I'm still busy. I guess that won't ever cease to be the case... for the next six years. But it still takes some getting used to, as the busyness does not come completely from schoolwork these days, but more adult-types-of-things. For instance, I got paid on September 1st and had to pay my rent, my cable bill, and my utility bill. I had to return a pair of TOMS in the mail. I had to go to the bank to change my PIN number and access a statement of the balance in my checking account. I try to go the gym every other day. On top of all of this, there is the schoolwork and the smaller things like remembering to take out the trash on Tuesday nights and cleaning the bathtub.

Please don't mistake this post as a complaint, either. I'm happy to be busy, delighted with having to schedule free time for myself. It is certainly more pleasant than the lonely, empty weeks I was spending in my living room before classes started.

Today Jess, Annmarie and I went to The Haunted Bookshop to make use of their large table in the philosophy section to do our homework at.



However, three English graduate students should have known better. Jess and I each bought at least four totally unnecessary books. (For my own part, I bought a literary biography of Virginia Woolf told through the lens of London, an interview with Simone de Beauvoir in 1984, a collection of letters from Zora Neale Hurston, a Kierkegaard volume, and three Nabokov books so that I might try to follow DS's seminar in my spare time. But hey, it all cost less than $30!)But there was something to be said for the bookstore's atmosphere for studying. The smell of old books permeated the air, and the only sounds were of book-lovers' feet on the creaking wooden floor. Not to mention, we also made friends with the cat.




He seemed about as skeptical of my assigned reading on "New-Formalism" as I was.



I want to keep going back there to study... but I can't afford to spend $20+ on books twice a week or whatnot.


In any case, Things I Love About Iowa City: independent bookshops.