I'm in Cambridge, I'm settled in my dorm room, I have a fridge. The day after tomorrow I start classes.

Having no computer of my own yet is turning out to be fairly inconvenient. (I keep waffling between a PC or a Mac and I really must decide soon.) After being woken up from my nap this afternoon (prompted by too little sleep last night, since there was an impromptu hall party going on immediately outside -- and I mean immediately -- my door) by Uncle John and the Tacoma Crowd, I walked down the hall, intending to take a walk outside to clear my head. Most of the doors in my hall were closed, except for two, in which the respective residents were sitting at their desks, tapping at their computers. Working? Possibly -- I put in a couple hours yesterday myself on the copious amount of reading for Tuesday -- but possibly also doing email or talking to friends.

Most of the people in the dorms are young, as is most of the class -- I heard the average age is 24, which, puts me definitively in the "oldster" category. I've actually only met two people older than me, but I've met a whole bunch of people from the class of 2000. The HIGH SCHOOL class of 2000, that is.

So far no one seems really scary, except maybe for the Rhodes scholar who happened to belly dance in London for spare change during her scholarship (and that's admittedly cool, just kinda intimidatingly cool). The class of 550 is divided into 7 sections, which are again divided into several subsections. If my subsection's representative at all, the class of 2007 is pretty normal folk, from quite diverse backgrounds, and with only a few bright shiny superstars.

I walked outside tonight through Cambridge and was struck by how empty it was compared to Seoul, where people are out until all hours. The brick-lined streets are quiet and empty here, except for the lively Square, where I stopped to listen to a folk singer on the street (one of three I saw playing). She was singing about love and sounded like a smoother, softer version of Natalie Merchant, and I thought, if this were a movie, that would be the soundtrack song playing as the heroine wanders through the streets of her new home, a little wistful and homesick, wondering what the coming year will bring.

I'm not sure what song would have been playing last night, when I went to meet ABD in Boston, to meet his friends and see a movie. The T is undergoing some renovations and closed a stop (perfectly incredible -- can't imagine another city that would do it this way), which meant that passengers had to get out at one stop and be shuttled to the next. With that and the general slowness of the T (also perfectly incredible), I was late to meet ABD, and even called to say I was giving up on going, but ABD insisted I come out and he would wait for me.

Well, somewhere along the way, on the Green Line, I was thinking about how law school was going to suck, and how I felt I really didn't belong there, and I starting thinking of where I would go if I dropped out (hypothetically) on Tuesday. I could stay in Boston, find a job. Or maybe it would be better to flee, go home, recoup. And then it struck me -- there ain't no home to go to. The recent family drama in Tacoma really shook my faith in my folks there, and I lost something pretty valuable in all that -- the belief that I had a place to go, no matter what.

So with this and the nonstop meeting of people in the past two days and the lack of sleep lately and the feeling that I don't belong here, I got off the train and found ABD waiting, and followed him into the building, and then suddenly I knew, I just knew that if I met one more new person and had to make nice and charming one more time, I'd scream. So instead, I burst into tears.

Yay, the first week of law school!

We skipped the movie, ABD making lord knows what excuse for me, and went to a pho place in Chinatown, a skeezy part of town, and talked for a while until I felt calmer. ABD drove me home, with the new fridge he'd procured for me, and three bags of groceries, and... there was a hall party going on, participants of which paused briefly to stare at me as I dragged the three bags of groceries and a boxed fridge into my room. Yes, I went grocery shopping on a Saturday night, girls and boys. What can I say? I'm old and it was fun.

My room is unfortunately facing the common area of the floor, so of course I couldn't go to sleep for a while. I assembled the fridge, stocked it, read the New Yorker, and finally went to bed around 2 am. The sun woke me up at 8:30 this morning. But despite the short sleep, I felt a lot better.

Boy, this is turning out to be a really long entry. I was really just going to write about my walk tonight outside in the cool (and I do mean cool -- people are wearing fleece sweatshirts already) Cambridge air, but I forgot all the profound things I thought about during my walk, so I had to write all this blather instead. Okay, enough.