HELLOOOOOO CHEWONKIIIIII

I just woke up from a nap so excuse me if this post is strangely worded or unreadable. But let me tell you about my life in Atlanta.

My transition back was certainly an adjustment, but in all honesty it went a lot better than expected. Surprisingly, the first few days were the easiest because Katie and Abby and I got a lot of attention - everyone seemed really surprised/excited/happy to see us, and that made the first couple of days pretty easy, at least for me (I know Katie and Abby felt COMPLETELY differently).

But as the first week went on, everyone's excitement began to die and I slowly began to realize that I was home for good, and that was a little hard. The worst part of my day was walking into the cafeteria and seeing a few things that bothered me.

1. The teachers and students sat at separate tables
2. You weren't exactly "welcome" at any table you might like to sit down at. Cliques were in full swing.
3. The meat was not from a nice little cow named Gus, or a chicken that lived no more than half a mile away. God knows what grey jiggly mass that ravioli had inside it.
4. There were no mail slots to look into in anticipation on the way in.
5. There was no dessert after lunch. Not even grapes.

Comedic value aside, there were definitely times in that first ten days or so where I felt very alone. I wouldn't say that I was depressed or having extreme Chewonki withdrawal; it was more like little flashes of nostalgia hitting me at random points throughout the day. These little flashes definitely haven't gone away, but now I'm more able to see them as happy, fond memories, and not reasons to feel sad or upset.

-Side note: my weather extension for Firefox is telling me it's -1 degrees in Wiscasset. Carolyn, I hope you are alive. -

The second week of school was kicked off with Snowpocalypse '11 here in Atlanta, where we got a whopping 4 inches of snow last Sunday night. I know a lot of you northerners are laughing, but it was the most snow I've ever seen here. Atlanta can't even handle an inch of snow, so four inches was enough to shut down the entire city for a week. I literally didn't have school a single day last week, which was nice, but I got mad cabin (hey, we lived in those!) fever by the end. Sledding down an icy asphalt street gets old after a while. But the week served as a nice interim in my adjustment to life back at home - with the cold weather and the snow on the ground, suddenly things didn't feel so different from Maine! Plus having time off just to sleep/read/watch obsene amounts of Modern Family was nice.

Last Friday was the day I was looking forward to all of last week, as the one and only Lee Barker was coming to visit me. Katie and I met him at the airport on Friday night and

attacked him as he emerged from the bowels of the Atlanta airport into the baggage claim area. And my mom was there to document it all!

We had a great weekend. I took him around Atlanta on Saturday to experience his first real day in the South. We went to the World of Coke, where we did shots of 60 different Coke products from around the world (little note: sodas from Africa taste like actual pee.) and called the tour guide out on all his "Coke is a green company" bullshit. It was nice. After that we ate lunch with Abby and then went to the hippest neighborhood in Atlanta: Little Five Points. Any of you who visit will definitely be taken there. It's the former cocaine capital of Atlanta until the cops drove those people out so now it's a really cool artsy community with tons of street performers with dreadlocks and thrift stores. To give you an idea of how cool the people there are, we ran into 2 Chewonki alumni from Westminster in one of the stores! We bought a bunch of incense (which we burned later that night to my parent's dismay) of all different varieties: Morning Garden, Misty Mountain, and Coconut were among the many flavors.

After that we played the right-left game where Lee shouted out a random direction to turn at each intersection. We ended up in a nice part of Atlanta I'd never seen before. Who knew there was so much left to explore?! (that should be read in a really cheesy voice).

Later that night we played some guitar, watched some Modern Family, and chatrouletted with random people. The people were your standard chat roulette fare - you know, penises, creepy eastern European men, awkward tweens, college kids, and JUSTIN BIEBER. That's right. I kid you not. Let it be known that for a glorious 14 seconds, Lee and I talked to the one and only Justin Bieber. And we know it was real because he nodded and talked and responded to our questions so it couldn't have been a recording. I, of course, ruined it by asking "... so do you like being famous?", which he responded to by moving on to the next person. Whatever.

The next day Lee and I went to my lake house in northern Georgia, which I hadn't been to since early August. We picked up some fried chicken for dinner at a local southern diner (Lee was delighted) on our way, and rolled into the dock area around 3 or so. Our lake house is actually pretty cool in that you can only get to it by boat, so we loaded up our stuff onto the boat, only to realize that the battery was dead. What were we to do?! Southern hospitality saved the day, and our neighbor gave us a ride across the lake.

We had a great time up there. It was beautiful - it was the first time I'd seen snow on the ground - and we canoed, walked in the woods, and completed a quasi-work program by hauling firewood to our porch. We had a thought-provoking intellectual discussion about the sad state of the environment at dinner with my mom, and then sat by the fire and read/watched tv/talked some more. Once my mom fell asleep we had a little more fun by playing Battleship with a little twist... I'll let you guys figure out what it was.

And now we're here today. We dropped Lee off at the airport a few hours ago, after I took him to a super greasy but awesome drive-in restaurant and gave him a tour of Westminster. It was really sad to see him go, but at the same time reassuring. I'm sure all of you guys who have seen each other post-semester have felt this too: it's really comforting to know that everyone in our semester is real and actually exists outside of Chewonki! We had a really great time and I can't wait to see all of you sometime soon.

Lots of bisous.

Ben