"her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you"

after an exhilarating move-in weekend, i've finally started classes at university park. and i've found a greater confidence in doing so. the first class (english 456 at 9:45 am) got me off on the right foot: super excited ph. d student as professor, a great collection of texts, decent class size and setup. i'm excited about having smart peers to compete with and experienced superiors to look up to. my italian class looks like it's going to be hard -- taught in italian, apparently.. yikes!
i visited the stacks in paterno/pattee library.. egads. so many books and so little space. very claustrophobic, but still sort of fun. with shelves only ~2ft. apart forming tiny corridors of barely lit mustiness.. it was a lot like walking into a very authentic horror film location.
i'm pretty well settled into the dorm.. it's an adjustment. some of the design (like the bathrooms) is great.. other, unfortunately, not so great. the closets - not number one. the bed is nice and low, though, which means that, while i can't store much under it, i can easily make it and i don't have to take a running leap to get into it. my roommate seems nice as well. i haven't gotten to know her very well yet, but, aside from being a windows user (*shiver*), she seems like a decent person.
the desks here suck. little to no storage space and no place to stash my texts and notebooks.. a nice little place for a piratey picture of my baby.

we had some trouble over break. after our good friends announced their engagement (for which we are ridiculously happy), we had some tough discussions which, while working out now, made for a pretty miserable few days. we're slowly fixing the problems that caused our discontent and, while i'll be doing most of the problem-solving (i.e. not being aggravating anymore), i think it'll be an entirely positive thing. we'll both become more mature out of it and i think that can only be for the better.

i finally got to spend some time with caz whom i haven't substantially seen since senior year of high school. he's invited me to his d&d extravaganza and i'm pretty keen on having a pirating halfling. yesss! i've been spending a good amount of time with banana which is great because our friendship really suffered when we couldn't see eachother at school.. it's great that we can get together, with just a phone call, and have dinner and chat. we spent about four hours today just shooting the bull and chatting about comics and books and classes and ..everything. it was great.
i'm worried that i might too easily isolate myself.. i have a ton of homework for this semester and it'll be easy to just do it quietly in the library/dorm/dining hall while spending time with too few people. to help allay that fear, i have signed up for the anime and sci-fi clubs' listservs and will at least see some free movies and have some fun, geeky discussions. i'll be helping out with setsucon, too. that's the anime club's convention that sounds like it could either be enormous fun, an enormous disaster, or both. we'll see.
i'm tired and procrastinating on my already increasingly substantial homework (already!), so that's it for tonight.