Wow I really need to update!! So much has happened around here that I can't even begin to describe them all. I feel like I should introduce all the characters first, but don't know if I have the stamina for it.
First and foremost, let me say that I am very happy here. I love my classes (well, three out of the four), love my roommate, and like my developing group of friends. And Amherst is beautiful. :) It's been easy to get into the rhythm of things, going to class, eating at Val (Valentine Dining Hall = Val), and reading the 800 pages a night for all my classes.

First let me talk more about Shannon, my roommate. It's almost eerie how well we get along. People call us the poster board roommates, and one person even said that they should bring the college tours into our room and say, "This is the example of perfect roommates." We have the exact same schedule and we do basically everything together. On the rare occasion that we're not together (when she has XC), people ask me, "Where's your other half?" Every night, we lie in the darkness of our respective beds and discuss the day and all the people who go through it so that we always end up sleeping a lot later than we think.

Despite the fact that we're sub-free (substance free: no drugs or alcohol on the floor), we're also the first floor, which means that all the drunk people pass by or hang out in the common room. A lot of people, mostly sober actually, also decide that our room is THEIR common room, and they invade. At one point, we had about 15 people come in at once and go basically crazy, with one guy, Dede, swing off my bed, and others turning on the TV and sprawling all over the floor. Grr. We kicked them out.

My classes are basically amazing. I absolutely love my seminar on Berlin. Germany is the one European nation I never really got obsessed with, and it's fascinating learning about it in all its aspects and reading German literature. I love how classes here are so interdisciplinary. I've written literary essays without taking an English class. Happiness!!! If you're in need of a great realist novella, try "Delusions, Confusions" by Theodor Fontane. My professor is from East Germany and she's the sweetest lady who just loves her subject. Always so nice to talk to, and she's taking us to New York!
My Spanish class is decent. Too easy thus far, but I love my professor's accent. He's from Northern Spain and I just like sitting there and listening to him. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, are the best because after Spanish, I have Europe in the 20th Century, which is an awesome class that really weaves literature and history. I always look forward to going to those classes.
The one class I don't look forward to is Intro to Religion. The class is really long and early in the morning, and every day we really have a RIDICULOUS amount of reading. Seriously. Even compared to all my other classes. I think I have more reading for that one class than my other three put together.. like half the Bible in one day. And then the lecture style is so unstructured. She's basically spraying out stream of consciousness about Judaism. If you space out for about two seconds, you're completely lost.

Hahah Shannon's listening to "Bet On It." Camille, another friend who is absolutely adorable with her big eyes and her cute dresses, and I introduced her to High School Musical songs... Shannon's slightly obsessed with "Bet on It" currently.. I've heard it about eight times a day. I think this will be the first cause for roommate strife haha.

Friday night, I was dragged to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" at the campus center.. Yeah.. okay... not a good idea... THERE DOES NOT NEED TO BE THAT MUCH SEX IN ANY ONE MOVIE. EVER. OR NUDITY. EW. I blame Tim, who heard from his very critical friends that it was the best movie ever made. He's not trusting them ever again. Then afterwards, a group of us, Robert, Tim, me, Shannon, Camille, Ethan, and Trevor just hung out in the room talking for a couple of hours. With a lot of them not really knowing each other, it was sometimes difficult to keep up a stream of conversation, and so we went around the circle and talked about our days. Trevor, who is EXTREMELY into math, decided that since there were seven of us there, and obviously seven is a prime number, that thus we could pick any number less than seven and still manage to go all around the circle. So we went every other person. My very exciting day included going to my callback for an a capella group, which I didn't make, but the callback was fun. They taught me the soprano part for two of their songs, "Lean On Me" and "Hide and Seek" and then I had to sing it with all of them singing their different parts. That all went pretty well, until I had to sing the solo for "Come On Over" by Christina Aguilera. Elaine doesn't really have a sense of rhythm, so she messed up twice during that... eww.

Last night was far more interesting. We spent almost four hours of the afternoon in the library with Tim and Camille. Tim takes religion with Shannon and me, and thus we all had about 800 pages to read. Thus, on Thursday, he proposed that we have a mass religion reading session, AKA mass execution at 1 PM on Saturday. However, when that time rolled around, Shannon was not yet back from her morning run (she's a psycho), and thus I texted him to tell him that we just MIGHT have to live for yet another hour, to which he responded, "Oh man! I was hoping to fulfill my martyrous destiny as soon as possible!"
We did eventually meet our fates, after we found the sound-proof glass room in the library that I had seen earlier that was AMAZING. We sat there for four hours straight... I think I lapsed into a coma at some point.
To shake ourselves out of our religiously-induced stupor, we went to eat dinner, which was actually good because they had Mexican food (I never thought I'd like it so much) and then we came back to the room, having picked up the rather unwelcome Andrew, and played Apples to Apples. It was pretty funny how you could tell each person's personality from the way they chose the cards. Andrew always chose the most bizarre, nonsensical, and even disgusting cards. Camille always picked the opposite of what everyone else thought it would be. For example, for "masculine," people put down "Clint Eastwood" and something else rather manly, and she picked "Hummingbirds." I'm not complaining. I put that one down. :) Tim always chose the most sensible or the most romantic, such as "A loving hug," "sunrise," "sunset," and "the ocean." I always picked the one that had anything to do with Europe, and Shannon also went with common sense. They were all really mad at me in the last round when the word was "dangerous" and everyone put down "electric chair," "thunderstorm," and something else that was actually dangerous, and I picked Andrew's "Renaissance" because it was dangerous and damaging to the ecclesiastical structure of Europe. :D
Another round, I was the judge for "fabulous," and when I pulled it out I said, "Fabulous. Obviously Elaine." Camille pulled out a "create your own card" and said, "Elaine!" Obviously, she won. :D

After that, Tim took off for his room and we tried all sorts of maneuvers to get rid of Andrew, who was bombarding us with strange Youtube videos. Finally, we left him with the boys playing Settlers of Catan, and took a walk throughout campus at night. It was really pretty, even with the loud music and screaming emanating from various dorms. Basically, Pratt is the sex dorm. Stearns and James are the drunken dorms. Appleton and Williston are the ghetto dorms, and North and South are the soberly social dorms. We went to Schwemms, the cafe that's open really late, and sat around and talked for a little bit. Then we came back, each doing our respective things... Shannon studying French while sort of watching Youtube, Camille watching SNL, and me watching "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" on my computer. All of a sudden, Trevor and Jesse come up to our window and scare the living daylights out of me. They were COMPLETELY drunk, and then came in through the door. Harbouring drunken Trevor is our Saturday-night thing, apparently, since he did it last week too, though I really hope he doesn't fall into this pattern. He starts drinking when he's depressed, and his ex-girlfriend had come to visit for the whole day and he'd realized that he still had a lot of feelings for her but she didn't reciprocate, and thus, he drank himself into a stupor. He comes in and tells us how Jesse and him were at the social dorms. They wandered into the bathroom, and with encouragement from Trevor that "We need to make our mark!" Jesse took someone's shower brush and snapped it in half on his knee. We shall call the shower brush Y. They then wandered into the kitchenette, thinking it was an exit, and found this unopened bottle of really expensive vodka, which Jesse stuffed into his shirt and sprinted back to South to put it in his fridge. The vodka will be known as X. Then, Jesse looked for Michelle, who shall be known as Z, because he wanted to have sex with her. He kept asking Trevor her number, and Trevor kept responding, "1-800-Michelle-Escobar," which Jesse was not yet drunken enough to believe. Remember that Trevor is extremely into math, always wearing T-shirts with mathematicians' faces on them, but by the end of the night, he couldn't keep it straight that "Jesse stole X, broke Y, and wanted to do Z."
Trevor then started moping that he was meant to be miserable in life and that he should never again pursue any girls because it would just turn out badly. If he wants to be a great mathematician, he must be miserable, and then we argued about different mathematicians and their varying degrees of loneliness as I attempted to make him feel better. We eventually walked him back to his room and made him get into bed, even tucking him in, since last Saturday when we told him to go bed, we mistakenly left him in Jesse's hands. Instead of going to bed, they ended up riding the elevator up and down the four floors for an hour eating a whole box of 18 chewy bars.
Right when we thought things were calming down, Cam and Jeremy show up at our window, thoroughly drunk. Cam is the guy that gets drunk on Tuesday nights and is perpetually drunk. Apparently he drinks so much that he had crystals in his pee, which made him realize that he might have had a problem. He had 10 shots of vodka and a crapload of beer, got written up by the police, but the policeman didn't even think that he was very drunk. Eek. We introduce Cam, who is Shannon and my favourite person just because we love laughing about him, to Camille. Cam's real name is Camilo, and when we introduced him to Camille, he said, "CAMILLE? Wow! My name's Camilo!! You're like the girl version of me!"
We finally walked Camille back to her room, only to meet the creepy Alex who used to follow me around. He was found out stone cold last weekend in the shower. He was also completely wasted this weekend, and he said to us, "Hey! Camille, if you and I ever go out together, you can be my spit checker."
The three of us stare incredulously, uncomprehending the meaning of this enigmatic statement.
Thankfully, he continued, "Well, sometimes when I go out, I need someone to tell me when my spit is gathering at the corners of my mouth so it's not all frothy. You know what I hate? I hate it when my eyes are different sizes."
What made it even funnier was that his speech was completely slurred, and also that at the moment he was describing these phenomena, they were occurring before our eyes.

Oh drunken people... I promise I'll update more!!