[Part 3; I don't like long posts] The next day, I woke up appallingly early to cover an ambiguously newsworthy event near Old City. I took the subway and located the appropriate elementary school all by myself (and Mapquest). Afterwards, I befriended the photographer so that she would help me home; she ended up imparting wisdom about academic and social life at Penn (she was a graduating senior). Then, I got a bagel and cream cheese from ABP - which never happens, because they stop serving at 10:00 AM - and slept until my cell phone rang. It was Joyce, an RM student (and friend of Seth and LiJia's) who was accepted into Penn Regular Decision. She was on campus for the day, so I immediately threw together a jean skirt outfit and led her around my favorite parts of campus.


She was not impressed with the Student Union (wood paneling and armchairs and working fireplaces!) or my bookstore. There's a secondhand bookstore around 40th, which I suppose ought to be cooler, but I find it kind of shabby and depressing. I suppose I should probably explain about the bookstore: First, it's the store that most Penn humanities professors use to order textbooks, so the back shelves are endlessly interesting in terms of their sheer volume of potential knowledge. Also, it's a relatively small store, so there isn't a great deal of breadth in the fiction section - but the stock choices are all dead-on. I find the Penn Bookstore (a vast Barnes & Noble) really overwhelming; I never find anything there unless I go in with clear intentions, and even then only sometimes. However, I can't go into the independent bookstore without finding three things I want badly. Joyce did like the on-campus bubble tea place and Penn in general, and it was nice to meet her.


At 2:00 PM, I took her to Adultery class, where I worried too much that it wouldn't seem like a Real Class. We did have actual discussions about actual books during the semester. That day, though, we discussed the "epistolary novel" we'd written as a class online. I did my novel postings at about 4:30 AM each time, so that I'd be sleepy enough to be shameless and uninvested in my writing; I think everyone treated the assignment that way. Our prof called the result, "Les Liaisons meets Melrose Place," and then he assigned us a group film project for Wednesday, adapting "the novel" to "the screen" (both terms used in the loosest possible sense). The rest of class was sitting outside, where [a girl] in my group chatted with Jon about how much she was enjoying To the Lighthouse (I was pleased), and then narrated about how she tried to steal Unbearable Lightness from the bookstore and was asked never to return (I was aghast).


Anyway, nothing noteworthy happened on Tuesday, but Wednesday (filming) was a lot of fun. My group filmed the end of the novel, including: a death in childbirth!, boating accident/murder?!, wedding! & wrongful imprisonment!, and love scene (sort of)! Because life hates me, my role involved standing in front of a mirror, wearing a bowler hat, and being instructed to strip. However, the joint birth/death scene was virtuosic; a girl "gave birth" to somebody's pink backpack from under a blue sheet, and her grief-stricken friend adopted the backpack. The boat scene was our other triumph. Jon had provided a toy boat, and Dana wadded some paper inside it and tried to set it on fire, on-camera. That didn't work, so instead her Hand of God reaches into the shot and tips the boat over, with a self-produced exploding sound (oh, also, jail was a bike rack). Our class is planning to meet on Monday for pizza and a screening of these ridiculous things.

On Thursday, I turned in my final paper in Poetry class, bought a birthday present for my sister, and then spent about ten hours at DP. I've been copy-assisting lately, and last night was a particularly good night for it, since Thursday is Beer Night. I walked around the newsroom with my Sam Adams beer, feeling oh-so-slick (I think it was the first time I'd possessed a beer bottle), and Laura (an editor) said, "Oh, that's adorable, it's as big as you are."

I sat down between Laura and Garrett (the other editor) and said, "I've never finished a whole one before." Apparently that was a ridiculous thing to say, because the quote was immediately written up on the News Office quoteboard (grin).

Afterwards, I wandered over to the Editorial Office, where the Ed Page editor, Eliot, was playing with his guitar. To the tune of "Brick," he began to sing, "10 PM, Sharon is copy-assisting...."

I said, "That's just like abortion." Which was immediately written up on the Editorial Office quoteboard.

I decided to quit while I was ahead and actually get something done. At about midnight, though, Garrett came by and asked if I wanted anything from Ben & Jerry's. I already had a bag of Sour Patch Kids, and my half-finished beer. I obviously needed cookies and cream ice cream as well.

"I really like the combination of alcohol and candy or ice cream," I told Danielle (the copy editor).

"You'll fit in great here," she replied.

At 1:00 AM, she and I took a break to go up to the roof of the DP office, ostensibly to look for the Executive Editor. It was such a nice night; we reoriented and found Freshgrocer to our right, and discovered that there were beautiful old houses - a whole network of residential streets, with little courtyards and ivy on the buildings - to our left. I never would have guessed those things existed in the shadow of the hulking, windowless DP. I finally went home at about 1:30 or 2:00. I had finished copy-editing a while before, but I wasn't allowed to leave until I completed my First Beer. I surreptitiously poured some of it in the bathroom sink.

EDIT: Candy for all who read this far (as suggested by Tara)!