Tony - First week at Cornell

Hey Everyone,

I'm about to start my second week at Cornell and things are going pretty smoothly. When I showed up here last week I was pretty lonely. I had pretty much nothing to do and knew no one in town. In those dark times I turned to food for consolation and gained a solid 30 pounds. However, things started turning around on Monday when I received a $11000.00 stipend check to last me until January... its a strange feeling to have your bank account double in a day. On Tuesday I got to meet people in my department and started getting to know the 17 other students in my year. Once I got to know these people, things started getting a lot better. Seven of them are from upstate NY so we've got a lot in common and most everyone seems pretty cool. A group of us even went out to dinner and to a bar on Friday and I had a lot of fun. So all in all, I'm pretty optimistic about Cornell at this point.

I had a few interesting things happen to me over this week that are worth noting. For one, I learned that my 4 person apartment has 2 empty rooms for the time being. Apart from being fucking awesome, I manged to open up the empty rooms with a credit card and now have spare guest bedrooms for any visitors. My only other house-mate is from India and has only been in America for a few weeks. Hes nice enough but we don't have a lot in common so its unlikely that we'll become best buds anytime soon.
Also, I run into Leah Elliot all the time. She's a lot cooler now (she taught me the credit card trick for opening apartment locks) and even gave me some tomatoes from her garden which is incidentally right outside my apartment.
By the way, the bathing suit chain was successfully completed yesterday.

Thats about all for now. Its a bit difficult adjusting to Cornell. Everything computer-associated is unnecessarily complicated and it feels like the university tries to squeeze a lot of money out of you for nothing (for example, printing costs $0.09 a sheet). Every other student has a difficult-to-understand accent and I never catch the faint aroma of weed. Most of these instances make me sigh and say "I miss Skidmore." This of course makes the international studient I am talking to look at my quizzically. Nevertheless, I think I'll get use to it all and am now looking at this year with cautious optimism instead of impending doom.

Tony out.