(In which the horrible hiatus halts!)

You may be wondering, at this point, where in the world I have been. I wish I could say something cool like "Budapest," but I think we'll have to save that one for next year. I've been right here in Northfield- which, don't get me wrong, is almost as cool as Budapest.

...Now you're probably wondering what I've been doing that has prevented me from posting for the past few weeks. Again, I wish I could say something cool like "building a scale model of the Colossus at Rhodes to put on the Bald Spot," but, alas, that is not what I have been doing. Perhaps we can save that as an idea for next year too.

What I have been doing, boringly enough, is getting sick, getting better, and then catching up on the insane amounts of work I didn't do when I was sick.

Actually, getting sick was kind of exciting for a little while, because I got quarantined for a couple of days due to the H1N1 scare. I guess it wasn't technically quarantine, since "quarantine" comes from an Italian word meaning "forty day period," and I certainly wasn't stuck in my room for forty days.  But I got to pretend that I had the plague, and I got used to ordering food from Erbert's and Gerbert's.

Northfield has two sub sandwich shops worth mentioning. The first is Hogan Brothers, which serves (1) great soup and (2) great sub sandwiches that automatically come with soggy yellow peppers unless you request that they not include the peppers. The second is Erbert and Gerbert's, a small chain restaurant whose sandwiches, apparently, all represent characters in a bizarre and incomprehensible story involving time travel, talking crustaceans, and, notably, sentient comets with superpowers.  I am not making this up.  My personal favorite sandwich is the "Narmer," a turkey sandwich which represents the Egyptian pharaoh Narmer, who is involved in one of the time travel stories somehow.

Anyway, while I was quarantined (two-days-antined?), I had Erb's and Gerb's deliver me a Narmer sandwich no less than three times. They deliver right to your dorm. It is wonderful.

What wasn't wonderful was, as previously mentioned, the sheer amount of homework awaiting me when I recovered.

I had three essays due earlier today.  Yesterday, after working on my essays for a little while, I decided I needed to do some math, so I went to Sayles and ate some egg rolls and did math.

While that was going on, the post-Ebony Sayles Dance started up. In case you've forgotten previous descriptions of Sayles Dances, they involve very loud music and flashing lights and lots of dancing people. I thought to myself, "I could leave now so I don't get distracted- or I could stay right here and do Real Analysis to the beat of epically loud music."  I went with the latter. And then a million people arrived and packed the ground floor of Sayles, and I, ensconced at a table in Upper Sayles, was pretty much sealed in by the sheer amount of dancing people, and there was really no choice but to go ahead and work through the whole problem set there.

After a while, people coming up the stairs started talking to me. The first such conversation happened in the middle of a deafening rendition of Lady Gaga's hit song "Poker Face." It went like this:

 Then he went back to the dance.  There were many other short conversations like that, mostly consisting of "Why in the world are you trying to work in here?" or "Is that Real Analysis? Cool!" or "Hi, Collin!" or "Can you put me in your blog?"

 (Yes, Alex Chin, I can put you in my blog! Also, your method of removing part of a banana's peel, spreading peanut butter over where the peel used to be, and then eating out of the banana like a dish is pretty cool.)

That was the story! The End!

(Also, on an unrelated note, while reading a French-English dictionary, I accidentally read  "suppose: ry..." as "supposery", which isn't a real word but which I really think should be. It would denote a bunch of unfounded conjectures. Then you could dismiss your opponents' arguments by saying "That's all just guesswork and supposery." I am really sleepy. Goodnight!)