Ruthie

So, for the past 10 days, I have been staying on a college campus, ala dorm style, for my first grad school residency. Might I say that grad school is perhaps the sweetest deal ever. Teachers respect you and take you out frequently to pubs where all attendees get drunk and rattle on about various dead poets, etc and the work is entirely tailored to what you want/care to study. It is wonderful!!!!!!

It should also be noted that, this week, I have had the pleasure of staying in the Fairleigh Dickinson Dorms by means of unnecessary requirment, where I have relearned the pleasures of Shower Shoes, cold floors, loft beds, and uncomfortably crafted desk chairs.

But perhaps the most rewarding has been having the rare opportunity to eat in the campus dining hall each afternoon for lunch. I have been thrust back to a lifestyle of eating 12 unsatisfying courses all in one sitting. From plates of yellowing iceberg lettuce, to untrustworthy bowls of Mac and Cheese, to bowls of cereal, followed by Fro-Yo, and Turkey slices that would be an embarassment to any guest.

But, naturally, it has made me think of all of you. Each night, myself, along with award winning novelists in their mid-forties, teachers who perhaps are too smart for their own good, a man in a trench coat (regardless of the 90 degree temps) and one token Hot Poet, I have had the chance to reliive the days of the undergrad, stumbling drunkenly through hallways, falling down in the night on campus greens, and laughing in stairwells about the perils of Joyce vs. Woolf's writing techniques.

Its been, in a word, Bonus.
-'gella'