Thumbs Flea and Batcat

"Thumbs! Thuuuumbs!" Emily called out to across and down the street where the cat was completely ignoring her, following its own whims to a bush at the base of an apartment at the end of the street.

"I don't think she's coming." Rachel said, having noticed that Flea was around the same area of Thumbs. Thumbs didn't like Flea, although Flea seemed to have no problem whatsoever with Thumbs. Emily made a face and nodded, but called again, "Thumbs! Get over here you dumb cat!" She sat down on the step at the top of their porch and scratched Batcat behind the ears. Rachel sat next to her and looked at her phone, waiting for Ottavi to call her for their hangout. Batcat, like every cat, decided that since Emily and Rachel were on the porch, now was the perfect time to walk out of their reach and eat some dinner out of her food bowl. 

Thumbs and Flea had both disappeared out of sight down the street at this point. Why was that cat never on the porch when they wanted her, Emily though. But wait, that was a complete lie. Thumbs, lazy butt, was on the porch ninety percent of the time when they came out side. Being a cat, she of course sometimes wandered off but always came back. She knew where the food was.

Rachel's phone made sounds of the wild west. "Ottavi's out back now." she said.

"Well that's inconvenient, what'd he do that for?" Emily asked, following Rachel as she got upstairs and went inside, heading towards the back door. "Silly Ottavi."

I Don't Appreciate the Lack of Spellcheck Here

A classroom in one of the newer buildings on campus (new enough to have one of those designs where the architects seem to have gotten the go-ahead to do whatever the heck they wanted with the layout), for approximately forty eight minutes five days a week is home to a group of ten students, sitting in desks arranged in a half circle around the desk of a teacher. The teacher varies from day to day, but today is Tsuchiya-Sensei, and class is for all intents and purposes over. A sheet is being passed around the classroom to fill out about how an extra credit assignment went, and students are slowly, lazily making their way towards the door. Class that day was an easy one, as long people had practiced a bit of Kanji (Emily had, thankyouverymuch), and it being noon on a blissful spring day, people were taking their time.
Emily pulled a bento out of her lunch box. It wasn't really a bento box so much as a basic leftovers container, but one does just as good as the other and means that the backpack it's stored in will be lighter coming home. The bento contained a mix of things that Emily, along with her roommates (Laura and Rachel), had constructed with the help of an adorable older friend, Yoko. Onigiri, sushi (with a fancy name Emily had already forgotten), fish cake, omelette and bits of shiitake mushrooms were squished into the container together, and as Emily waited for others to finish the survey she got it out and began eating out the mushrooms.
"Tukurimasita?" her sensei asked. Did you make it?
"Soo desu." Emily replied. She was pretty sure that wasn't the best reply, but it was normally her go-to for any situation.
"Honto desu ka?" Tsuchiya-Sensei asked. Is it true? "Hontoo?"
"Hai." Emily replied. Jessica (meticulous in her papers and still writing), laughed at his disbelief. He asked again to get the same reply. Emily felt a little insulted. But not really. Without Yoko she could never have made any of this anyway.
She walked over and offered some to Ferell-san, who had just finished her survey and accepted the egg gratefully and excitedly. Yee-san seemed fairly excited about the bento and went into a monologue about how in Chinese restaraunts the real egg rolls were never listed on the menu but had to be asked for.
"So really, you made this?" Tsuchiya-sensei asked.
"Yes. Really." Emily replied, this time in English.
"Where did you buy the ingredients?" he asked.
"Uhh, my friend Yoko bought them from the Tensuke Market." Thank you, Yoko!
Jessica finally finished her greatly detailed paper, and the small group of students filtered their way out of the classroom. Jessica and Ferell-san took an onigiri each and, although Emily thought they had become a little dry over night, they didn't seem to mind.
Out into the bright sunlight with good friends and food fitting for a group of Japanese majors, it was a pleasant break in the middle of a fair amount of college chaos.

Waluigi Never Wins

Clocks go so unnoticed until silence falls. In the downstairs of strawgoH, it is quiet enough to hear the small clock in the outer room, ticking away the eleventh hour of the night and reminding everyone that time goes on. Testa sits in the small wingback chair with her macbook propped on her lap, researching her biology homework, having started much later than she planned thanks to a particularly interesting game of Mario Party. The couch is shared by Shannon, half asleep under a pink fleece blanket, and Emily, exploring the internet with one arm propped on the new Pokemon pillow that she picked up at a garage sale earlier. It's odd how quiet a room can get, even with so many people filling it.
The silence is interrupted before too long by what sounds like an odd car alarm outside. It alerts the neighbors out on their porch whose voice get louder for a moment until the car alarm is off. Oh how life goes on.

Sleep Should Be Optional

Emily had never actually made real coffee before, but there was a first time for everything. Especially on the first day of an eight thirty class. Which is a ridiculous time to have a class, in reality. No college student should be forced to get up this early. Doesn't lack of sleep have a correlation to diabetes, she asked herself as she scooped the grounds into the top of the magical machine. It smelled delicious. Coffee could make everything better. Coffee would someday lead to world peace.

When it was done brewing, or whatever it is that coffee does, she poured some into her favorite Pokemon mug, added an unhealthy amount of creamer, and took her seat directly over the heater in the livingroom. Directly over meaning sitting straight on the grate and feeling the warmth flow through as much as her body as she could fit over the grate. The coffee was delicious. Maybe she should make a couple more cups before she left. 

As Emily sipped at her coffee, the grate becoming almost uncomfortably warm (almost), her roommate Laura came down the stairs. Emily's favorite days were the ones when she got to see her roommates in the morning (providing they weren't stealing her shower time), and she could feel her day improving already. Maybe waking up at the ungodly hour of six may be worth it after all.

Half a cup of coffee, a scoop of fishy catfood for Thumbs and Batcat, and a punch of fish flakes for Edmund and Ulrich, Emily and Laura set off at a brisk pace for the bus, which they magically barely caught. The coffee was starting to really set into Emily's system at this point, and suddenly the day was so much brighter (or maybe that was just because the sun had finally risen). One stop into the ride, one of her favorite Zachs arrived and sat in a seat across from her, his odd style of shorts combined with a thick hoodie and who-even-knows-what-that-hat-is was even better than hipster. That's right hipsters, you've been outshone, Emily thought. Emily thought a lot of odd things with coffee. She also thought that the bus would be a lot more fun if it didn't have all of those dumb walls in the way.

At the stop on Neil Avenue, Emily got off and made her way to Central Classroom. She couldn't figure out if she was supposed to put on her coat or roll up her sleeves, so she compromised and did both. She started to notice how few people were on campus so early in the morning. Then her pride kicked in and she decided that since she was there so early the was one of the elite. Ridiculous? Yes. But at eight in the morning, hopped up on coffee and the sugar from the last of the peach cobbler in the fridge, nothing seemed that ridiculous.

She made her way up to the second floor in Central Classroom, with an inner monologue running through her head a bit too fast for her to really keep up with. It smells like paint. Why does it smell like paint? Did it smell like paint last time I was here? Maybe it always smells like paint. Is this a supply closet? Is this my classroom? Is my classroom a supply closet? Does my classroom smell like paint too? Maybe if I run my hand along the wall, there'll be paint on it. There's paint on the wall, right? That's why this floor smells like paint. I'm the first one here! Maybe I'm in the wrong room. Maybe we are supposed to have class in that supply closet.

Being the only one in the classroom-which-is-not-a-supply-closet, Emily thought carefully about which seat she wanted before deciding on the one directly next to the window. She noted with dismay that the window was open and cool air was blowing in, but it was okay in the end because she also found out that her seat was almost directly over the heater. Score two for heaters. This was going to be an excellent class, she decided because if she ever got bored of Theater, she could just people watch out the window. It would be good to be awake so early.

Takai desyoo nee

"Oftentimes it's better in Japanese culture to soften your assumption."
The instructor, Christensen-sensei, stood at the front left corner of the classroom, going over the Japanese "Core Conversations" that were to be learned that week. The overhead lights were on in the basement classroom of University Hall, which certainly didn't help the concentration of the students. Whispers and hushed voices beat through different parts of the room, whether or not they were at all relevant to the subject remained to be seen, although a surprising amount normally was. The students in Japanese 102 wanted to be there, wanted to learn the material. Those who had taken the class simply at random to fulfill a GEC had dropped out some time during 101, as the class was less than easy. It was rewarding though, at least in Emily's eyes. To be able to converse in this amazing language was like a dream, and having already mastered the Katakana writing style, she felt that she was more than willing to keep taking the class, all the way as high as she could go.
Emily sat in the front of the back set of seats, basically halfway between the front and the back row, so that she could plug her laptop in and charge it while she took notes. She felt so... grown up in her grandfather sweater vest with a computer in her lap and a coffee in her hand. Two seats away, Stopar-san was watching anime on his computer, headphones in, and taking notes in a notebook at the same time. Next to her, Guo-san was flipping through her textbook halfheartedly, not quite tuning in but not wanting to tune out. Snow fell outside and covered the ground that she would be walking on to get to her next Japanese class in half an hour, yet somehow she had overdressed and felt overheated on the way in. Maybe that was why college students could be seen wearing shorts in winter...

The Odd Awakening

Monopoly is one of those games that seems like it can take a number of days to entirely play out. Emily looked on despairingly as the game was set up and the pieces handed out. Ordinarily, she was the first one to jump into any kind of game; board, card, or dice. Monopoly, however, she had determined to be a waste of her time, and would only end with, well, she wasn't exactly sure how Monopoly ended. She had never gotten to the end of a game.
Alex handed the pieces of the game around to four of the eight or nine people sitting around the table. Even those who weren't playing were morbidly fascinated with this new version. The interesting thing about it was that there was no longer paper money involved in the game... only credit cards. Credit cards. For no particular reason that she could identify other than that she had been taught so, Emily was disgusted by the change. As there was nothing to do at the time other than sit and watch the game, Emily decided that this was a good time for a nap.
She made way through the snow to the girls' cabin. Knocking the snow off of her boots, she was greeted by Robyn, who was explaining a report she was working on for school. In the bedroom, Emily found that Testa had had the same idea as she did and had settled down in the bed that they shared for the weekend. Community naps are wonderful things, and although this time the "community" consisted of only two of us, it was strangely reminiscent of our past cell retreat, where there were a total of five of us sharing a mid afternoon snooze.
An hour and a half later, awoken by the sound of a tardis in the vortex coming from her phone, Emily got up and slipped on her glasses. She looked over and noticed that some time during her sleep, she had gotten a text from Sam.
A very, very odd text from Sam.
""Who do you like, cause Rachel won't tell me. Lil"
What on earth "Lil" meant was anyone's guess, but really that wasn't the part of the text that... concerned Emily.
Why on earth would he ask that? she thought. Why on earth... What? What is going through his mind? and of all people, why Rachel? The subject had somehow come up between them, apparently. But really, this text was so lacking in information it was somewhat hilarious. She felt a strange pull to answer it - to answer it with the actual truth - but resisted. It would be ridiculous. What seemed like more than half of the guys in his cell had been able to figure it out for themselves. He could too.

Words from Work

Emily pushes open the door to the office slowly, as if opening it any quicker would break some kind of spell cast on the library. There is no one there, all five of the chairs are empty, even the one normally occupied by her boss who, in less busier times, would be busy flitting between her e-mail and her twitter account.
It seemed odd to call this one of the busiest times of the year for her department. The look of the library certainly wouldn't justify that statement. There was a hush that had fallen on every floor - that spell that falls when finals ends. She had seen maybe five people since entering the building, a shocking number compared to the hundreds that had traversed the halls only a week before. Yet this was when Emily, and her fellow Stacks workers, were busiest of all; the carts of books to be reshelved taking up the totality of hallway space outside the office.
She shut the door as gingerly as she had opened it and laid her belongings in the back corner, contemplating on the sense of having a slow and busy day.