Whose idea was Monday, anyway?

So it REALLY felt like a Monday today... I slept in, got up in time only to fix myself a nice lunch and eat a rushed breakfast (orange and some bread...) before walking to work and getting there ten minutes late (and that mostly because I was taking a new route that had been closed all last week and the week before for Inauguration, and I took a wrong turn on one street in the new route). I felt bad about being late, but I stayed until 5:40 to make up for it, and my supervisors are always much later than me, so no one seems to mind very much. Except for the little “non-dark-side” of my conscience...

Work was really busy and not very fun. I had to put together the daily art news, which took longer than usual since the news was backed up from last Thursday evening, and then go right to the dreaded Phone Duty training session, which was meant to be a re-cap for me and a fresh intro for ALL the OTHER interns. When I got to the desk, however, there was me, the receptionist, and only ONE intern there. Her name is Kristie Yeung, and she is really nice. She works in Development on the 6th floor, and we promptly became friends and agreed to have lunch together that day. The receptionist was in a little bit of a better mood, and spoke just a little bit slower and allowed us the smallest littlest bit more time in between her directions to write down notes. Whenever the phone rang, she let—made—Kristie answer (not me—huge sigh of relief at having already passed that test!), though more often than not the calls ended up being complicated enough so that she had to take the phone away anyway. We got our phone duty shifts emailed to us last week, and I’ll be working every Tuesday, 12-2. So, extra prayers during this time would be greatly appreciated, folks...!

The rest of Monday pretty much faded into oblivion, as Mondays will do. I finished a PolSci 399R paper and then went to FHE, which involved snacking on popcorn, green-but-chocolate M&Ms, and pretzels, and participating in a music dance video contest in groups (Warning: “groups” is almost always a danger sign for upcoming fragmentation, boredom, and indecision among FHEs). We were supposed to be assigned songs and come up with our own choreography, but my group never was given a song, which resulted in about ten minutes of absolutely nothing as we—some of us—searched for, found, practiced to, and discarded four or five possible options. By that time, it was time for “showtime,” and we pretty much had nothing. But our latest song had been a classical-opera-balletish type piece, so we stuck with that, improvising all but maybe 10 seconds of choreography, and scoring embarrassingly low in the cheer-scream-clap-factor-method used to determine the winner of the night. Some of our members even deserted our group before we performed. The other groups all did better, but nothing so worthy of the deafening screams of raucous applause which came from their members when “voting time” came around. All in all, I was not impressed with the activity, and if it weren’t for the pretzel-popcorn-M&M mix, the night would have been completely pointless.