Good Bye... Forever.

Dear Friends,

Remember last year when my class schedule threatened to swallow me whole? And I constantly wrote about how busy I was and how I had so little time to write? And secretly in my mind, I thought that my professors were trying to kill me?

Well, I was wrong -- that time. This semester, however? This semester is a very different story. All that I can say is that I now know for certain that my classes are trying to kill me. Trust me -- I am very, very right.

Let's start with my Pilates instructor and her personal vendetta against my abs. First of all, you should know something about this woman: I have never in my life seen anyone who looks like her. We all have those women around us who look so impossibly good that it's sickening, but Claire looks even better than that. She looks like the airbrushed bodies that you see in magazines. You know, the ones that you look at, but always find solace in the fact that nobody really looks like that in real life, right? Uhhmmm...she does. PLUS, just to add insult to injury, the other day she let the fact that she is 50 years old slip. Excuse me?? Don't get me wrong -- a lot of women who are extremely dear to me are in that age range, and I'm excited for the chance to age as gracefully and wonderfully as they have, but I mean, come on. This is just embarrassing.

So her class twice a week is motivation enough to stick with Pilates for, oh I don't know, the rest of my life. It's tough, but it's awesome. I love it. Sometimes I daydream about getting really good at it and owning a studio one day and wearing that pretty, flowy, dancer-y clothing that Claire wears and subsisting on raw nuts and veggies and meditating on mountaintops in my spare time. But that's neither here nor there.

If, then, my Pilates instructor is gorgeous [albeit a Nazi when it comes to my core], my rock climbing instructor can be summed up in a single phrase: OH MY GOSH. Despite his Napoleon complex, he is smoldering. Literally, I get distracted from his "lectures" because he is so ridiculously attractive. I don't know where Grand Valley has been hiding all of these painfully good looking people for the past two years, but Joe is making my goal of dating a professor seem more and more immediately plausible [...just kidding, Mom. I won't date him. He's not really even a professor, and I would obviously want someone far more academic. Plus, like you always taught me, you can't have a conversation with brawn and rippling muscles, now can you? Okay, now I feel awkward...].

ANYWAY, I have run into a bit of an issue as far as the actual rock climbing goes. We were bouldering on the second day of class, which just means that were climbing horizontally instead of vertically and therefore had no harnesses or ropes. I was climbing with a group of kids and I reached for a hold, but lost my grip and fell. It wasn't that huge of a deal, I didn't think... I mean, it hurt my ankle, but I didn't want to be That Girl on the second day of class. Besides, we have to wear the school's rock climbing shoes, which smell like a mixture between kitty litter and butt, and there was no way I was going to let Joe check my injury and consequently get near enough to catch a whiff of my clean feet in those things. So I limped out of class with my dignity trailing somewhere behind me.

Long story short, it's been a month and I'm still limping. I think it's a stress fracture, though, because yesterday [quick update] I was walking off the bus, heard/felt a pop, and tonight it is nearly as swollen as it was in the beginning. It's awesome, I'm really excited about it... plus, it makes rock climbing class really fun. Not. I haven't been on the wall the entire time, due to my sweet injury. I can't move my foot in the directions that I need to be able to climb, so I've been belaying a 37 lb Chinese girl named Ayaka for the entirety of the two hour class periods.

On the plus side, I have gotten so good at belaying that Joe has taken to pimping my services out... but I don't really know what to do with that.

So, I've been wandering around campus with a broken ankle and permanently sore muscles and you'd think that the one class that would give me a break would be boring old science, right? I'm in an honors geology course right now, which is basically watered down earth science with a few third grade activities thrown in to keep us non-science majors afloat. Seriously, I'm not kidding. Last week, for example, we made glaciers out of dirt, ice, and sand, and then graphed the subsequent bodies onto a sheet of paper with colored highlighters to label things like the "water level" and "delta." It's just short of awesome.

As with all earth science classes, though, we had to start with a unit on streams and erosion and other such nonsense. Interestingly enough, Grand Valley happens to be built on a stream system that runs into the Grand River, aka The Ravines. As a super cool class field trip, then, my professor [who apparently wants to be Bear Grylls] led us on an expedition into the uncharted wilderness surrounding Grand Valley. Now, I'm not saying that under the right circumstances [i.e., a cute boy asking me to go exploring and the luxury of a functioning ankle] I wouldn't have enjoyed this. I definitely could have. But to come to the edge of a cliff and have the professor peer over it and say, "Well, it's pretty steep, but just make sure to zigzag on your way down and help each other!" only to bound merrily over the precipice and jog ahead of the class, happily pointing out meander beds and failed sediment traps and terraces and flood plains.... well, I'll let you imagine how thrilled I was to hobble along behind my classmates, swatting at the lethal looking bugs that buzzed around me.

So, in conclusion, I would like to say that truly, literally, seriously -- my classes this semester want me dead. Maybe just suffering...but more likely, dead. You should consider this my farewell should they succeed. I shall miss you all.

xoxo,
Carly