you know you're in college when...

I realized that last night was the first night in a very long while that I had gone asleep in one day and woken up in an entirely new one. And that was because I went to bed at the "early" hour of 11:45.

Tonight was Placerita's "Turkey, Tarts and Testimonies" celebration. My friend Jared entered a pumpkin cheesecake in the men's bake-off in hopes that he might win the grand prize of a turkey. If he didn't, we weren't going to have a turkey at our Thanksgiving celebration. He won a Cornish Game Hen. Hardly enough meat for 5 people. Happily someone took pity on these college students whose best shot at a turkey is a pie baking contest...and a donated turkey now sits in my RD's fridge waiting for us to brave the mysteries of turkey cooking and carving.

I've just gotten the strangest feeling lately as I walk around campus...it's been longer than a year since all of this was new to me, and now it feels like normal life. And it's extremely weird to walk into the lounge of a dormitory and get that "home" feeling, or to find it normal to push yet another tray around the caf in order to get my next meal, or to walk up the hill for the third time in one day after a 10:15 pm meeting and mentally prepare myself for the rest of the evening's schedule. My roommate just looks at me as girls run screaming down the hall at midnight and asks, "When did this become normal?" I have no idea.

My thoughts of late have really been much deeper than all of this, but I don't know how to type them into this little box. Can I just say that I'm not at all the same person I was when I began this blog? I was reading it the other day...and I was struck by how much different I am. You can't tell as much just from what I wrote, but I remember the things running through my head, the things driving who I was back then...and those things are dramatically different now. But yet not as different as they ought to be.

I really ought to get back to researching the presentation that I must give at 11:45 tomorrow...