It Has Been Some Time, No?

Believe it or not, I STILL haven't started classes yet! Sorry to everyone freezing in Cornell, slaving away in classes. If it makes you feel better, when I'm laying in a grassy park on a sunny day or partying until 7 in the morning and sleeping all day afterwards, I'm pitying you.

That's actually kind of a lie, though. I haven't been entirely free. After the last post I made, we had two straight weeks of very intense orientation. There are 150 students in my program and we had to be in a giant building every week day from about 10 till 5 or 6. The first week at orientation I definitely gave off the WORST first impression, though, and looking back it's really fucking funny. After being so starved for attention for three and a half weeks and not really having a lot of friends except for two tourists who left after a few days, I had pretty much forgotten how to have conversations with groups of people. My tactic on how to make friends was to approach someone and, after the standard bullshit small talk (Where you from? What you study? Do you think thunder is an erotic noise?), I'd respond with the first thing that came to my head and hope my abrasive attitude would win people over. Example: When I met these two really chill girls who go to school as Macalaster, in Minneapolis, my first question is: So, like, is Minnesota full of (voice drops to a whisper) chubby people?

It did get better, though, and by the second week, I actually was able to have real conversations with some people, make some connections, and develop a really fun group of friends. One of my favorite guys is from Birmingham, Alabama and his name's Lewis. He is without a doubt the funniest person I've ever met, and in the many awkward silences that occurred time and time again during the first two weeks of orientation, he'd fill them in with something completely out of the blue and fucking hilarious. We got dinner for my friend's birthday the second week, and during one of those silences, he leaned over to me and said, "Have I told you I'm in a gang yet? Yet, we call ourselves the Culebras," and then proceeded to tell me how this week's a big deal because they gave him a bicycle and a slingshot. Yeah, I also made friends with these two really funny sorority girls from Columbia, and I laugh so hard I cry every time I hang out with them. They talk about their poo and make me feel like a kid.

Also, the study abroad program I'm doing, COPA, offers specialized research tracks, and I decided to pursue the film track. There are six people, four of whom are my closest friends in the program, and it just sounds fucking sick. We have to take a seminar on Argentine film, plus two classes at the local film university, plus one extra class of our choice at a different university. On top of it, we have mandatory field trips relating to the Buenos Aires film scene, one of which is a sound studio, another which is a special effects studio, etc. We also get passes to the Buenos Aires International Film Festival in April. Yeah, it's gonna be the shit.

Last weekend, all the students were split up into two groups and flown to a beautiful mountain town called Bariloche for three days. It was so relaxing, and it was there that I really bonded with my group of friends and cemented some really important relationships in my life right now. I stayed with a hilarious gay guy named David, and during the day the group would go for hikes, swim in the lake, take tours of the area, etc. It was wonderful and relaxing but I was also kind of glad when it was over because it sucked to be hauled around like cattle everywhere, to be stuck in a bus for hours, and to wait to be fed every day. Regardless, my last day I had a wonderful moment at the lake by myself. I was skipping stones and thinking about how wonderful it is to be 20, because not only do we have so many opportunities before us, but it's as if we've been given new eyes to see them with, and (for me at least) life's reached an intensity and a beauty that's sometimes nearly unbearable. Fuck, I sound like that guy from American Beauty!

Anyways, this week was very low key because the shopping period for classes starts next week, meaning I'm going to be checking out literally 15 different classes in one week and deciding the one's I'll stay in. Ok, I'm gonna head out now. I have a date (more on this later if anything interesting happens).