It was a glorious weekend for it, too; my freshman year, I was told that Wesfest weekend is always nice, which, in my sophomore year, I unhappily learned was not at all true. Still, we seem to have gotten back to the pattern, which I approve of, as it means that I finally feel like it's warm enough to start wearing shorts again. Glory glory hallelujah, etc.
So let's see. What did I do this week, after I returned from DC? The answer, surprisingly, is, "Several things."
[Under the cut: Several things! Including WesMTC, The Theatre (pronounced thee-ay-truh, of course), awesome movies, quasi-religious traditions, and a guide to the dreaded specter of GRS.]
So Monday was an MTC meeting, as per usual, although admittedly I spent a fair portion of this one a little bit distracted because I was simultaneously trying to edit an essay and work on a design for TypeClub — we volunteered to design signs for some of the groups that were promoting themselves during WesFest on Friday. I signed up for the Wesleyan Story Co-op, and I eventually made this:
It's not the best thing I think I've ever designed — I think it's a little bit too busy, honestly, but I wanted to capture the "oral storytelling" aspect of the Co-Op and the best pictures I could find didn't have the tops of their heads, so I had to improvise a little. Well, a lot. But it's done, anyway, and they didn't end up using it after all, so I guess the point is moot?
So that was that. Tuesday, I can barely remember; I had a pretty bad headache all day, so it's pretty much a blur of classes, studying desperately for a test on Thursday, and finally getting my schedule in order. Seriously, I may have stressed about pre-reg in years past, but this year I was too busy to even think about it for more than five minutes at a time. I applied to a few POIs, bookmarked a few other random classes back when pre-reg opened up, sorted them into an order I decided was satisfactory on Tuesday night at about midnight, and then finalized my schedule the next day. Clearly, I am the queen of last-minute productivity.
Of course, pre-reg was not the only piece of bureaucracy I had to sort out this week! This was also the week that we got our GRS numbers — "we," of course, being all us sad students who, having decided not to go into program housing, had to throw ourselves on the mercy of a computerized lottery system. Ever since then, our conversations all seem to revolve around the numbers we received, the size of our groups, and what houses we're interested in trying to acquire.
I fondly recall freshman year, when I skipped the process entirely by going into program housing, and last year, when I left all of the decisions up to the three other people in my group because I was too busy going through hell week for a show that only really came together at the very last minute.
A note, for all those fortunate souls who are unfamiliar with how GRS works at Wesleyan: I'm not really up on the particulars, but essentially, here is what you have to do:
1. Divide your friends into people you would be willing to live with for an entire year, and people you would inevitably murder if you spent too much unadulterated time with them and their living habits.
2. Carefully suss out who in your first group has also placed you in their first group.
3. One of you (there may be anywhere between 2-6 of you) must create a Group on the GRS [General Room Selection] page. The rest of you must join that group, otherwise Reslife will not know that you guys have all decided to put up with each others' mutual weirdnesses.
4. Celebrate. Talk about how much fun you think you guys will have living together next year.
5. Secretly worry that you're either going to be a horrible house/flat/roommate or that you're going to snap and kill one of them during the process of living together.
6. Hope that you get a good number so that at least you have a nice living place to console you when you are trying to keep yourself from resorting to homicide.
7. Try to stop talking about homicide on an admissions blog. Also reassure everyone reading that you are in fact terribly fond of your flatmate and have never once felt the desire to kill her, mostly because both of you are very, very good at getting out of each others' hair when necessary.
8. Receive your GRS number. Sigh because it is not as high as you would have liked, and then curse whatever lucky friends of yours you now hate because their number is far higher than yours. Like, say, approximately 70 spaces higher than yours. Jerks.
[Numbers, for the unitiated, decide the order in which students may choose their housing. Assignment of numbers is based on points; rising seniors have three points, rising juniors have two, and rising sophomores have one. I think you may also get a point bump depending on special considerations you may have, although you would do better to ask someone else about that because, like I said, I didn't really begin paying attention to GRS until about a week ago.]
9A. If you are a rising junior: look at LoRise and HiRise, or at some of the random places like Hewitt and that one house on Pearl that none of the seniors want. Decide what you like and what you think you can get, based on your number. LoRises tend to go much more quickly, which is why I'm in a HiRise this year, but I think I'm actually happier being in a HiRise. However, if you are in a 4 person group and the LoRises all go away, you'll need to decide what member of your group you like the most, and split into a 2-person group with them. Apparently you can also split and make a group with someone else, but if your new friend has a lower number than you, that's the number you'll have to take.
I don't know what rising sophomores are supposed to do. Like I said, I didn't bother.
9B. If you are a rising senior: Look at the senior houses and senior Fauver. Endlessly discuss whether the fact that Fauverites live in the same building as their laundry machine outweighs the fact that, apparently, the walls are thin and the rooms are small. Get shot down by every single one of your friends, who are apparently really looking forward to that three-block hike to the laundry facilities in the middle of winter.
Consider the quiet streets versus the party streets, the single group houses versus the houses partitioned between multiple groups, the prototype houses versus the less-nice houses. Look at floor plans. Go househopping. (I did not, because I had meetings, but my friends did!) Decide where you want to live next year, and where you'll settle for living when someone with a better number snatches up the house you want from right beneath your grasping fingers. Try not to smack your friend when she regrets not choosing program housing yet again, because goddamnit, if you have to suffer, so does she.
10. Hope that everyone ahead of you really, really wants to live on Fountain.
11. Have far, far too many conversations about GRS.
12. Pick a place. This one has to wait until Monday, but never fear, I'll tell you the details next weekend. Cross your fingers for me, people.
Anyway! Besides that, I had a test on Thursday, on which I know for sure that I did a fairly mediocre job. It's a very distressing feeling, knowing that for sure without knowing precisely how mediocre. It's very unsettling.
Afterwards, I bought ice cream to cheer myself up, and only belatedly realized that it had cookie bits in it and so I couldn't eat it until after Passover was over. It was okay, though; I had applesauce to binge on, which is always a more satisfying anxiety-food anyway, and I realized that it's not really the food that matters: it's the grocery shopping. I find buying food very stress-relieving, as long as I'm not spending my own money.
But I have ice cream now anyway, so... win-win?
Friday was insane, though: flipping through floorplans, then a meeting with my writing professor, then a meeting with an anthropology professor to discuss my idea for a thesis, and then an MTC meeting during which our idea for a shenanigans-filled musical about a heist became an idea for a shenanigans-filled musical about a heist with a murder mystery in the background. Go figure, right? Still excited, though. Lady thieves, murder, stealing things... there is nothing bad about any of this. Well, there is, but not when it's fictional.
After that, I got kidnapped for a while, and then I somehow ended up at the Prometheus show, cheering on the awesome fire spinners and wishing that I had changed into closed-toed shoes at some point during the evening.
prometheus [not the specific performance I saw, but still awesome.]
On Saturday, I celebrated the fact that Passover ended for me on Friday night, and then I went to see [title of show] at the 92 Theater.
It was a great show, made even greater by the fact that A) I understood at least 85% of the references and B) I can totally commiserate with the experience of writing a musical with three other people [two guys and one other girl].
After that, some friends and I curled up and watched Trouble In Paradise, which I was a little concerned about, given that it is A) black and white and B) started off with some very bizarre singing, but it was a fantastic movie — very, very saucy/suggestive (it was made before the Motion Picture Production Code of the 30s went into effect), all about people stealing things, and full of women who refused to take any guff from anyone.
Watch it, people. That Lubitsch guy really knew what he was doing.
[Original tags on this post: awesome movies,design stuff, GRS,GRS causes me pain in my soul, handy guides to wesleyan life, I like to pretend my life is interesting,ice cream is magical,last-minute is better than first-minute,LOOK I DID THINGS,passover, please don’t be alarmed by the frequent references to homicide in this post,pre-reg, Prometheus,talking about GRS also causes pain in my soul and yet somehow I continue doing it anyway,theater, typeclub,WesFest, wesmtc]
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