Notes from the Homefront

Hello hello! I am still in Jamestown and as some of you have noticed, have not been blogging, partly because I have been having too much fun to be on the computer, and partly because nothing outrageous has really happened. So, updates: my favorite coffeeshop closed (rip Timothy's, and your beautiful kona mochas.) Wegmans is awesome, awesome, awesome, and its wireless internet is useful when turning in ones grad school apps. The library is being renovated, so I have been forced to read things in my room that I bought years ago, and have never read. One of my best friends got engaged (YAY M! YAY S!!). My cat has taken to sitting in my bathtub and drinking out of the faucet, and when you pet him, his back is all wet. He also, apparently, has a usual seat at the dining room table. We have feet of snow. This week I have been to see two movies in the THEATER (this is big for me): Avatar (beautiful, a lot of explosions, iffy plot, fun) and Sherlock Holmes (too much slow-motion punching, good good casting, excellently realized London, fun plot) and two movie classics: A Lion in Winter (Katherine Hepburn for queen of the Universe!) and Carousel (arguably the worst movie I have ever seen. And I like musicals. Rodgers and Hammerstein get a big ol' FAIL on this one..plus there is a ton of unaddressed sexism, and it annoyed me.)

I did take a roadtrip to Framingham, MA for a friend's 21st birthday, which meant that I got to stop in Geneva, and then roadtrip with the author of this guest blog, and pick up another in Amsterdam, and then on we went to MA. We surprised our friend, very spectacularly, and got to spend a little time with her before she goes to Senegal next semester. This whole trip involved 5 buses for me, and roughly 3 days in the car, but as it was with (and to see) some of my favorite people, it was WELL worth it. The main excitement (and with me, there is usually some travel excitement) came on the return trip, which happened to be on New Years Eve. I caught the bus in Syracuse, to Buffalo, where I would have to get another bus down here. We stopped in Rochester, and were searched by border patrol. This happened again while I was sitting in the Buffalo bus station, too. I don't know if this was increased border security for New Years, or what, but the oddest part was that they ask you your citizenship, and if you say, "American," they don't even check your license. I was talking to my dad about this and we agreed that if anyone should be checked for hijacking a bus, it is more likely going to be me than the group of Japanese tourists, or the Pakistani couple with children (all of whom, incidentally, I watched get questioned, and have the passports extensively examined.) Whereas I am young, unpartnered, solo, and wielding knitting needles. And I am betting that if I had been non-white, and said my citizenship was American, they might have insisted on seeing proof. It makes you think, doesn't it?

Anyway, I got to spend two hours in the Buffalo bus station on New Years Eve, which was a hot mess, to say the least. And then when I got on the bus to Jamestown at 9:30, we had to stop...twice...because a guy threatened the bus driver. He was either drunk or mentally ill, and if he had done something again they were going to pull over and wait for the police. When we got into town he was sound asleep. I made it home with 10 minutes to spare before the New Year rolled in, so I wolfed a plate of food, had a glass of champaigne, and went to bed.

Happy, happy 2010 to all of you. Regularly scheduled programming resumes next week, when I return to Brooklyn. And thanks for reading. I'm still having fun.