RadamAGONY. Well, at least I can complain about it to my new best nightstick-wielding friends.

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It was the final five minutes that were the most torturously slow; from 7:11 to 7:16, I clutched the sandwich I made myself in the dining hall and just smelled the egg and cucumber and cheese desperately as the seconds thudded interminably by. My roommates signed me up for Ramadan, insisting that we should "just try it", though it's ludicrous to fast entirely during the one week when I know I'll be getting about three isolated hours of sleep per night. Actually, as official captain of the insomniac procrastinators team, Ramadan fits in susprisingly well with my nonexistent sleep habits; waking up at four in the morning for breakfast isn't actually much of a chore, because by then I've just been awake all night anyway. (un)surprisingly enough, it wasn't the not eating that tortured me the most; by about 11:15 Consuelo and I were nodding off during Chemistry, the only thing keeping us awake being the frantic motion of our hands scrawling "I NEED SOME COFFEE". "I KNOW!!!" all over my notes on alkenes. I've got bruises all over my shins from just stumbling, caffeine-less, into various 14th-century stone structures all day. Ironically, waking up yesterday with a debilitating case of food poisoning was sort of a boon; not only did I have the entire day to work on my EE, but I didn't have to subject myself to the torture of meticulously crafting a sandwich at supper and wrapping it in a napkin as Killian wolfed down his beef lasagne with its tantalising mountain of melted cheese next to me. I guess I'm just balancing the nutritional scales really, based on how much I ate at camp. The first years were astonished by my enthusiasm for the chicken curry, which was so much better than regular college food that I went back for three helpings. This time around, with my official bright blue AC Camp 2008 t-shirt and my second-year shower priveleges, camp was an entirely different experience in the best possible way. For two days, I led the coastal walk, and though my trusty hometown-pride Middlebury Track And Field sweatpants are now permanently dyed from all of the brown sticky substances I had to trudge through, the astoundingly pure turquoise colour of the water and the silver flashes of sun off the heads of a group of twenty seals as they surfaced in a rocky cove was worth it. I livened up the second hike by bringing along a kite, which turned out to serve as a remarkably simple pacifier for the complaining first-years - almost as god as the Twix-bar 'emergency rations' they were given at the very end of the six-hour hike, which I swear made at least two people choose CAVRA instead of ILB this year. During my one completely free day I woke up because the sun streaming onto my face was so coaxingly bright. Naturally, I spent the rest of the day barefoot at the secluded little rocky beach five minutes' walk away from the farm, skipping stones with Josh and lounging about on sun-caressed rocks, absorbing the crisp scent of salt and seaweed in total placid silence except for the gentle lapping of the waves...and Olivia's voice pointedly reading in our direction all the articles in the magasine called The Art Of Seduction, which I really wish she hadn't picked up at the staff barracks. It was pretty much just another golden sun-soaked opportunity to ignore all my responsibilities for three days, which is why I've had a standing 11:30 coffee date with my best friends in Sunley house for the past three nights. That's 11:30 p.m., not a.m., and it's not decaffeinated coffee either. Unfortunately even at my prime batlike active hours (from eleven til four in the morning), distractions continue to throw themselves in my otherwise studious path. There's this wonderfully diverting tradition that at midnight on your birthday, people throw water at you, or throw you in the outdoor pool. Now that we have security guards patrolling campus from 10:15 to 1, sprinting away in pyjamas up the murderously long EMC hill from their gigantic halogen flashlights seems to also be on its way to becoming an entertaining AC rite of passage. Entertaining, if only because it was completely futile and all thirty of us got caught anyway, herded up main drive like sheep. Volunteering my name as a sacrificial lamb, I ended up chatting with the yellow-neon-vest-clad security guards for two hours; it turns out that there are actually three domestic staff connections that even beat making friends with the cafeteria ladies, and their names are Ricky, Morgan, and Jamie. They invited me to go to the pub with them sometime, and now I can go flitting around campus after dark wherever I want as long as I stop by the Safe and Secure hut first to say hello. Finally, the freedom to wear white after 10:15! Ah, the leisure of actually walking underneath streetlamps instead of sprinting from shadow to shadow with a black checkered Palestinian scarf wrapped tightly around any recognisable features of my face (which has meant far too many unfortunate blind collisions with telephone poles in the past)! What more does one need? Besides peanut butter. Or some sort of protein.Or some sort of FOOD. RIGHT. NOW...

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