Or someone damn Ohio.

Or maybe I should tear myself away from the Bio book and go shower.

The scent is entirely secondhand, mind you. And I don't really want the place condemned. Loads of interesting people there, actually. So long as I don't think of the first real night night there when I wore my Verlaine shirt, cancan skirt, and Mao's red fishnets, and proceeded to shoot my mouth off.

With a metaphorical flare gun, methinks (I finally saw The Breakfast Club).

And after that things got uneasyish and I made the mistake of trying to sort them out, and then everything pretty much went to hell before I could stop sorting and make amends.

So. Back in my usual sweaters and jeans, doing a lot of reading (both in the room she was seldom in and in the library nook I grew very attached to), Mao avoiding me, me badgering Mao, rumors flying all over within the small campus's artistically grafittied walls, me giving myself a haircut when I was too nervous to concentrate on anything else (it ends a few inches below my shoulders now, except one piece in the front that I can barely tuck behind my ear--and this, children, is why we don't pick up scissors when our hands are numb). I came to know some people by name or sight in my short time there, and apparently they knew me, or at least well enough to ask "what happened." Funny, who those were, and me getting a ride to the airport with Mao's evil former roommate and her boyfriend.

Though I learned there was no reason to stay shadowed, blocking myself from everything else because I'd managed to lose my hostess, in a sense. "It's not just about her," Hannah said, after we finished laughing over childish things. "It's this place."

She loves it, like so many others; Hannah, that is. We talked over cookie dough, along with Swahili-speaking Amanda who taught English in Kenya before a tribal war forced her to leave early. Good to love a place, 'specially if you plan to stay there a spell. Me, I liked it well enough. The diversity, the ceilings, the creativity, yes, but not the redundancy and the backsliding and the smoke that was irritating even when it spilled from Hannah's mouth in dusky hoops while we jabbered about the Care Bears in Wonderland.

Round the fireplace, though (or at least around the Nintendo), on my last night there, after Mao had moved into her new room, that was lovely, how the cookie-baking and comparisons and idle idleness went. And how Hannah, who had crinkly hair like sand and ginger and no visible piercings and who reminded me a tiny bit of Crow and Saint Bride said, "You should transfer here." And when I admitted that, interesting as the place was, I couldn't see myself attending, "You have to come back."

And odd, how I seemed to know her and a couple others better than anyone I've met on my own campus, even Kitty and Caliban and Ladybird in my stagecraft class. Perks of small-small schools; everyone knows everyone. But then, everyone also knows everything, which makes for some remarkably puerile situations. Too much diplomacy and someone ends up with the flare gun, and so on.

Amazingly, it did work out. It might have been more the place itself than it was me, but being semi-social went pretty well, in spite of the rift with mine hostess.

That's another matter altogether, kids, and one that should never have come up (not that I was thinking ahead when I brought it up).

But academically, I do know for sure that I have to tell the parental units what I'd like to do. Campus is beautiful and classes are great, but being homogenous kills so much. I don't want to wait around for it to grow on me when there are so many other things straining to sprout if only I'd water them.

Aye, I'm talking funny. Blame it on my hair.

Adieu.