Oktoberfest

At 31 days and 1 hour (thanks to the one-hour tilt back from Daylight Savings), October is the longest month of the year. It's a good thing, because I need that extra hour in this month more than ever. If September was for getting my feet wet in grad school, October is figuring out how to escape from quicksand. It's a bunch of little things, and a few big projects, that just add up to a weighty month. Mornings of distributing surveys to kids who don't want to take them, afternoons of catching up with this week's readings, evenings of attending classes, and nights of studying for midterms and writing papers. Somewhere in this I must find time for the bare essentials, like eating, sleeping, hanging out with chicks, and listening to The Shins.

And other essentials, like experiencing life, must fall in there as well. It is somewhat ironic that in the month that perhaps gives me the least wiggle room to have a life, I'm living a more rich and productive life than I would, say, during the dog days of summer. The month is 11 days old and I already have countless memories...

1) There's the time the NYC hobo stole a 20 right from my friend's hand, swallowed it, and remarked, "Call the cops, bitch!"

2) There's the time I locked myself out of my apartment, slept on a friend's pullout sofa, and walked over to the front office 10 hours later with morning breath and bed head, all so I could save the $65 they would have charged me for unlocking my door after hours.

3) There's the Saturday night I walked down Broadway with a friend I've known since I was 4, while we pinched our nostrils shut and loudly mocked the suckass nasal singing of the lead singer from New Found Glory.

Countless) There's the time I was on the phone with a girl I truly care about, as sick and nauseous as she could be, taking a brief break from our conversation to throw up in her bucket, but refusing to hang up because "I want to keep talking to you. It distracts me from the fact that I have a bucket of puke by my bed."

You can't make these things up, folks.

I don't know what will come of this month. My lack of terrible study habits could resurface, something I don't think I'd be able to overcome as a virgin to the grad school exam experience. I could write an incredible research proposal that leads to my name being published rather quickly. My bed could be replaced by a computer chair and a cup of espresso every other night. I could lock myself out of my apartment again.

There are some serious implications this month and some serious fun times (I'm flying down to Florida essentially for a party, the Florida-Georgia weekend). But what's actually in store, and what will actually happen, that's writing itself right now...