well, summer has officially begun. i am done with all of my exams & grading for micro, three boxes of my stuff have been taken away for summer storage, and all of my other belongings are packed up in two suitcases, one purple duffel, one small black purse, and a laptop bag. the walls of my room are bare now--they echo if i yell towards them, and i am sleeping in a sleeping bag on my naked mattress.

the contents of suitcases are very revealing about a person, i think. you could construct entire stories, entire lives around them. among my belongings are: a robin's egg blue english biscuits tin adorned with the image of a chrysanthemum bloom, an empty glass japanese soda bottle with a marble entrapped in the neck, my frayed brown chucks and gray tweed vans, two decks of playing cards and two calculators, a chinese-english dictionary, and the tiny composition notebook in which i documented my new orleans trip. do you think tsa personnel craft such tales when they do random searches of checked luggage?

i will be home tomorrow in time for dinner. i cannot wait. it's hard to believe summer is finally here. i desperately need home right now.

sometimes, randomly, i get a wave of stupid, difficult-to-contain excitement about going to the beach with the 'rents. in those moments, i can't help but smile and must suppress the urge to squeal. we're going to have a kitchen in our room at the resort. i hope we buy crabmeat at the local grocery store (maybe a piggly wiggly?) and my mom makes crabcakes. it's something we seem to always do when we're at the beach~myrtle, outer banks, rehoboth.

last night, to grade exams, the professor and i went to a coffee shop by campus. i was treated to an iced chai and blueberry scone (i wanted pumpkin, but they were out), courtesy of the business school. it made grading much more pleasant.

over the course of the semester, this professor has grown on me a lot. a year ago, as a student in her class, i thought her rather strange and eccentric. as i've gotten to talk to her, these quirks have become endearing, and i've come to really admire her. i am in awe of the life she has created for herself.

she is very young, under thirty i imagine. she's jewish, from brooklyn originally. she went to nyu undergrad and then straight to harvard for her phd. from there, she went right to teaching here--immersed in academia in her career thus far. she spent last semester in san francisco, living in a cottage (in some wealthy neighborhood that she wouldn't have been able to afford had it not been for the cottages that are rented out on the properties of the mansion-owners), and working between stanford and uc berkeley. two weeks ago, she flew away to california again for a day to give a talk at caltech. california. amazing.

she goes to europe two or three times a year, mainly for conferences but combined with pleasure trips. she went to one in marseille that somehow turned out to be awful. she lunches with famous game theorists.

she is a caffeine addict. when we grade exams, she always suggests we do it at a coffee shop. i once met up with her around ten or eleven at night, and she arrived with venti starbucks in hand. she is always predictably late. she speaks with a slight lisp and has a goofy laugh, what one would imagine as a guffawing sort of laugh.

her uniform is a knee-length skirt and tee, sometimes with a zip-up hoodie on top. in class, she always seems to be wearing the same jean skirt. i imagine she has ten of the same skirt in her closet--after all, it does have nice lines, and it suits her well. i've also seen her in khaki cargo skirts. she has an orange puma messenger bag that i covet, and yesterday she was wearing a small silver, space-age tumi backpack. she has all sorts of neat tech gadgets. she has these in-ear headphones for her ipod nano that make her completely and totally and hilariously oblivious to everyone around her. i've also seen her jamming to music wearing those big black headphones that cover your ears. i've never asked her what she's listening to though.

when i talk to her, sometimes it feels like i'm talking to another student. i think she's ridiculously smart, like genius caliber. her mind works in ways that i cannot follow.

anyhow, i've grown to admire and respect her greatly.

yesterday, i spent an hour sunbathing and studying finance in the quad. i was wearing the most comfortable sundress from target. the cotton is so soft; it feels like i'm wearing a nightgown. some photos of the afternoon:

airport in twelve hours. sleepy eyes~bedtime.

sweet dreams.