Second Skin

I once again have a big collection of great pictures, but they're going on the Butterfly Paper this time, if you're interested.

Thursday went down pretty much exactly as planned... it was rainy and gross, and I spent my morning doing various errands and being lazy, then I waited for Katelyn and Jack outside their class and Jack was very prissy and made me walk him to the bus stop with my umbrella so he wouldn't mess up his hair and only then could I meet Katelyn for a quick lunch (and SAGA was the most crowded I have ever seen it and I have no idea why) before Yiddish. I like Yiddish class an awful lot. At some point, we were discussing something about God that must have been at least vaguely blasphemous (maybe in connection to the Kabbalah? I don't remember), and the phone rang, and we determined that we didn't have to answer it, and my amazing professor Rachel started laughing and said "I just keep thinking I'll pick it up and it'll be this voice 'This is God. Stop telling them these things.'" and we all laughed heartily. Also Yiddish literature is just really neat. It was somewhat less rainy after class, and I ran around doing a few more errands and running into people I know, then I grabbed Katelyn and took her to knitting circle, where she learned to knit and I ate chocolate cake. Also the knitting circle people gave us the leftover cider, which Katelyn and I vowed to heat up in my kettle later and drink during our homework party. We had dinner, and then I went off to my storytelling meeting. We've got some neat stories for the festival on Friday, and it's going to be great. We're doing audio recording, and I'll let you know if it gets put up somewhere that you can access it. Once we got all the storytelling details ironed out, I headed up to D4L, where the fabulous sign decorating was going on, and I took those pictures that I already posted. We left the signs to dry and Katelyn and Jack and I were good little children and went to read the first two chapters of the biography of the Roosevelts (Franklin and Eleanor), which is actually quite interesting cause the Roosevelts are very interesting peoplen who had affairs with other women all the time. We put the cider in my kettle and made it hot (somehow, cider takes FOREVER to heat up, unlike water for tea, and it makes boiling noises long before it is even lukewarm) and drank our cider and were happy people while reading, although the cider left residue on all the mugs and in the kettle and I had to do dishes (which I did, um, yesterday morning :s). Sometime after we finished reading and talking to each other and bothering each other, we went to bed, and then it was Friday.
We got to sleep in on Friday due to not having WWWII class cause Aaron's out of town, and so we went for breakfast-brunch-lunch together, and then it was time to hang our amazing fabulous gay signs. I took pictures, they're on the Butterfly Paper. We love our signs. I did have Sound Patterns Friday, and I am going to kill the next idiot in my class who can't understand that the phonetic alphabet isn't the alphabet we spell with and just cause "ai" looks like the letters in "rain" doesn't mean it's pronounced like "rain" cause "rain" is "ren" phonetically and "ai" is the sound in "bite" and God this is not hard rawr. But we'll be done with vowels soon and consonants won't be as tough for these people to understand, I hope, cause I really like this class and I hate when Mark gets stuck explaining the same thing over and over cause people won't catch on and ignore the completely non-phonetic English spelling (non-phonetic for a reason, mind you, but non-phonetic nonetheless). Also I like talking about the Great Vowel Shift because it sounds so cool. After class, I picked up my big giant giant packet of Yiddish readings which is more than 2 inches thick and we grabbed some dinner and wanted to go to the Holyoke Mall to buy pretty things to make Jack a pretty pretty drag queen. Unfortunately, the only bus that will get us from here to the Holyoke Mall runs between 9 am and 5 pm on weekdays only. Not so good for us. So we entertained ourselves by reading for WWWII like the responsible students we are, and somehow Katelyn and I ended up bugging Jack in his room until at least 2 in the morning, which is not that hard to do. I stumbled back across the hall, exhausted, and collapsed into my bed to sleep sweetly.
I slept until I heard the local high schools having some sort of cross-country event outside my window, and so I closed the window and slept again until someone started pounding on my door, and I hoped he would go away, but then Jack was beside my bed poking me and telling me I left my keys in the door the night before. I glared at him in his chipper, freshly made up and pretty state from my tangle of blankets and pillows and unwashed hair, and then he asked for breakfast and I told him I'd put pants on and join him and I did. We then found Katelyn and went looking for a bus to get us to Northhampton (since the Holyoke mall was impossible) and had issues reading the schedule right, but ended up with an hour to kill, which we spent getting Jack more food (he is always hungry) and we ran into Alex and he criticized my eating of apples and then took the core that I had left and ate it and I thought that was pretty weird and gross cause who eats apple cores? We did catch the bus into town, and promptly went off to the thrift store, where we found all sorts of amazing jewelry for Jack and Katelyn and I bought matching velvet jackets cause velvet clothing is God and we had fun in the thrift store. Then came our general other shopping purposes: Katelyn bought some yarn to knit her girlfriend a scarf, we wandered through the neat used music store place, we went to CVS to buy Jack a bunch of makeup (although the boy already owns way more than me and Katelyn and Sara combined), then to Haymarket for lunch (I had the most delicious tomato and mozzerella sammich mmmmm), then shoe shopping at various places and I got new shoes but Katelyn failed to find any. Caught the bus at Smith and there were some annoying Mt Holyoke girls on it and I am glad beyond glad that I go to a school with boys at it, because all-girls school girls are incredibly annoying. We played Mad Libs on the bus because we bought Mad Libs because Mad Libs are great. We got back 3 minutes after SAGA closed (they have the weirdest hours on weekends), so we ordered a pizza and truly intended to do more reading, but we bought all those new toys, and we had to play. We spent forever blasting Madonna and getting Jack all pretty (pictures on Butterfly Paper, except that I forgot to get a picture of the finished product, so you'll have to imagine) and Rance dropped by to do Jack's eye makeup and do a little dance to Madonna (I love that boy he is so funny) and, just as we finished, Jackson called and asked if we wanted to come over to his mod and watch the L Word. Feeling vaguely guilty that we keep turning down the people over in the queer mod when they want to hang out, we decided to make the trek last night, mostly so we could show Jack off. Jack can not walk like a girl. Or sit like a girl. Or be at all ladylike. I spent most of the night telling him what a terrible girl he is, and he mostly ignored me as is his way. We ended up choosing bad lesbian movie over the L Word, and Better Than Chocolate is a truly bad movie that we laughed at an awful lot amid the strange, slightly awkward conversations that always happen at the queer mod and that are the main reason we don't spend more time there (that and that it stinks in there cause they don't clean well or something). It was so amazingly foggy when we made the trek back across campus, and absolutely beautiful, and the night air was so exhilirating. Jack and Sara wanted to watch a movie, but Katelyn and I weren't in the mood, so we went for a long walk that turned into sitting on a bench having a long talk and it was really good for both of us, I think, so sit outside and discuss everything until Katelyn finally looked at her phone and we realized it was 2:23 in the morning, and decided that we wanted to go to bed. I went to collapse in my room, only to discover that I had taken my pillows to Jack's room earlier because he has only one tiny flat non-pillow and that I had failed to bring them back. Jack was still in Sara's room, but he was almost done, and he returned and made me retrieve everything belonging to me, not just my pillows, and then I slept soundly and happily for many hours.