i may have just spent the last week researching. or maybe only 4 hours.

Vassar is enormous. Not to mention enormously posh. I haven't seen a dorm room, of course (probably it would be cluttered as usual), but from the outside the buildings are ridiculously graceful & beautiful. The library is gorgeous inside, as well, and large enough to swallow my dormitory twice.

And the Alumnae House (don't look at me -- that's how they spell it!), where I'm staying, is all antique dark wood and brass. At the continental breakfast, they totally had custom-embellished plates that read "Alumnae House" with a little golden coat-of-arms thing and white tableclothes. The one other occupant of the dining room just left his dishes sit on the table and stalked out -- clearly someone in a black suit shouldn't be expected to walk slowly! -- leaving us in a quandary. What to do with our dishes? It feels so rude to just leave them on the table. In the end we put our things on a sideboard with some other random dishes. "Let's scarper," I told Greg after dropping yogurt on the lovely hardwood floor as I was taking my dishes over to what may or may not have been their proper spot. "Before anyone says, 'why the hell did you just put your dishes on the tupping sideboard?'"

Apparently elegance makes me want to sound British.

I keep remembering Jenn's all-purpose advice: "When in doubt, kick 'em in the nadgers and run away." Not exactly appropriate to dealing with librarians. So instead I'm trying to follow Sir Ian McKellan's advice about acting: I think to myself, "how would a Mackenzie act who researches like a grown-up and lives in elegance all the time?" and then I act like that person.

It's much like pretending I'm a punctual person. I thought the special collections opened at 9, so I showed up at 8:30 and sat around for a while. I found out at 9:30 that the reading room doesn't open until 10.

While waiting, I found myself in some sort of science section. So between "How to identify a snail" and "Octopus" by Wells (which for a brief moment made me think I was in a science fiction section -- it made me think of Cthulu), I chose to peruse "THE INSECTS: STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION" by R. F. Chapman. An imposing white tome with posh gold lettering, it informs me that "the tentorum consists of two anterior and two posterior apedemes which form the internal skeleton of the head serving as a brace for the head and for the attachment of muscles."

Fascinating.

Unable to actually understand a word of what that means, I amused myself with analyzing its punctuation. I really think it needed another comma.

"The Pylorus," I learn next, "is the first part of the hindgut and from it the Malphigian tubules often arise."

Truly, I had always wondered from whence those pesky tubules arose.

If I learn anything about Elizabeth Bishop, I'll let you know.