the importance of remembering trousers while meeting and greeting

This. This is brilliant. Fans of: Kerouac; poetry; free association; nonsense; word games. Click now.

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I went to uni at nine in the morning today for a study skills lecture, dear god. I had grown unaccustomed to the light of the dawn. Sadly I also have a nine am class every Monday - I managed to wangle afternoon classes the other three days I go in, but that one is non-negotiable. This seems unwise, knowing students. I'm sure the hangover quotient of that lecture will be quite monstrous.

Then I hung out with my new Communications friends until O Festival started. This was something like Six Degrees of Separation in reverse. I'd met Neha and Eugenia at the last study skills lecture, because Eugenia knew Fei Fei, whom I'd made friends with at the Welcome. Eugenia also knew two girls called Shelly and Melissa, who joined us in an Epic Tour which fell short due to Shelly's fear of elevators. We did however explore the Sekrit Underground Lair (er, parking garage). We found something labelled TV Studio. Later Shelly and Melissa introduced us to Damien and Michael (who were also introduced to each other by some other girl this morning). Eugenia and Neha then buggered off, while the rest of us went into the Alumni Green (a fancy term for the six square metres of lawn that constitute the only patch of grass on campus). There it turned out that Melissa knows absolutely everyone. She introduced us to some other girls, and promptly buggered off as well. So six hours after meeting my first randoms I ended up hanging out with the randoms of my randoms' randoms. Half of whom also had just met. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you UTS Orientation!

Before meeting the boys but after Shelly and Melissa had wandered off somewhere (they would return later) Eugenia and Neha and I decided to check out the student newspaper, Vertigo. The dude the Student Association assigned to show us around their offices later was called David. He was wearing: Preppy sweater vest, bright pink shirt, emo hair, glasses. Also: baggy felt shorts, thongs. This was... slightly incongrouous. Kind of like he'd forgotten his pants that morning and hoped he could just sit behind a desk and nobody would notice. I'm sure he thought I was a loon because I kept breaking out into mad grins at random. But you try keeping a straight face when your mental dialogue goes like this:

David: Oh, I seem to have misplaced my PIN.
Maggie's Brain: You also seem to have misplaced YOUR PANTS.
David: Anyway, our politics is important because la la la government la la la and the university is facing a MASSIVE DEFECIT of-
Maggie's Brain: Pants?
David: Anyway, this is the room where we keep all the random junk and old protest signs...
Maggie's Brain: AND PANTS.

I am a horrible person.

AND ANOTHER THING

I think I shall abandon the Monikers idea. After all the randoms I mentioned in the last post, I realised that I just know way too many people to make up a code name for all of them, or even just all the ones that may feature in this journal with some regularity. I may still use it for the occasional person who just begs for nicknaming (and teachers. definitely teachers), but, in general - much too unweildy.

I didn't mention that Beth tagged along to our official Humanities Campus Tour, just for shits and giggles, and to whack me in the shin with her motherload of textbooks. Apparently it was a much better tour than her DAB one, whose only amusing moment was "This is the Queer Space. It's for if you're queer, and you need some space." Also, the Design course is apparently under the dominion of the Blonde Brigade, which I think Beth should infiltrate. And the unofficial Epic Tour did eventually end up happening after the elevator-phobics left. Not that the myriads of levels of the Tower building really contain anything particularly interesting. We did discover that half the lifts in the building do not acknowledge the existence of floors of odd number. Except, for some reason, number seven. Bizarre. Since most of the even floors were boring (maybe there's a conspiracy, and all the interesting stuff is on odd floors...) and we politely refrained from buttonmashing when other people were in the elevator with us for actual transportation purposes, it was less of an Epic Tour and more "playing with lifts" - which is also an amusing pastime.

Later on the Patch Of Grass I found a ladybug and named him Queenie. Then I released him into the wild.Ladybugs are awesome because they are the only insect that can crawl on me without inducing panic of flaily proportions.