"To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material."

Good things about this weekend:

• The new dorm room is awesome!  It's bigger, cleaner, and much more nicer-looking than the ones I've had before, and I have a real closet for once!  And wireless Internet too!  (More on that later...)
• Having an awesome lunch in town yesterday afternoon.
• Meeting up with a couple of people after being away for so long, but not with as many people and some people I know (again, more on that later).
• Partially related: getting back on track with fall symposium planning this morning.  While we need to work out a few kinks with the adults in charge of giving us money and helping us, we're pretty much ready to go and start organizing this thing.  I'll need to meet with the others in VIP soon in order to delegate responsibilities.
• Great weather -- 70s and sunny.
• Finally getting to be away from my family for a while.  XDDDDDDD

Bad things about moving back to college:

• As much as this dorm room is awesome, it still has its problems.  The light flickers, which means I have to use my desk lamp to illuminate the room until I get it checked out, and the window keeps sliding down and doesn't stay open.  Oh, and the door slams.  LOUDLY.  Though there really isn't anything I can do about that except maybe get a decent door stopper.  And there's a tree right in front of my window; while this wouldn't be a problem when the leaves are off, as it is I'm not getting as much natural light as I could be getting, and the fact that I face west means I'm only going to get enough sunlight to keep my room lights off only during certain parts of the day.
• The building I'm in is labyrinthine.  I'm able to walk to one of the dining halls without having to step outside, but not before I go down two flights of stairs, turn down tons of crazy corners, go through too many doors to count, and up a ramp.  After some digging, I found out that the dorm complex I'm in used to be separate buildings, but renovations in the mid-90s connected all the buildings together -- this definitely explains why this building is so hard to navigate.
• I COULDN'T GET THE INTERNET WORKING IN MY ROOM.  DX  I had the problem checked out this morning, and it turns out that while I can't get Internet through my ethernet cable, I can through the wireless network that's available in my dorm (which is one of the few to have it, huzzah!), and this has something to do with the college letting security certificates expire.  -_-  Thank you, college, for screwing over lots of other people who are still having a problem.  (But it's working now, so yay!  :D)
• Speaking of getting screwed over: Having to pay $400+ for books.  Goodbye, checking account.  If I don't get a job soon, I'm going to be broke, and I mean that in the literal and not figurative sense.  :(
• My class schedule isn't the greatest; on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays I have three classes in a row, which isn't too much of a problem since fall semester last year I had four classes in a row on those days.  The real problem is that on Mondays and Wednesdays I have to walk from Building A to Building B and back to Building A.  Building A is fairly close to my dorm, so that's not a problem, but Building B is notorious for being a LOOOOOONG walk from the rest of campus; it's pretty far from the rest of the campus buildings, and it's the second-closest college building to town.  So for two days out of the week I have to make a long trek down a hill to get to my second class, and a long trek up that same hill for my third.  Wonderful.  :P
• Yesterday I accidentally set off the emergency alarm in the newly-renovated dining hall (which is AWESOME, BTW) by walking through the wrong doors.  Fortunately, nobody took the alarm seriously, but it was still awfully embarrassing.  D:
• Generally being disoriented and trying to get a good routine back in order.  And being awfully homesick for some reason -- even though I don't like my hometown, and even though my family can sometimes drive me nuts, I still consider that to be home and I don't know what I'd do with myself when it comes time when I move away for good and when my mom and dad won't be around anymore.  I've started to badly miss the routine and "safety" (for lack of a better term) of life during high school (even though if I were given a chance to go back to that time in my life, I would quickly and gladly say no).  And just feeling extremely lonely, even though I know that I don't really want to be friends with most of the people here, and when it comes to Not Feeling Alone I don't want to have to settle.  And just general panicking about my current prospects.  The first weekend/week back is always like this, but I've been feeling it much more than usual.  I've been very reserved and moody since my parents left yesterday evening, and this is not the way I wanted to start this year.

I've been pretty bored today, since everything I've needed to do -- meet about the symposium, get textbooks, etc. -- have already been done, and the job listings have just been posted.  So for the past couple of hours I've been online and not really going out and meeting people I know, mostly due to reasons I've mentioned a million times before.  Later I might take a walk around campus, and the dining halls will be closed because dinner will be a picnic/BBQ outside (because my college is quaint like that XD), so I might meet up with some people there.  I guess the "omg how are you doing?" will have to wait until tomorrow, especially in Japanese class where most of the kids I know are amazing and fun to hang out with.  ;-)  And then tonight I'll start applying to jobs, maybe look into yoga/meditation and capoeira classes, and relax as much as I can before classes begin tomorrow.  Tomorrow I'll schedule an appointment at Counseling, see what I can do to meet with both someone at Career Services and my great-to-the-fifth-power ex-faculty adviser, apply to more jobs, start working more outside of my dorm room, and figure out ways to do homework as quickly as possible.  :D

I'll probably still find the time to post here as often as I have been, but I might be a little bit sparse otherwise.  Still, starting tomorrow night I'll be on AIM much more regularly than I have been; my screenname is mecteol (surprise surprise), so if you at least want to add me then go right ahead!