D.C. is Finally Looking Up

Since I last wrote, things in Washington, D.C. are going much better. We never did discover the cause of the crazy flood waters that overtook my apartment (and my mom, the neighbor, the plumber, the contractor working on the house where I live, the landlords and I all made a valiant effort to figure out where the water could have come from, to no avail), but we did tear out the old, wet carpet and go crazy with a couple of fans and a dehumidifier. (Note: I have never seen a device that sucks water OUT of the air before. Being a nose-bleed prone child from an arid state, I had no need to be taking any more water out of the air. Ordinarily, we were looking for ways to put moisture back INTO the air.)

But anyway, right around the time the apartment dried out, the movers showed up with the rest of my stuff, the carpet guys came to lay down new (and much prettier) carpet, and I finally got to unpack, put together my bed and stop sleeping on a mattress in the kitchen. And somehow--luckily--the only things that suffered any damage from the flooding were my cable box (ironically, I'd been really hesitant to get cable, fearing it would suck up too much of my valuable time) and the biography of Richard Nixon, which promptly started to mold. HA. Karma's a bitch. (And no, I don't really want to explain why I have a copy of Nixon's biography. It's a long story.)

So now, relatively settled, I'm getting into the process of making new friends, reconnecting with old ones, and poaching other people's D.C. friends. Orientation for my graduate school program was Friday, and so far I've managed to stay more excited than scared. I'm not a) the only person who doesn't have film experience or b) the oldest person in the program, although I'm not that far from it.

I realized how old I am, and just how long I've been out of college, when this librarian came to orientation and started talking about appropriate research methods. She said: "I know when you all were undergrads, it was OK to just do all your research for a paper on Google, but now you should be using different methods to research." She says this, and it suddenly occurs to me that I'm not completely sure Google even existed when I was an undergrad. And so my slow descent into old age begins, at the ripe old age of 27!

I guess that's about it for now. I start both class and work tomorrow. I hope it goes well. I hope I don't discover that I'm in over my head. Or really, I guess I'm OK with being in over my head. Everything I've ever really learned from, grew from or been challenged by involved me feeling like I was in WAY over my head. I hope I learn, grow and am challenged by this!