huh?

being ever diligent about ferreting out pieces of 19th-century sports journalism, i decided to spend today working in the special collections room at my undergrad university while i'm home for the thanksgiving holiday. i arrived at campus, parked the car (and had to pay far too much to do so!), and took care of priorities -- COFFEE. as many of you know, my mother's coffee-making skills, or lack thereof, are mythic, and i could feel a caffeine headache coming on as it was after 9 am and i still hadn't had my morning cuppa. now the quickest route from the library to the nearest source of good coffee on this campus takes one right past the english department -- or at least where the english department used to be! imagine my surprise (shock? horror? dismay?) when i whizzed past and threw a casual glance over my shoulder at the doors to the deparment only to see that the secretary's office had been plastered over, as had many of the doors to the offices that i spent so many hours haunting as an undergrad. i was confused, not to mention a little upset. it turns out that they've moved the entire department to the opposite end of campus, perhaps as much as a kilometre away from both the library and the good coffee place!

on my last trip home i found out that the folks that bought my childhood home had torn it down and built a new one on the lot. i also discovered that they had torn down my elementary school to make way for a housing development. this time around, i find the place of my academic childhood has quite literally been turned into a long, beige, blank hallway. what the h*ll is going on? are the fortune cookie gods sending me some sort of fat, cosmic, cliched reminder that one can never really go home again? if so, i get the message guys, but you could have just sent it in a cookie.