The air show this morning was pretty cool. Terry, Mark and I piled into my car and left about 10:30 to drive down to Mason, Michigan, a little bitty small town about 15 miles away. It took longer to walk down and get my car in Lot 91 than it did to drive from campus to the air strip. It was almost exclusively populated by Ercoupes, teeny two-seater aircraft built in the 40s (most of the ones in the show were from 1946), which looked like new. There were even a couple of biplanes and an ultralight there, and I snapped some pictures.

After getting back and puttering around for a while, Janet and I went to the mall off of Grand River. After I remarked about the peculiar unidentifiable smell that seemed to permeate the mall, Janet turned to me and said, "It must be New Mall Smell," which made me laugh quite a bit. I was looking for the Coraline audio book and some stuff to hang on my walls. I found neither. Instead, I found the new issue of The Third Alternative, the 1st Session DVD of Cowboy Bebop (which contains the first five episodes of the series) and Ted Chiang's new short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others. Ted is a Clarion graduate himself, and has won an unbelievable amount of awards so far; his very first published short story won the Nebula.

We met Leslie What this evening, our instructor for next week. And we spent our final night with Terry watching Heavenly Creatures which was an early movie for actress Kate Winslet and director Peter Jackson. It was interesting, incredibly funny, and wickedly disturbing. I'm still ambivalent about how I feel about it. Though it did star Kate Winslet, which is a plus.

And of course, we rounded out the night with Mafia, though I had to leave after the second game. There's something about the 5th floor lounge that sends my allergies into hyperdrive. I had to flee back to my room and the comforts of air conditioning. It's just as well, since I only got six hours of sleep last night. I was actually hoping to go to bed earlier than this, but Mafia's incredibly hard to turn down.

Alarming trend #3 (or is it 4, or perhaps maybe just 2, oh hell, who cares): it has taken longer than I thought, but people are starting to factionalize. Not as far as critiquing goes, but socially. There tends to be the same people getting together to do things, and this bothers me a little. I've been trying to include myself in as many groups as possible, but it seems that certain people just don't feel like hanging out with certain other people, which is kind of sad. We're all here to learn from each other, and it's a shame that we can't all hang out with each other too.

Christ, I'm rambling. I'm off to bed.