Ok, so I've been doing volunteer work at the Brandywine Zoo for the past couple weeks, and never really got a chance to wind down before my family and I rushed off to Poughkeepsie to look at Vassar. Yep, I'm sure most of you all remember the great college search during your teenage years. Well Vassar was amazing, but we were only there for a few hours before we peeled off down the New Jersey Turnpike.
Since the trip to Vassar from northern Delaware is a little under two hours, I had a decent amount of time to think about all kinds of stuff. I am still chuckling from the last day of camp, when one of my ten year-old students came up and told me that he was going to buy an island in the South Pacific when he grew up, and that I could come chill at his place. That wasn't the funny part. The funny part was when this ten year-old kid told me that I just needed to bring my girl and he would "supply all the Trojans and Champagne" that I needed. That was a riot. Those kids just cracked me up. Well, most of them did. There was this one little puke who thought it was funny to punch me in the balls. But he got kicked out of camp, and told never to return, so it's all good.
Anyway, so I came home, and I tried to relax from these hectic weeks and roadtrips by playing some Grand Turismo 3. There is nothing relaxing about that game. It acually made me more stressed and frustrated. Every time that Lupo Cup car beat me by a second or two, it added insult to injury. After twenty minutes, I had more or less decided that the driver of that car and I were mortal enemies. When he beat me for about the fifteenth time, I honestly think I was speaking in tongues. I don't recall exactly what I said, although between the sporadic bursts of profanity, I believe I mentioned something about burning his village. Maybe I should stop reading my AP European History book about Alaric and his tribes of Huns, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and freed Roman slaves sacking Rome in August of 410. The point is, I can't figure out why I am enjoying that game so much despite all the grief and restlessness it causes me.
Also, I noticed something odd on the way back from Vassar. After returning from my trip to Haverford (which I also adore), there was a car on the shoulder of the road, with four-foot flames billowing out from under the hood. When I returned from Vassar, there was another car with an even bigger fire coming from under its hood. Those are the only two colleges that I have completely fallen for at this juncture. The colleges that I did not like didn't like didn;t have flaming cars on the way home. I'm not saying that there is a connection bewtween these events, I know that there is not one. However, it is something interesting to think about, especially when you consider that I had never once seen a car on fire before, and now I've seen two inside of three weeks.
And now for something completely different: Some of the hallways in Vassar are abnormally wide. The tour guides explained that this was because back when Vassar was founded as an all-girls' school, it was widely believed that studying too much retained large amounts of blood in the brain, which in turn made young women infertile. So the headmaster made the girls run laps through the hallways to increase circulation in their bodies and keep them healthy and fertile. The hallways had to be wide enough for two girls wearing hoop-skirts to pass each other.