Assorted Afflatuses

There is nothing quite like the smell of alcohol in the morning. But such is life in my dormitory. Or, perhaps, life in any college dormitory. Needless to say, I continue to adjust slowly to life without the luxury of carpet below my feet. (Though that particular problem will be remedied once I manage to pick out a rug.)

Given the less than vibrant restaurant scene in Lewiston, Maine, it is quite fortunate that the dining services folks here at Bates serve food leaps and bounds beyond what I have consumed on other college campuses. In particular, I have nothing but praise for the Bates muffins. They are simply divine. The scones erred a little on the moist side, and the green tea on offer lacks the kind of intense, bitter flavor I like, but the muffins positively cannot be beat.

My second food-related complaint — the lack of luscious crusty bread — may soon be remedied. The fancy new (and mysteriously air conditioning free) commons building, according to one of the officials on hand for questions, has a magnificent oven capable of producing wonderful, hearty bread in the blink of an eye. What I would not give for a just-baked baguette! It has been weeks now, since I have sunk my teeth into something as scrumptious.

More academically speaking, the fine art we call linear algebra, for better or worse, has not posed nearly as much of a challenge as I thought it would. The study of linear algebra, though, has not made me any more fond of matrices. They still torment me like some kind of awful, pestilent disease. Some might argue that, with a calculator, matrices "aren't that bad." But typing matrices into a calculator, or a computer, for that matter, is a process highly prone to errors.

The opposite holds true for my French literature class. Reading Flaubert, Maupassant, Baudelaire and Apollinaire, and writing two six-hundred word literary analyses in French — all in the space of four weeks — takes a certain amount of effort. Having said that, reading French literature makes me feel very smug. Whether I can justify that smugness, however, is another question entirely.