Orientation Day 01/10/08

Orientation day!


synopsis of my unofficial first day on campus is as follows:

i arrived promptly and well caffienated at 8 a.m. to a room filled with Einstiens Brothers bagels, boxes of delicious coffee and my competition...er.. i mean classmates.

they took my picture for my ID. what i want to know is why and how one giant pimple knows its an important picture day and schedules its arrival for the morning of the said important photo?
atleast my hair looked good.

we had a half hour "break" where they let all the other students come in to meet us. so at that point it was a half caffinated "meet and greet" type thing and according to my new friend whatshisname from Toronto, this happens monthly. so i should prepare to do this with every new class that rolls in. atleast there's free food.

the staff at GIA called this "networking"

Lots of foreigners. lots. i'd say 1/3 of the people there today were from other countries. I caught India, China, Japan and Canada.

OH, and one guy from Alabama.

I was having a nice chat with a young woman in my class that i suspected to be about 23 or so based on how well she carried herself and her conversation. turns out she's not only 16 years old, but graduated early from high school on some expedited genius program or something. she was born in 1991. *bangs head on table*. maybe i should introduce her to my nephew.

the good news is she asked me my age before all of this conversing happened and she thought i was 24 or 25 (bless her heart). she finally believed me when i showed her my sweet ass grey streak and told her i was 6 years away from my 20 year reunion.

i got a cute little parking permit for my car and on my way to install it i almost got run over by one of the backstreet boys driving a large Denali at 330 mph through the parking lot. this was ten minutes after the security guys gave a speech about driving 5 mph in the lot to avoid hurting anyone.

asshole.

theres a cafe that not only serves food, but i spied a very shiny espresso machine that may possibly become my lifeline the next 6 months. i think its good to identify your life rafts immediately when in a new environment.

the bathrooms are very ambient. low lighting. clean. sorta swanky and comfy all at once. not that i plan on hanging out in there.

i suspect that the lights are low to provide a soothing environment for which to decompress and cry in .

Overall today was cool. I sized up my class in 5 minutes . The one person i found intriguing was the woman in the wheelchair with lots of irish tattoos, a backpack with lots of military patches and a full rack of ribbons on it, dogtags around her neck and a southern accent. and awesome custom black chuck taylors and more holes in her ears then me. I'd like to know her story. she's in my class, so i'm looking forward to that process. i love meeting new people.


Day one is Monday!
I'm sure that i'll be blogging here and there about my progress. stay tuned!