Connect it. Cut!

This morning I woke up in New Haven, Connecticut. I was on a couch. I wasn’t wearing pants, or a bra. Thankfully, I had a sleeping bag draped over me, but just barely, because the night had been aggressive and hot, and my L.L. Bean sleeping bag was designed for 20 degrees Fahrenheit. The night before I had been questioning this logic: is it safe to stay in an apartment, with five guys, on a couch, in barely pajamas? My answer, expedited by my heavy dosage of sleeping pills (I’m on three Benadryl now), was yes, without a chance for any further questions.

It helped that the apartment was usually inhabited by twenty-something female law students, thus all the rooms had a quaint, feminine charm which was comforting in a way I did not expect New Haven to be. I was calmed by the pink and girly handwriting, the Feng Shui of scholarly young women, and the paintings which were, no doubt, from IKEA, but which still held things in focus which women are cultured to believe are good for them: flowers, romantic landscapes, beaches. Four Izze® bottles of different colors decorated a shelf, one of the few barren ones, while the others were dense with law books with boring titles: Constitutional Law, Law for Dummies, TORT! [Exclamation point added for excitement]. I was particularly amused as my host, on an aside, introduced me to one of the sub-let-ers, engaged with his computer at a desk in the corner, half-hidden behind a door with a small sign sticky tacked to it: Well-behaved women rarely make history.

So I woke up to a tall man asking me if I knew how to lock the doors to the apartment. 9:30 AM. Construction had been blaring outside my opened window for some time. I had woken up just barely an hour earlier when two- or three- or who-knows-how-many people prepared breakfast for themselves before escaping to summer jobs, though, at the collegiate level, I suppose they could just be called jobs. Not quite careers, but almost. I had recognized that the sun was now up, and bright, and I had rolled over to protect my face, my eyes, from the sun, while also, somewhat conscious, re-draping the unzipped-by-this-point sleeping bag around me, or at it's most minimum of coverage, around the parts of me that I didn't want any strangers seeing in the morning (read: my entire body).

It is impossible for me to wake people. Not impossible. But I hate it. People either 1) look ugly when they first wake up, far less attractive than should be possible or 2) act very dismayed, displeased, and full of hate, when you wake them up far before they wanted.

I was fortunate this morning, because I was 1) fairly well rested (even though I slept on a couch!) 2) not completely hideous. Even more fortunate, I managed to put on a bra without completely undressing (fun fact: that’s not that hard to do). Anyway, I mention all of this only because after everyone had left the apartment, I sat down on the couch and guess what I did for the next two hours:

A)   Wrote the opening lines for a novel I’ve been thinking about.

B)   Blogged.

C)   Read Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island on my Kindle.

D)   Played Angry Birds.

If you guessed D, you’d be right. Who knew I could be so unproductive. It must’ve been the heat. Must’ve been.

Around 1:20pm, Max, my Yale host, gave me a speed tour of New Haven, or at least, the parts of New Haven that were important for Yale University. It was beautiful. I have now seen Princeton and Harvard, and even though Yale is usually always third in ranking, it is the most beautiful, hands down. The Princeton science halls are quite nice, if only because they have a very modern feel to them (they must’ve been constructed in the last twenty years), but if you want the archetypical college campus, Yale wins, hands down (Harvard was far worse than the both of them). It is not surprising that Steven Spielberg chose Yale for Indiana Jones’ affiliated university in the fourth movie. Below is a picture of Yale’s equivalent to Colgate’s Hall of Presidents, which was depicted fictitiously as a dining hall in IJ4.

This is a picture of Yale’s quadrangle. I really liked the sheer number of trees on their campus. Don’t ask me why. I suppose Harvard also has a lot of trees, but they seem small and sickly. It also does not help that Harvard is in a busy populated Cambridge, so any trees are muted by the many sounds of Massachusetts’ drivers: sirens, honks, screeching brakes.

 Absolutely stunning. What I found very curious about Yale is its size: only about 4,000-5,000 undergrads. And yet, the buildings were ginormous. Literally. Even if one was mindful of the post-graduate students, the square feet of places to study seemed to far exceed the number of studying scholars. What an endowment.

Lastly, it was discovered that, indeed, Connecticut drivers are bad drivers. Panicked flashbacks to my harrowing jaunt on the Masspike revealed in retrospection that there had been quite a few Connecticut license plates jostling past me at 75, no, 80, miles per hour. All in all, I give Yale, like the entire city of Boston, a B+. Impressed.

Then I packed up and awayed myself to Fairfield, Connecticut, which is conveniently only thirty-minutes away. Speed limit says 55? No it doesn’t, go eighty. All the while on I-84, I kept expecting to see the outline of New York City. It occurs to me now that Connecticut is truly a bizarre place. I expected Fairfield to look like Winnetka on steroids. I was saddened to see that it was just a nice town. Oh well. Here are some pictures:

 

I’ve enjoyed getting casual tours of famous east coast cities. I keep wondering if I could ever give Wilmette the same treatment. Sadly, I doubt this to be the case. The Midwest is not as walk-able as the east coast. And there’s about 100 years less history (a rough average). Anyway, tomorrow is Pennsylvania! One of my favorite states!