14:19 - January 12, 2003
here pt. II
I stepped off the plane into this complete void of oxygen. I gasped, I grinned, I put down my suitcase in the center of the hall and breathed. And then I found the shuttle, stuffed with lackluster CU students, bought a ticket, and spent the whole lefthanded ride home trying to figure out which portion of the mountain range was MINE, like it belonged to ME. Usually I was too far away to discern the ranges from one another, and even when I got close enough to do that I was wrong about them. The Flatirons didn't come into view until, out of the other side of my eye, I also saw a big green sign: BOULDER, elevation 5368. That makes me pathetic as a geographer, but I can live with that.

Even though classes start tomorrow, nobody else is here yet except Nick's roommate Steve, who is exactly as I left him rushing out the door Wednesday morning: playing the XBox or whatever it is he has, some secret agent game where you creep around a building in the dark and strangle people, then carry them into empty rooms and dump their bodies. As soon as the elevator stopped on the fifth floor I could hear him yelling. Nothing has changed.

I still don't have a roommate (::shrieks madly with glee::, as I did about an hour ago), and the two Japanese boys on our floor are gone. They have been replaced with people I don't know but for the names on the door. My laundry detergent is missing, but everything else is exactly how I left it other than the fact that the floor has been vacuumed (what? what? did this happen on its OWN?) and I have eighty thousand package slips that I can't pick up because the package center is CLOSED.

This semester will be better. Really.

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