Sweaty (Mornings) and Sweet (Evenings)

Like everyone else with a fairly rough morning, I also experienced a few bumps at the start of the day. After a mildly depressing shower once I had seen my AP scores, I hopped onto the metro to pick up my lost ID card. My turnaround time was actually really good until my brain stopped functioning and I went down the wrong entrance on the subway to go downtown instead of uptown. Unfortunately, I had already swiped my week-long card to get in at the downtown entrance and when I tried to swipe it again on the other side, the display read "Just Used." At that exact moment when I spent another $3 to get a single-ride card, the train came by and went, leaving me to wait for the next one. (Thank goodness New York trains come every 5-10 minutes or so.) I was mostly irritated that I had made such a stupid mistake.

To add onto all the craziness, I wasn't able to get any breakfast because I had to print out the essay for the morning class right after I got off the metro before I did anything else. The printing process alone took forever: a series of trips from my room back to the lobby trying to figure out how I could acquire one piece of paper from the confounded machine. Goshdarn it, you'd think I'd be able to figure these kinds of things out quickly as a teenager of the 21st Century, right?

By then, I had broken into a sweat.

In class, I regretted not eating breakfast but was immensely glad that I had my ID card once more. Dr. Mesznik somehow ended up magically and imperceptibly funneling the stories of everyone's weekends into more complex economic situations before shifting gears to his own lesson and question/answer time. We even talked about Hammurabi's code (and its relation to bankruptcy)! During the afternoon class we spent the first half of class revising and expanding some of last week's math-related concepts and then Ms. Santos began our introduction to finance where we she defined and characterized the different financial markets including capital, stock, debt, and money markets. 

The afternoon slipped by without even saying hello and before I knew it I was on my way to the Guitar Center at Times Square to mess around on some instruments with Alyanna and Mark. I did really enjoy us all playing together and singing, getting awkward stares as we loitered in the Acoustic Guitar room and were a little too loud. I just felt very comfortable picking up a guitar or a ukulele and playing extremely basic chords. At home, I could play around with the piano or guitar whenever I wanted, and believe me, I did, all the time. But being at Columbia, away from the musical freedom (if you will), I missed it. Much like Mark, it reignited a spark in my heart, more of an ache than anything else really, for home and familiarity. 

On the way back to Columbia, we popped into a tiny local grocery store, one of those organic, Whole-Foods-but-way-smaller types, to get 4 pints of delectable Haagen Dazs ice cream, one for each of us including Izabel. And despite the fact that we couldn't finish it all, it still made the night a lot sweeter. Looking out at the dark purple and blue sky laying on a ledge by the Low Library just as we had the first night, I couldn't help thinking about what had changed but also what hadn't changed. 

We were still the same wide-eyed kids we were when we first came, a little beat up sure, a little home-sick on occasion, and maybe even a little tired, but still eager to take the world by storm. Or at least give it our best shot anyways.