold"). I have to go to Waffle Frolic (seriously, what a great name for a restaurant). That lake in the picture above? I've been staring down at it for four years and never been.

I've had so many adventures in places that are not here, and I think it's time to fix that.

I never really thought that I'd stay here after I graduated; I'd always thought that my chosen college town would be the place where I went to college and that would be that. But here I am, making plans to stay. And I like that. This town is giving me the chance, or at least, I hope will be giving me the chance, to make my transition from "student" to "real actual adult person" a little easier. I'll be able to tear off the Band-Aid slowly here. This is a place that is safe and familiar for me, a place I've spent four years tucked cozily away between cinder block walls and cocooned by textbooks. It's a place where I have friends - my roommate who will be staying here with me and who is kind of my best friend, as well as some other friends who won't be graduating yet. It's a place where I can navigate all the scary things adulthood brings - paying rent, buying groceries not on my parents' credit card, owning a car, paying off student loans - with some sense of solid, familiar ground.

I'm looking forward to discovering this place I halfway know. I'm looking forward to turning Ithaca into more than just South Hill and the IC campus. I'm looking forward to really claiming this place as mine, for a little while longer at least.

And, let's face it, I actually really like snow.

Research vs. Experience

Recently, John and Hank Green were on tour in the UK for the first anniversary of The Fault in Our Stars, and John made this video in which he basically broke my heart by going on my favorite walk along the Thames - the one that goes past Parliament and the London Eye and the Globe and eventually winds its way to Tower Bridge and the Tower of London - as well as mentioning getting a drink at Eat to be rebellious and calling Caffe Nero "Caffe Nerd" because the font does kinda make it look like that, and all sorts of other London-y things that made me viscerally miss that place I once called home. (Not like I don't do that enough as it is, thanks John.)

But he was also, kind of, in an uncertain way, making an argument that virtual narratives are now so real and compelling as to stand up to physical narratives. He was looking at an object in the British Museum that was actually on loan to a museum in Toronto, but the space had been filled by such a convincing 3-D photo that it took him a minute to notice it wasn't real. So, he says, does that matter? Is it important to be looking at the real thing?

I'm a history minor; I do a rather ridiculous amount of research like it's my job. So there's something to be said for that - I do not have a time machine. I cannot find out, in a personal, physical way, everything about daily life in World War II or the French Revolution or Victorian London. I just can't. I have to turn to official documents and personal narratives and paintings and photos and maps; I can piece together my own truth based on the snippets I've been given.

And I obviously did enough research to create a landscape for my characters before I went to Europe. I'd written A TERROR OF DARKNESS completely when I finally went to Paris, and I think the only thing I wanted to change after having gone was noting how damp the catacombs actually are - it looks pretty dry and dusty down there in all the pictures I'd seen.

But even though the research I'd done was enough, I wouldn't have traded that semester abroad for the world. There are some things you simply cannot learn from books - sometimes you have to buy a drink at Eat and get stuck in the snow at Piccadilly Circus and eat pub food and discover places not listed on the maps. Sometimes you have to touch the stones of Notre Dame and breathe the dank air of the catacombs and dance through the gilded halls of the Palais Garnier.

I don't think John is arguing that everyone should always stay inside 100% of the time and be glued to their computer screens. That would be silly. And I think the question he's raised is interesting: is it sufficient to look at a picture of a thing? How much is there to be said for looking at the thing itself? How important, for example, was it for me to see the actual Mona Lisa when we went to the Louvre, versus looking at a picture of the Mona Lisa in my textbooks and online?  

Maybe the virtual experience is so detailed now as to be enough. But the real experience just adds something more. It allows you to create something more than what's merely "enough."

Shiny and New

So, new year, new blog layout. What do you think?

I am well aware that it's been so long since I last posted on this blog that some of you might've given up waiting for a new post from me. These last six weeks or so have really taken a bite out of me, and I apologize profusely for not keeping up with the blog.

This past year feels a little bit like a whirlwind of amazing that led me straight to a brick wall that I slammed into, hard. I've recently come to an incredibly painful conclusion about someone I've known most of my life, and that's been a bit of a black cloud over me for a little while, to say the least.

But you know what? In spite of that, I've had an utterly incredible 2012.

I flew to London to study there for five months. I saw Big Ben and the London Eye and St. Paul's Cathedral. I walked home from Piccadilly Circus for three hours in the snow. I had cream tea at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I climbed Arthurian mountains and danced at ceilis. I visited the catacombs beneath Paris. I spent five days in Italy, impressing my friends with rudimentary Italian and managing to get us un-lost on more than one occasion. I spent two weeks on my own in Ireland and London. I found a home in London, a home I miss every single day, but even so, it is something I will never, ever regret doing.

I have had four internships in the past year - one with a nonfiction publishing company in London, one with a nonprofit in the next town over, and two with literary agencies. I have worked with wonderful, talented, kind people, and I have learned so much.

I have made some wonderful friends, some of whom I met in person at last, some of whom I worked with this summer, and some of whom I am lucky enough to be sharing an apartment with. I don't quite know how I managed to find such amazing friends, but I am so grateful for all of you.

I have had some amazing professors tell me that they think I'm talented, praise which basically made my life. There are few things better than having a professor you esteem very highly tell you how much they enjoy your work.

This past semester has been insanely busy for me, and a little bit rocky, especially towards the end. But the good stuff that's happened to me in this past year far, far outweighs the bad stuff. I'm not entirely sure how 2013 is going to top that.

So, here's to a new year - new friends, new adventures, new writings, new experiences. And yes, I promise: new blog posts. :)

Ithaca Again

Hello, dear blog readers. I hope you are well on this fine Tuesday evening. I am currently ensconced in my wonderful new apartment with two of my three lovely flatmates, listening to someone else's music and the sound of my keyboard and the wind, and more than a little miffed that the very strong smell of pot coming through the window from somewhere is putting a damper on my sense of calmness.

The rather omnipresent smell of pot is one thing I did not miss about Ithaca, but there are many things I have missed. Mostly those things are people - I missed sitting around at two in the morning with roommates, hanging out and laughing and talking about important things or the meaning of life or nothing in particular really. I missed my friends that I have not seen since December, before I left for London. It's been great to see things click back into place, to pick up conversations as though I've never even left, to hug people I've only known in text or in pixelated videos for months. It's been great to be surrounded by friends again, in my apartment, in the dining hall, sitting at a table in "the pub," having person after person wave and say hello and ask how my summer was. Classes start tomorrow, and I'm excited to be reading new things, learning new things, attempting new things in my writing. It'll be hard, but it'll be fun.

Of course there are things I did not miss. I did not miss the utterly vile smell of marijuana, I did not miss the worry of piling-up homework, I did not miss the cold (although it is not, of course, cold here yet. It certainly will be, though).

It feels a bit surreal to be here again. I was walking through campus to pick up my textbooks in the mail center, looking around at all the familiar buildings, and for a moment I felt a little bit like I was in one of those dreams where you know you are in a specific place even though your surroundings are not that place at all. I couldn't quite grasp what being back meant. How could I be here again after everything that had happened? How could I be in Ithaca, after being blown off a mountain in Edinburgh, after getting hopelessly lost and then found again in Venice, after walking three hours in snow-clogged London? How can I be back in the same place, to do the same thing, when I am not the same?

I do think this semester will be pretty exciting though. I'm looking forward to my classes; I'm looking forward to directing Broadway Revue and joining the Quidditch team. I'm excited to cook delicious things for my roommates and other assorted friends; I'm excited about the shiny new internship I snagged myself (talk about the benefits of Twitter!!); I'm excited for lots of adventures around this neat little town I live in.

I think one of my favorite things to do is just sit and talk with a small group of close friends until all hours of the morning. We talk about serious things - relationships and breakups and friendships and careers and hopes and dreams and fears, all sorts of things. We talk about other things too, like books and tv and movies. We tell jokes, talk about stupid stuff that doesn't matter, as well as the stuff that does. It feels comforting to be surrounded by people you trust, when you know they trust you too. I'm glad to be back in that environment. I'm looking forward to a lot of late nights and tired mornings, smiles and secrets and so many laughs my jaw aches with it.

And hopefully all this will happen without too many unpleasant smells filtering in from outside. 

Adventure Time Again!

I've been sitting around all day wondering what to blog about (well, when I wasn't reading an amazing MS for a lovely and talented Twitter friend) and I just realized that I have had some adventures these past two weeks that I can tell you about!

Last Saturday, because I had some extra bus tickets I had to use before they expired, and because it sounded like lots of fun, I went into the city to meet up with my lovely intern friend Ari so that we could have a writer meetup and sit in a cafe and put some words onto some (computerized) paper. It was loads of fun. We went to a place called Argo Tea across the street from the Fashion Institute of Technology (coincidentally where my best friend goes to school - why have I not been to this place before?!?) and they have some really delicious tea and really tasty pastries. Actually, I'm glad that I didn't know about this place earlier in the summer, I would have spent entirely too much money eating lunch there. I actually managed to get quite a lot of words written as well, which was great. I've never done the typical set-up-camp-in-a-cafe-and-write thing, and I had sort of expected to be distracted by the public setting, but I wasn't - it's New York, nobody really pays much attention to anybody else. I was glad to have the designated time set out to just WRITE - and occasionally discuss writerly things with Ari - in a place where I had no Olympics to allow me to procrastinate.  (Seriously, the Olympics are murdering my productivity. Or, well, I guess I'm allowing them to murder it.) So, thanks for a grand afternoon, Ari! :)

The weekend before that saw some adventures too. My friend Lisa - who you will all remember as my roommate from London, with whom I had such great adventures - came to stay with me for the weekend and watch the Opening Ceremonies (which were fun, but slightly weird - although Voldemort vs. Mary Poppins? Yes please). We also went into the city that Saturday (more bus tickets that needed to be used) and we saw War Horse at Lincoln Center. This is actually the third time Lisa's seen it and the second time I have (we saw it together in London, and she'd seen it in NYC prior to that) and I would absolutely go again. Lincoln Center has this amazing student rush program called LincTix - go check it out, it's fantastic! Because we got thirty dollar tickets. And - can you believe it?

WE WERE IN THE FRONT ROW.

There are a lot of theatres where sitting in the front row doesn't actually sound like fun - most traditional proscenium style theatres (the ones with the big arch over the stage) have the front row set back from the pit, and you'd consequently be craning your neck the whole show trying to see what's going on. The stage at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center isn't like that - the front of the stage juts out into the audience (I am trying and failing to remember what the theatrical term for that is. Theatre nerds? Enlighten me?) and so even from the very front row, you aren't at a disadvantage. There were a few things we missed out on, because they were on the other side of a prop, but as we'd already seen the show, that was not a problem at all.

Guys. I don't think I have raved to you yet about how much I love War Horse. But. I LOVE War Horse. It is quite possibly the most beautiful piece of theatre I have seen in ever - both visually and emotionally. It helps that the history nerd part of me gets incredibly choked up just thinking about World War I, because it was so very pointless and yet so very devastating.

That scene is from the end of Act I, which is just such a vivid, heartbreaking scene. The whole production is such a beautiful look at the story of the war, and just how much it affected everyone involved - English townsfolk, English and German soldiers, French people trapped in no man's land, and yes, of course, the horses.

The horse puppets are absolutely stunning. Joey (the main horse) walked right past me twice two weeks ago, and I was rather as giddy about it as I was as a horse-obsessed ten year old about real horses. The detail on the puppets is amazing - Joey is a hunter, half Thoroughbred, half draft horse, and his design is really quite different from his friend Topthorn, who is all Thoroughbred, and so is much more angular and lean. It was wonderful to really get to see all that beautiful detail from so close. And the puppets absolutely move like real horses. The actors controlling them are really wonderful - you honestly forget that they are there at all, that you are not watching a real horse. The moment in Act I when Albert, Joey's human, jumps up onto the puppet for the first time is just magical. It all seems so very real.



That's an interview with the actor who played Captain Nicholls in London in 2010, and it's a really good close-up of just how well the horse puppet moves. It's really pretty amazing.



That's the official West End trailer, and it showcases another thing I love about this play: the music. I of course bought the soundtrack when I saw it again two weeks ago, because it is really beautiful music, and it fits so well into the play. It isn't a musical; the songs are more like a film soundtrack, but there is one character called the Songmaker who serves as a sort of narrator or Greek chorus to thread the show together. There's one song, called Only Remembered, that both opens and closes the show. It was initially an English hymn, but the lyrics take on an entirely different meaning when set against the stark backdrop of World War I.

Who'll sing the anthems
And who will tell the story?
Will the line hold, will it scatter and run?
Shall we at last be united in glory,
Only remembered for what we have done?

I'll spare you the English-class style breakdown of poetry, but I think the song really captures the bittersweet ending of the show -  the characters have done heroic things and terrible things, and they have seen so much. It's really a show to bring a packet of tissues to, but it is absolutely, breathtakingly beautiful. I would see it again. I would recommend it to just about anybody (except perhaps small children. It is a bit, well, upsetting. It is war, after all).

I'm so glad Lisa got to come visit for the weekend (if you're reading this, Lisa, I can't wait to see you back at school soon!!!) and that I got to see War Horse again. Huzzah for tea and friends and writing and good theatre! All things that make for a very happy Caitlin. ^_^

The Curious Incident of Maureen and the Ice Cream

What do you get when you cram five agents and five interns into an elevator?

One pretty hilarious story, that's what.

So, any of my lovely blog readers who are also on Twitter may have seen the announcement that Maureen Johnson made early last week: Ben & Jerry's had offered to give her control of an ice cream truck and distribute free samples wherever she wished. She said that she had turned down every promotional offer she had ever gotten, but was in NO WAY going to turn down this one. She asked people to Tweet her if they wanted to have her come to them with the ice cream truck.

Fellow intern Ari and I immediately started tweeting.

Later, she asked us to email with business location, phone number, et cetera, and somehow, between me, Ari, and the head of the agency I work for, on Thursday, we found ourselves receiving a call from Maureen's publicist to confirm about the ice cream truck. I was diligently reading query letters, when Ari called around the corner "did you hear that?!" The agent I work for was on the phone and had, apparently, said "what about an ice cream truck?" When she got off the phone, Ari and I explained what had been going on (some of the agents in our office knew about this Twitter campaign, others did not), then our boss agent got off the phone and called Maureen's publicist back to confirm.

We were going to be visited by Maureen Johnson and free ice cream the next day. And there was much rejoicing.*

The next day, Ari and I were both at work even though we do not usually work on Fridays. We were told to expect a call from them around 11:30. I had my Twitter page up while I was working, to check on the progress of the ice cream, since I knew Maureen would be tweeting during the journey. 11:30 came and went. Everybody in the office was fidgety, looking up every time the phone rang. And then Maureen tweeted that, of course, because this is Manhattan, they were stuck in traffic. But, finally, she said that she was at our office, and told us to "come down!"

The phone hadn't rung - nor did it, at any point, I don't think - but I called to the others that she was there, and we all scrambled towards the elevator and crammed ourselves in. I don't think I have ever seen a group of grown women so excited about ice cream.

Our elevators are notoriously slow, but we made our way down and then hurried outside (confusing our doorman immensely) and saw - no ice cream truck. Oh no! Where had they gone? One of the agents pulled out her phone and tried to tweet, when another spied the Ben & Jerry's truck around the corner. And there was much rejoicing. We all scrambled over to the truck and discovered that there was no one in the front seat. Oh dear. But another agent saw the driver, who told us that the others had gone UPSTAIRS to find us. (I later found her tweets to that effect. Whoops.) Our boss agent ran back to the building to try and find them, while the agent I work for tried to cajole more free ice cream out of the driver (to no avail). After a moment, most of us headed back to the elevator, while two of the agents and one intern stayed a moment to take a picture of the ice cream truck. We trooped inside, further confusing our doorman, and slowly headed up in the elevator. When the door opened, we saw Maureen Johnson and a Ben & Jerry's person holding a box of ice cream. An instant later, our boss agent popped out of the next elevator, and we all burst out laughing. I'm pretty sure that Maureen and the Ben & Jerry's person now think we're crazy.

But we all went into our office to take some pictures, and then Ari and I got Maureen to sign our copies of The Name of the Star without being overly fangirly, and then we were left with some delicious Raspberry Fudge Greek Frozen Yoghurt as Maureen went off to bring more ice cream to the denizens of New York.

And there was much rejoicing.

* Yes this is a blatant Monty Python reference. Also, I think the agents were a little confused as to who this Maureen Johnson person was and why she had been given an ice cream truck, but Ari and I were equally, if not more, excited to meet her - YA author and master of all things Twitter - as we were to get free ice cream.

Gosh it's been a while...

Hello, blogosphere! I'm sorry I've been so silent for so long; first there was the debacle that was my computer, and then my family came to visit me and finals happened, so... yeah. I've been away so long that Blogger has completely changed its posting format without me noticing! Weird! Well, I am back, and I should have internet access for the duration of my last two weeks in Europe. (Trying not to think too much about that: two weeks from today, I will be getting on a plane and going back to America. Hopefully this will be a plane that I don't get sick on, at least.) Currently, I'm mooching off the wifi in a cafe (I should probably buy something else, actually, I've been sitting here long enough...) in London; I'm here for the night before I set off on an adventure to Dingle, Ireland (the setting of The Long Road Home) and then one last week in good old London town.

 The last two weeks have been kind of strange and awesome and sad, all at once. My family came to visit me (during the world's easiest finals week) and it was so much fun getting to show them around the place that has become my home over the last four months, in spite of the fact that it rained and was miserably cold almost the entire time they were here. Oh, England. You're in drought for months, and then the skies open the one week I don't want them to? Gee, thanks. On the one nice day, I took them on the South Bank walk that was my introduction to the city - it's the walk along the Thames from Westminster to Tower Hill, and it's a really great way to see just about every London landmark all in one go.

 But by the end of the week, it turned into a festival of leaving. My mom and my sister left on Friday to go back to work and school (my dad stuck around; more on that in a bit), and then one by one my flatmates started to leave. Lisa moved out first, although she was still in London until yesterday; even though I still got to see her until it was my turn to leave, it was really strange to be in our room without her things there, or not see her huddling next to the heater in the kitchen. Matt left next, and with him most of my other friends, as the London Center's group flight was on Monday, and then Tory left the next morning, off for some adventures in Morocco with her sister. Then it was my turn to do the leaving - I had my last day of work and my last London pub dinner with Lisa. The next morning, it was time for my dad and I to set off on some adventures. I was really excited to go see Florence with him, but at the same time I was really quite sad to hand over my keys to my landlady, shut the door on my flat, and walk down my dimly lit three flights of stairs for the last time. It really punctuated the fact that this amazing experience that I am having is really coming to an end... and I don't want it to!

 I just arrived back in London after a few days in Florence with my dad. It was a lot of fun! We climbed up an awful lot of things (the terraces in the Boboli Gardens, the Cupola of the Santa Maria Del Fiore cathedral (aka the Duomo), the Bell Tower of the Duomo...), saw some pretty stunning views from the top of those things, learned a lot about the Medicis, and, of course, ate a lot of really good food and lots of fantastic gelato! It was great to spend some time with my dad and to see some sunshine for a change!

 I'm here on my own for another two weeks. Navigating European travel alone (granted, it's just to Ireland and then back to London, so I'll be in English-speaking places the whole time, not too bad) is both a scary and daunting prospect and... kind of liberating. I intend to stay in this cafe until the internet kicks me off (can it do that?) or until the place closes and they kick me out, and then I'm going back to my hostel and I'm going to bed. It's pretty early in the day to be thinking that, but I'm exhausted and currently, I have no one to please but myself, no plans but my own, no place to be but the airport in the morning. It's nice - I suspect that by the time the two weeks are up, I'll really want some friendly faces around me and I'll actually be ready to go home, but for now I'm quite ready for another adventure.

Thoughts from Places: Prague

For once, this travel story does not start with "I woke up at a ridiculous hour of the morning to go somewhere." Instead, it begins in a leisurely fashion, waking up at a normal hour last Saturday, packing, exchanging money, and hopping on the Tube, thus beginning our spring break adventures and our survey of European public transportation (after this one-week trip we had traveled on the underground of three different cities, two trains, three (!!!) airplanes, four buses, one tram, one vaporetto (water taxi) and one gondola. The gondola was, of course, the most fun).

I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I am really, really not a fan of flying. I think my irrational, historically-minded self simply refuses to believe that it is safe or possible for me to be several thousand feet in the air without plummeting to my death. The more rational side of me, of course, severely dislikes it because it really affects my ears quite badly; for hours after a flight, I still feel like I'm underwater, and when it's really bad, I get all dizzy and miserable. Sigh. But the flight to Prague was uneventful, and we stumbled into the city by bus and then by metro. My first experience of Prague was in the dark, in that unpleasant underwater-can't-hear-anything bubble, but I could already tell that our stay there was going to be lovely.

We found our hostel and had a nice chat with the girl at the front desk - who, like pretty much everyone in Prague, thank heavens, spoke very good English - and we signed up for breakfast in the morning and a walking tour the next day before going up the stairs to our room.

Guys. This was the most glorious hostel room I have ever been in. I have stayed in HOTELS that were not as nice as this place. The breakfast was also amazingly delicious; they had a buffet of fruit and bread and cereal and they'd also make you whatever you wanted in terms of eggs or crepes or pancakes. Oh so very tasty.

After breakfast, we napped for about half an hour (what? It was morning and we're college students) and then we trooped down to the lobby in order to meet our walking tour group at 10. Except... there was no one else in the lobby. Well, okay, fine, there are other hostels on this walking tour, perhaps they're just late picking up another batch of people. At about 10:15, we asked the receptionist, and she looked all worried and called the tour people and started speaking rapid-fire Czech (Czech, by the way, is an impossible language. There was a list of helpful phrases on the map from the hostel and none of us could manage any of them). She then told us that somehow, they'd forgotten to stop by Miss Sophie's (our hostel) and that someone would be coming to get us if we could wait another five minutes. Hooray!

We finally met up with the tour group, and we talked a bit with two other American girls from Chicago and an Australian guy, as well as Aoife, our lovely Irish tour guide (yes I asked her how to pronounce her name). We spent four hours walking around the city, listening to Aoife as she told us what seemed like everything: this monastery was built in such-and-such a year by these people, and this castle was refurbished by this woman, and this is one of the three locations of the defenestrations of Prague.



The location of the third and (so far) final Defenestration of Prague, in 1948. They sure do like to defenestrate people in Prague.

Other than being a place where people are thrown out of windows and speak a language where the letters don't make any sense, Prague is just an amazingly beautiful city. What I've told everyone about it is that it feels like walking through a fairytale, and it really does. Everywhere the streets are a little bit narrow and all paved with cobblestones and every street, especially in Old Town and the Castle District, is just filled with beautiful old buildings. It's a city so lovely that neither Hitler nor the Communists wanted to destroy it, so from a historical standpoint it's probably the most intact of all Eastern European cities.

This is an average street in the Castle District:


And this is the view from near the monastery (complete with our lovely faces, of course):



And this is a bit of St. Vitus' Cathedral, which is inside Prague Castle:



On Sunday afternoon, after the walking tour let out, we walked over to the National Theatre and, even though we simply walked into the box office three hours before the performance, we got tickets to see that evening's production of Benjamin Britten's Gloriana. We meandered our way back to the hostel then and got a bit fancier (it was the opera, after all), and then headed back towards the theatre. We ate dinner across the street and then went up to discover that our seats, even though they came to about twelve dollars, were fantastic, and that the theatre looked like this:



Gosh I love old theatres.

Gloriana, which is about Elizabeth I and was written for Elizabeth II's coronation, will probably never be my favorite opera - there's too much recitative and not enough aria for my liking. It was, however, incredibly fun to go to this production. The singers were all excellent, and the music is very pretty, if not particularly catchy. It was also quite visually stunning, with period costumes and stark, modern sets, with lots of excellent visual symbolism and the oddest ballet I've ever seen before. I was really happy that we got to go and do that - it isn't everywhere that you can walk into a theatre that late in the day and get such good seats, and I've never really been to an opera on that scale before, so it was a lot of fun to see that.

Monday was spent doing a lot of wandering. Our plans for the morning were thwarted, as we discovered that the National Gallery is closed for five years for renovations. So instead, we spent our time meandering through the streets, stopping in stores or touristy shops or street markets now and again, and finally finding a museum to visit - an exhibition on Alphonse Mucha's art nouveau posters and sketches (very cool!) and an exhibition of Salvador Dali (very weird). We also went back to visit Charles Bridge, one of the places we'd been on our tour and one of the most iconic of Prague's landmarks, at night, which is quite lovely, with lots of dimmer-than-you'd-think streetlamps and shadowy statues hovering over you in the dark.



After that, continuing in our newfound tradition of eating in places where famous people have eaten, we had dinner at the Cafe Louvre, where Einstein and Kafka apparently ate (presumably not together :P), and then, even though Tory wanted to go on a pub crawl, we headed back to the hostel and packed our things and went to bed because the next morning, we had to, of course, get up at a ridiculous hour to start the next leg of our wonderful European journey.

I hope everyone in the blogosphere had a good week last week! I'll be posting again tomorrow as well, as the tales of spring break will take up three posts, I think. Talk to you soon, blog!

Adventure Time!

"I'm glad you feel comfortable enough with us to try new things," my flatmate said to me as I had my first ever glass of wine. (Disclaimer: I am twenty-one. I have been twenty-one since November. S'all good, guys.) "You need to feel safe when you're doing this, and I'm glad you feel safe with us."

She was absolutely right. Not that I've developed a taste for alcohol - my lifelong drink total remains about two and a half - but in order to try new things, you need to feel comfortable enough to try them. I'm talking about everything from putting Brie on a piece of bread to having a glass of wine to navigating the bus system on your own. Trying something new involves taking a risk - sometimes that risk is very small, and it might wind up that you simply don't like the food you've taken a bite of. Sometimes the risk is much larger - like the chance that you'll misread the bus schedule and miss your internship interview (which didn't happen, mind, but it's certainly a worry). And whether it's a big risk or a small one, you have to be confident enough in yourself to take it.

I feel confident here. I feel safe here. I've done a lot of things I haven't needed to do or wouldn't have done back home - find a flat to rent, for example, or find my way around the city on my own, without anyone to show me where to go first. I don't really consider myself a very self-confident person, but in the space of about an hour I've had three people tell me that I was, so either I hide it well or I'm turning into a confident person. I think being in a foreign country will do that to people.

So here's to London, guys. Here's to having cool and nerdy adventures with wonderful people, to finding my way around this beautiful city without getting lost or feeling afraid. This is a feeling I like, and it's one I think I'm going to take home with me.

We're off to Scotland tomorrow for more adventures. I'm looking forward to more exploring. :)

Library Saga

So today, I present to you a Library Saga, a tale of staircases and helpful librarians and misshelved books. I hope it will amuse you.

First of all, some background. I don't know if newer readers of Tea & Biscuits will know this, since I haven't mentioned it in a while, but I sing. I like to think that I'm pretty good at it. I take voice lessons from a grad student at school, and I really enjoy it.

Also, out of all the people I know in Ithaca, the majority are either writing majors or music majors. My roommate is a music major. Last year I lived with TWO music majors. My very good friend from down the hall is a music major. This is unsurprising, as a majority of my friends and fellow AP level students in high school were band geeks.

So my voice teacher, Sarah, told me about this place:



Since I live pretty close to NYC and don't have a music library any closer to me, Sarah sent me on a quest to the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Center in search of a Mozart art song, "Ridente la calma." And since I was going, my music major roommate Anna asked me to copy some music for her as well, a Polish folk song called "Mother Dear" and a Mendelssohn piece called "Der Blumenstrauss." So off to New York I went. This was, of course, an opportunity to visit my best friend Ella (I link to her so often I should just figure out how to put a link in the sidebar and have done with it). She was coming home later Tuesday afternoon, so I would be able to get a ride back from her dad.

I got into NYC around 9 or 9:30, and Ella hadn't eaten breakfast yet so we went to her dining hall and she ate breakfast and we told stories of the last three weeks and et cetera. Because that's what friends who haven't seen each other in three weeks do.

By the time we got to the library, it was about 11:30. So, this is a library, right? Libraries open around 9 am, because they're libraries and that's what they do, right? Wrong. This library opens at NOON every day (this will become important later). We walked down the street and found a supermarket and I bought a sandwich. It was then noon, so we went back to the library.

Once in the library, I found a map and we went up to the second floor, which is where (most of) the music books are. I looked up the three books we needed again, to write down the call numbers and check that they were still available. Those three books were: 15 Arias for Coloratura Soprano, The First Book of Soprano Solos, vol. 3, and the Lieder Anthology. They were all there; the first two had the same call number and the third one was "for library use only" so we'd have to go somewhere else to find that. We then went over to find the first two, since they were in the same place, and after several minutes of looking on the wrong shelf we found the right shelf and, fairly shortly after that, my book. I made my copy (I do not get along well with copy machines; I wasted so many dimes and so much paper trying to figure them out) and then we went to put it back and find the book for Anna. We scoured every inch of that shelf, as well as many of the surrounding shelves, as well as all the return carts we could find, trying to find it. But it simply was not there. So we decide to go find a Helpful Librarian to ask.

We asked Helpful Librarian 1, and she told us that if it says it's available but isn't in the right place it's either misshelved or it's just on a cart after having been returned, waiting to be reshelved, and we would need to go downstairs and ask them if they can look for it. We also got a little form thing for the Lieder Anthology, which we would need to request upstairs.

We went downstairs and asked Rather Unhelpful Librarians 2 and 3 what to do, telling them what Helpful Librarian 1 told us. They didn't pay very much attention to what we were trying to say (Also, apparently "Fifteen Arias for Coloratura Soprano" is a rather incomprehensible title, since I had to repeat it A LOT), and they sent us around the corner to what turned out to be the DVD section or some such thing. We went up to that desk and asked Helpful Librarian 4 what to do, telling them what Unhelpful Librarians 2 and 3 had told us, and Helpful Librarian 4 told us that what we needed was a page who would go through the stuff that hadn't been reshelved yet. We went back to Rather Unhelpful Librarian 2 and told her exactly what Helpful Librarian 4 had told us. She looked rather cross but told us that the pages were all out on their lunch break. Mind you, it was 1 o'clock, and they opened at noon. Hmmm...

So we decided to try that one again later, and we went up to the third floor, in search of the Lieder Anthology. On the third floor, there's a coat check and all sorts of official stuff. We handed the slip from Helpful Librarian 1 to Helpful Librarian 5 and then wandered around looking at stuff for a while as we waited for her to get the book for us. (They had a display of Beverly Sills' scores with her stage direction notes and ornamentations written in - it was pretty awesome.) When we went over to retrieve the book, Helpful Librarian 5 asked me for my library card. I do not have a library card for the New York Public Library, since I do not live in New York. Ella, however, does - she just forgot to bring it with her. Helpful Librarian 5 asked Ella for her name, and then asked her to verify her address. Now, since Ella has just finished finals week, Ella has not slept in two days. And because I go to Ithaca, which is a hippie school in every sense of the term, I was afraid that Ella would come across as crazy, on drugs/drunk, or as someone trying to steal someone else's library card (why you would do that I have no idea, but there it is). But Helpful Librarian 5 was very nice about it, and we got the book.

We trotted over to the copy machines, and I put in the little copy card I'd had to get and laid the page out and pushed the button and BAM! Paper jam. (Ella later remarked that this was the most karmically attuned copier she'd ever come across.) I tried to do Anna's magic trick (Anna is very good with copiers) where you pull out the door on the side and then close it again and it's magically fixed, but it didn't want to open and I didn't want to force it. So I went back to Helpful Librarian 5 and said "I'm sorry, I don't know who I should ask for help about this, but there's a paper jam..." and she said "You're making copies? Do you have permission to make copies?" Of course I had no idea you needed *permission* to make copies, and so I apologized profusely, and she pointed me across the floor and said she'd fix the paper jam while I went to go fill out the necessary form.

Ella and I then took the book over to Helpful Librarian 6, who handed us a form and pointed out the copyright mark at the bottom of the first page which meant we'd only be able to copy 10% of the song.* Much hilarity ensued when she waited for a sleep-deprived art student and a writing major who has always been abysmal at percents try and figure out just how much 10% of a five page song would be (I worked it out later thanks to the calculator feature on Google; it's half a page). We had quite a nice discussion with her about copyright law and how weird it is, but ultimately didn't fill out the form to copy things because half a page would really be quite useless to Anna, so why bother? We then went back to Helpful Librarian 5 and handed the book back and said thank you and went back downstairs.

It was now about 1:40 or so, so after I'd collected my coat and backpack (Ella, of course, did not have to check anything because Ella does not carry bags or wear coats, because she is a silly person) we went back down to the first floor to check on that coloratura book. Rather Unhelpful Librarian 2 was still there, and she rather snippily told us that they were still on a lunch break. So we left the library and sat outside for a bit, waiting for them to get back from lunch, being cold, etc. At about five after 2, we went back in, and Unhelpful Librarian 2 was no longer at the front desk. Instead, Helpful Librarian 7 went back and looked at all the return stuff they had (it took her rather a while, it must have been a lot of stuff) but couldn't find it. She said if we put it on hold we could come back later and try to find it, but since we were leaving and neither of us would be living in the city till Ella goes back at the end of break, that would be sort of silly. So, two hours and a bit after we'd started, we gave up. We went back to Ella's dorm to wait for her dad to pick us up, and I finally got to eat that sandwich. I was really hungry by then!

So I suppose the morals to this story would be as follows:

1. Librarians are awesome.
2. Never try to do nice things for your roommate.**

I hope you enjoyed the Library Saga. It was certainly an adventure!

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* The thing that really puzzles me about this is that the reason Anna asked me to look for this music was that someone had taken those books out of the Ithaca library over break. Which meant that they were in the Ithaca library with absolutely no restrictions, which meant that if you really wanted to, you could copy the whole book and nobody would care except the person behind you on the copier line. Hmmm.

** I'm just kidding, always do nice things for your roommate. Roommates are awesome.