A snapshot at my life in Champaign

So I got my bicycle. The other morning I got up and I wanted to punch myself in the head. It was about -10 out and I had to chip the ice of my bicycle seat before getting on. I found a way to tie my hat tightly under my chin so that only a little bit of my face was showing, and then covered the rest with my scarf. With my book bag slung over my shoulder and my coffee cup wrapped in plastic bags and hanging over the handlebars (why don’t they invent a coffee cup holder for bikes?), I rode the 5k to school. The school building is pretty warm so after the first class I had warmed up enough to take off my coat, and talk to some of the other students. Coming from a class of 20 in Antigua, this class of 200 seems huge. I sit near the bag next to a Mormon guy from Salt Lake City, a girl from Guadalajara, a Costa Rican named Alfredo (you should hear his accent!), and a very shy bearded Muslim named Siman.
Actually it is refreshing because most of the students are pretty down to earth, serious and intense, with the average age about ten years older than me. This morning I had biked to school in a skirt, coat, turquoise scarf, orange hat, red woolen mittens, a bright pink shirt and a purple hoodie. Plus my fur-lined boots from Surplus Sam’s which have kept me from getting frostbite. I didn’t really think about the fact that everything I was wearing clashed, but halfway through the day when we had a break I was standing in the back swinging my arms and jumping to stretch out a bit. Nancy looked at me and started to laugh.
“You’re so cute.”
Cute, ahh, how I hate that word! Why couldn’t she say glamorous, or full of energy, or something complementary? But instead I felt like a little colorful girl jumping around at the back of the classroom.
Afterwards two guys came and asked me if I wanted to go out on the town with them that evening.
“I don’t drink.” I told them.
“Me neither.” One of them admitted. “I just need to get out.”
I mean, who does drink when you have class at 7 the next morning? Who does anything, for that matter, when you have class at 7 the next morning, and then classes all day? One night this week I didn’t get home until 8:30. I biked home slowly down sidestreets; slowly to keep from getting windburn, plus it was dark and I had no lights. The snow was coming down softly all around me, I could see it in the orange glow of streetlights and I could feel it stinging my face.
We have classes 6 days a week, and there are tutoring sessions on Sunday. I told my tutor the other day that I’d rather sleep than eat or shower. He laughed and said, “You can sleep next month.”
I might be dead next month, I thought, if I don’t sleep now. At the very least no one will want to talk to me. But then all of us students who are here together are in the same boat. No one is getting enough sleep. We have 4 or 5 hours of homework a night and add that to 9 or 10 hours of classes, and throw in 200 type A obsessive compulsive first-borns (I did a survey of my row at the back of the class and 8/10 of us are first-borns and 9/10 have visited more than 5 countries) and there is an explosive mixture. In addition, our professor Dr. Francis has memorized the name of every single student and every 1 or 2 minutes in class he randomly calls on someone to answer a complicated question and you are expected to jump up and answer it. He says he’s desensitizing us. Also, every few days he calls a student to stand up and he rapidly fires a series of questions at them and if they can answer them all correctly in 10 seconds or less, he gives them $10.00. I was on the edge of my seat today but he never called my name….. better luck tomorrow, I guess.
I’m not feeling as lonely as I was when I first got here, but I do sort of feel isolated from my world. It’s funny how I often want to get away, explore, adventure, but then when I leave I am suddenly looking back and through the rosy glasses of nostalgia, I am wishing to be home. Perhaps home is something that eludes us….. until we are finally able to sink our hearts into where we actually are, not where we want to be.