Arrival

Well I finally made it out to Ohio. I left Provo on Wednesday night after Andrew's reception having said my final goodbyes to friends, only to come back on Thursday having to do it all over again. See, my flight was cancelled. That's right. After sitting in the airport for hours (long enough for my dad, who dropped me off there, to go back to Sandy, pick up the family, ride around Salt Lake City, come back to the airport, check in, clear security, find and make fun of me, and leave on his own flight), they gave us the news that we were going nowhere that day on account of a big storm in Chicago.

So I caught a ride back to Provo (thanks A and K) to spend one more glorious night under the watchful gaze of the Y. How embarassing. We ended up playing Hearts on Matt Dinger's porch. I came in second.

So today I spent my second full day in airports, this time going through Dallas, eating bagels and fast food for more than it was worth, trying to catch up on lost sleep without missing crucial gate-change announcements or drooling on anyone nearby. Joey picked me up in Columbus and drove me back to Athens where I got my first glimpse of the campus in the failing light and found my new house high on a hill north of the university. It's a big place with wooden floors and high ceilings, but the law limits the number of unrelated inhabitants to three (though I think we've got four booked for the year).

Right now the house is occupied by the summer residents, nice college sophomores with long hair and a large collection of video games and beer. It feels like your typical college house: a cluttered, ragged box of walls furnished with mixed'n'matched furniture and patchwork decorations. The garbage strewn about the rooms is akin to the homework the guys had last semester—they had always meant to do something about it, but before they knew it finals had come and gone and it is time to move out. It reminds me of a missionary house in that it has so much more potential than it can grasp; the residents are so busy with the business of living—for missionaries it was the urgency of proselytizing, for students it seems to be the urgency of cramming as many cigarette butts into this or that empty bottle as possible—that they fail to do the simplest upkeeps that make a house livable. Is it just me and my chemical heritage that sees a house like this and dreams of spring cleaning? I'm not complaining. I see this kind of house as a project, just as I saw the house in Seodaemun or in Monticello. I wonder if my new roommates (grad students like me, arriving in the next couple of days) will share my love of a clean, organized house.

We'll see. In the meantime I need to furnish my 14'x14' square of a room. It came with a dresser and a desk but nothing else. Two closets though.