Remember, Remember the 5th of November

Remember, Remember the 5th of November

Fun-powder, Sisters and Stuff

Last time I wrote my sister had just arrived from London for a visit - with her came more Cadburys than I ever hoped, a lot of lovely tea and some wonderful gifts from home. It's been a while now - I should have written about it all sooner but life is so busy and when she was here there was so little time to put anything up. We did do some unforgettable things though - we met Whitney from the Vintage Store, branched out into Carrboro, crashed a wedding party in Topo, danced all night with some very lovely Marines, got shwasted with Maggie, joined the Pritchard girls in the Coffee Shop for $3 LITs and then accidentally ending up in a drag show. 

We also went shopping, spent far too much money, ate the biggest cheesecakes of our lives, forgot where we left half of the holiday dollars and met up with the wonderful Martin's who were there to see Luke and Russell. 

It was great fun - even though she missed out on Halloween and Alex's Birthday and the Homecoming Game. 

There are some crazy things that you don't realise when you're away from home - how people change, how you change, how they change, how having something familiar illuminates certain things that you hadn't noticed or had tried not to notice. So Vicky being here was great - it was brilliant because she was in awe with UNC in a way that I suppose all exchange students grow out of when they go through Stage Two of Culture Shock.  We start to compare, contrast, critique - we miss home and our friends and the familiar places that we didn't appreciate enough before we left them. I was frustrated by her being here because she reminded me of all those things that I miss. I owe her so much for coming because she reminded me that there are so many exciting and different things to explore here.

Initiation - I'm a DELTA internet. I'm officially initiated. And it wasn't THAT weird. Ok yes it was. But other than being told to wear nude underwear really it wasn't as strange as could be expected. Although.... thinking about strange...

Halloween - As some of you fellow beasties probably know - the King of the Ghouls (AKA Alex Woods) turned a terrifying twenty-two on the scariest day of the year. In honour of that most horrifying occasion we called all of his ghoulish friends by blood and bone and storm and crow to the Den of Horrors where the witches of Pritchard and the banshees of Britain had some spooktacular surprises brewing in their cauldrons. We arrived  carved memories into the chamber of doom, gathered a great many demonic friends and completely destroyed the Pritchard House. 

It was so different to anything we have back home. After drinking a bucket load of Zombie Gut Punch/Witches Brew (Vodka, Triple Sec, Black Cherry Liqueur, Blood Orange and Orange and Grenedine) - we headed out onto Franklin which had turned into Freaklin Street for the evening. It was full of some of the creepiest kids in town (or.... every student in Chapel Hill). 

It really was like in the movies where Halloween is a crazily big. It was also hilarious. I was a Dexter victim, happily wrapped up in nearly a whole roll of cling-film; The King of the Ghouls was a Chav decked out in Burberry; John and Andrea were married, siamese hick twins, Keiver was a redneck, wee Jessie was Snow White, Mary-Ellis was an giant blow-up M&M that was vaguely reminiscent of Violet Beauregarde albeit green, the Pritchard ladies were five of the Seven Deadly Sins and Fiona was a Roman Empress.

Strangely enough though in the state of North Carolina it is illegal to  buy or sell fireworks so my favourite day of the year - and the one that I suppose we Brits usually celebrate more - November 5th didn't happen. There were no Guy Fawkes' on bonfires, no fireworks, no climbing up Arthur's Seat to see the bursts of colour drift over the city... So where Halloween was good different, Bonfire Night was sad different - I'll have to make up for it at New Years. 

But I figure that there's no point in lamenting the differences now. Even though I miss my person and the shmoo and the Trinity and stuff, they're not here and they're not going to be for a while but it's five weeks until Christmas and then I'll be home and we can catch up and whatever - it's not that far away and why should I be down when the sun is so bright and the sky so blue and the leaves have turned the trees into yellow and red candles. I love the leaves here - they're crunchy and thick on the ground not mushy and wet and they're bright on the trees, not blown off in a gale. I've taken a load of photos of them. I really want to throw bunches of them into the air and take more but I want people in my photos not just leaves. 

I found yellow leaves in my boots yesterday, they'd slid inside when I'd been kicking them around in the arboretum (please note that I've learnt to spell that word). I'd been frolicking in them all the way from ADPi to class. 

AH! I have to remember to write down my perfect day!! I had a perfecccctttt day the other day. It started in the early am - you know those moments when you're falling asleep and the most profound thoughts slip and slide around in your unconscious mind but suddenly, like the back of sea-turtle, they poke up into your consciousness - just as you're about to sleep. Irksome because you usually forget them right?? Well I suddenly had this epiphany about the French Connection 2010 campaign - This is the man. This is the woman. - you remember it from the front of the Oxford Street store? Well what do you know about Simone de Beauvoir? It was one of those 'Jonathon Moments' (so called for a rather ingenious and eccentric fellow in my philosophy class) where you have an idea and you can't let it go and you sit up in bed, heart racing, face splitting into a grin and explain much to your room-mates chagrin "that's SO cool." And it was so cool. What is a woman? She is a many layered gateau. The woman is bored. Dance or something. Oh it was brilliant - I haven't had a moment like that where dawning realisation spills so easily over an idea. Anyway that was long-winded. So it started there and after shooting an excited email to my teacher at 2am I finally went to sleep and when I woke up I was still ecstatic. The rest of the day was just... lovely. I had a great philosophy class, a chatty lunch with the girls at the house ending up with a bunch of us chilling on the porch, then cooking for the Ron-a-thon pasta dinner - which was great because I really really miss cooking and it was great to chop and stir and make something again - then more classes, more pasta cooking and finally to the UNC's Got Talent thing. There was acapella, solos, dance - including The Kamikazes with two of our beloved Pritchards in it. It was just one of those days where the sun was out, the air was cool, the leaves were yellow and everything was perfect because I had an idea again. Happppppppy dddayyyyyys. 

Je serai poète et toi poésie, 
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