Monday's assignment: watch Finding Nemo (?!?)

I just got an email from my Italian professor, saying we had to go to the foreign language center at least 5 times this semester to watch a minimum of 45 minutes of Italian videos each time. I thought, oh shit this is going to be boring. But wait, there's more: check out the list of movies I have to watch:

Friends, season 1
Sex and the City, season 1
Aladdin
Finding Nemo
Erin Brockovich
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
The Mask of Zorro
Save the Last Dance
Tea with Mussolini
Girl, Interrupted

How cool is that? OK, the choices are so-so at best, but who cares? TV is like gold now; I've watched Family Guy once this month, and now I get to go watch a whole movie and I don't even have to write anything on it. I'm liking this.

In other news...

last night I crawled into bed at 2:15 am. 10 minutes later, I hear loud music and stomping all up and down the hallway, and suddenly these banging sounds like there's an earthquake. BANG BANG BANG!!! someone pounds on my door. I drag myself out of my nice warm bed to see who it is, and a senior wearing all black and dark sunglasses says "come on, get up, we're going!" All down the hallway there are more seniors dragging half-asleep first-years out of their bedrooms - they give me enough time to put on shoes and a sweater and hustle us downstairs.

They told us to get in a circle in the dining room, and Erin walks in wearing a tight leather jacket and a short skirt, brandishing a whip. She tells us this activity is consensual (nice word choice, don't you think?) and that we can go back to bed if we want to. Most of us decide to stay, and they blindfold us and stuff all of us into cars.

If you've never been blindfolded at 2:30am in the far back of a minivan, the driver of which is making constant sharp U-turns and driving on really bumpy roads, you should. I felt like throwing up, but it was fun. Also, the painting of our house's namesake that we had pulled off the wall in the living room to bring along kept hitting me in the back of the head.

On the way to our destination, one of the seniors in the car with us informed us that we were going to the grave of our house's namesake, and told us the story of her death (turned out she blew the whole thing out of her ass - and did a damn good job of it). She warned us to be completely silent once we got there, because what we were going to do was illegal and there could be big trouble.

So, finally the car stopped. They lead us out one by one, still blindfolded, and explained that this was a very important place to the woman after whom our house was named...you could almost call it a shrine, and that it was very important that we pay due respect to her memory and her sacred place.

They took off our blindfolds. There were a couple of seniors lovingly holding up the painting, and behind it was our destination:




Dunkin Donuts.


I'd like to know what was going through the heads of the people who were in there when we came in: 30 girls, half in pajamas and blindfolds and the other half dressed like they were about to rob a bank, one brandishing a whip and a few toting a very old-looking painting of a rather unattractive woman. The seniors bought us doughnuts and hot chocolate and told us stories about all the shit they made up to get us to think it was a real ceremony. All in all it was pretty sweet.

Kinda anticlimactic, though. I wouldn't have minded staying up all night doing stupid little "rituals" in front of a bonfire.