If you’re wondering what happened to College Girl, and whether she forgot her readers, or just got distracted, or both, or perhaps, on any given day this fall, made the mistake of taking the last bagel on Saturday morning and was never seen again, let me give you an anecdote to explain my state of mind that will make the whole thing make sense (alright, it’s only a partial excuse. Laziness and something along the line of “I haven’t been there in so long it’ll just be weird” account for much of my absence. Also, writing regularly seems to be one of those things that is self-perpetuating, and by that I mean to infer that when you don’t write it is self-exploiting, as all the ideas that come from nowhere when the knowledge you need to write is hanging about in the mists somehow don’t show up when you pretty much don’t care, because….)

Well, because of things like this.

Today, as I was starting a lab writeup – my tenth this semester – I started typing the date. And instead of “12 November”, “12 September” came out. I looked at it, and thought – “no wait, it’s not September…or October. November! There we go.” Then I started – wait — it’s November? When in the bloody blank did it get to be then? I’m turning 20 in four days? FOUR DAYS? WHAT?! (Insert some silent profanity here) Because I swear it was a week until my birthday yesterday, heck, it was years since I was supposed to turn 20 just a little while ago…

Apparently, a gigantic wormhole – you know, the one with all the socks and good pencils in it – jumped me sometime this fall, and deposited me down in the basement of a library about to embark on the oh so exciting and ever thrilling process of writing a lab. Then, I looked in my binder, and saw the last nine writeups, and this explanation had to be discounted. Perhaps – perhaps! - an alien took my place and did it for me…but no, there’s my crummy handwriting, as illegible as ever. ‘Truth is, I faintly remember all those weeks and months…there was the day I made pumpkin pie, that one time I went to a football game, and a few other moments where, for a brief second, like a reverse eclipse, I actually had a life. What was a doing the rest of the time? Well, can I tell you…thirty chemistry lectures, 27 of which I had listened to again. About four hundred pages of Philosophy to be copied. And the rest was frantic racing about between the printers in the library, my planner, and the Albertson’s where I go when I forget my lunch. Some other stuff was thrown in there, too.

Well, at least I got that off my chest, and I’m back, right? I guess, barring having any kind of real-life exposure of any great magnitude, I can always wax poetic about it here, right?

Not that I’m complaining. At the end of the semester, for all this, I’ll have five little letters, one for each class! written in capitals, too! That’ll be it. The sum total. The reason for my existence about ninety percent of the time. Yippyyayyo!