a productive day (complete with ice cream and jedi)

I was productive today. On a Friday. Something is clearly amiss.
I went to Coffee Bean in the morning, and wrote half my paper and outlined the other half, while enjoying a terribly delicious breakfast of a chai latte and a croissant. The fact that Coffee Bean has no internet is simultaneously extremely frustrating and extremely helpful to my productivity. I think that's why I keep going back. That and the chai. So good.
When I got back to the dorms, I started to watch some tv online, read some blogs, then realized I really had nothing better to do than to finish my paper. So I did.
I ended up downstairs in the courtyard, which was good, because it meant I got to hang out with friends all afternoon and evening and night, with pretty much all of us being productive, sort of.
I say sort of because I was already done with my essay, so I was just reading a book I bought at the campus book fair a few days ago. Oh, Dean Koontz. No other author rivals your ability to write thoroughly engrossing terrible books. This one was about a dog of alarming intelligence, a phrase which I took it upon myself to say as often as I could throughout the day. 'What's your book about?' people asked. 'Oh, not much. Just a dog of alarming intelligence,' I replied.
The best part of the silly book was the setting: Southern California from Orange County to Santa Barbara. Pretty sweet. My favorite bit was when I caught Dean Koontz out in an obvious lack of research: when the evil monster slaughtered a police officer in the hills behind Yorba Linda, he had the 'Yorba Linda Police' go to investigate. Silly Dean Koontz. We don't have our own police force, we just borrow Brea's!
We vacillated about ordering in or eating out, then failed terribly to come to a consensus and ended up eating at the cafeteria. A while after dinner, one friend pointed out that it was now 'time for dessert!' so we headed out with cupcakes in mind. The cupcake store was completely empty of anything but ginger cookies, so we went to the grocery store for ice cream bars, which turned out to be really melty and gross. So we headed over to Mandarine for good ice cream, which was delicious. I had caramel&hazelnut, and the other two had lemon&strawberrylemon and hazelnut&darkchocolatewithweirdpossiblypeachsaucewethinkmaybe.
Then we went back to the dorms and sat in the courtyard freezing until one by one we finished all the work that was going to get done tonight and headed upstairs.
[One friend, I have to mention, was writing an Arabic essay all day, very diligently. Her topic? A summary and explanation of Star Wars. She had all the vocabulary she needed from her media Arabic class: rebel, explosion, alliance, empire. How perfect. The main problem, which we kept cracking up over, seemed to be how to correctly put 'Jedi' into the dual form. Jedi-iin?]

falafel-rofl

A title which has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of this post. Moving on.
Today I took a slightly later bus, and got to campus just in time for the rare books library to open. Then I spent a few hours doing really really fun research. I'm not even kidding. I found this German book that has an amazing catalog of tons and tons of statues in the Egyptian Museum. The only problem is, it's in German. But that is really just an extra obstacle. I can read enough German to figure out whether something is a limestone statue of a husband and wife or not. I think.
Then it was time for class to start, and I went to Dramatic Lit, where the professor cunningly steered all discussion away from the more controversial topics of Streetcar, and we mostly talked about the boring character of Mitch.
After lunch I tried to go to my Egyptian Lit class, but the professor just didn't show up. So that was a complete and total waste of my time. When it was finally apparent that the professor just wasn't going to show up, I went with a friend to the campus book fair, where I bought two books that I didn't need, and have no idea what I will do with when I need to move. Oh well. They should be entertaining for a while, at least.
The bus ride home seemed longer than usual, but I met a nice girl from Kenya who is studying at AUC who I sat next to.
The rest of the night was fairly uneventful, except for a brief half hour period where I looked up and memorized a Japanese tongue twister to upload onto youtube for a project Hank Green is doing. I hardly ever participate in stuff like that, so I'm really glad I did today.