Smoothing Out

I'm finding its getting easier and easier to be here every week. Thursday night, this girl Tasha and I got to talking at the weekly ExEd pub night. She is living and working up in the Cities, since we only have classes two days a week, but decided to come down on Thursday night just to meet some people. I went out for the same reason. Her and Andy and I got to talking about ropes courses, and their functional applications and the changes going on in the industry. It was fabulous. Anyway, long story short, Tasha is now my Monday night roommate, so she doesn't have to drive back and forth to the cities every week between classes. And I really enjoy having the company.

This week we were walking out to our cars after Philosophies with Scott on Monday night and she said, "So, your sure that we've never met before? I think we must have been really good friends in a former life, or something." I concur. We stayed up way too late that night, knitting and talking, which made me cronicly tired when Tuesday rolled around, but I really needed the girl time.

Classes are amazing. Truely Amazing. I leave every class thinking to myself, "I have got to remember to share that with my students whenever I start teaching". With the 3 hour seminars we can really dig into the material and we can pull some amazing stuff out of it. Take Jasper's class for example. He usually has us reading something really heady and intense for class. (Like next week, we need to have read The Prince by Machiavelli.) Then he'll spend the first hour giving a lecture on what the hell the philosopher is talking about, and drawing attention to what makes it relevant. Then he breaks us into groups and we go somewhere on campus for an hour and talk about it, and the last hour we come back and as a whole community draw the learning out of the material. And for his class we are reading everything from Plato to Into Thin Air. So fantastic.

And Devon called today, which was stellar, as did Eric, and Bridget, and Matt. It was so good to hear their voices. It's nice to be meeting people here and getting involved in a new community, but the people here don't really know me. I was talking about this with Devon when she was catching me up on what everyone was doing in MA. I realized how out of the loop I was with alot of people. I'll be honest, I'm kinda disappointed. There were so many good friends of mine that said not to worry about moving to MN, that being far away wouldn't change our friendship, that we'd still be close. But I've been here for a month and some of them still haven't picked up the phone or returned an email or anything. It's hard missing people you love and care about so much and being confronted with the possibility that their life isn't any different without you there. That they don't notice something missing from their life, when you notice so much missing from yours. I don't mean that to sound self depricating, but it's honest.