The campus is filling up

Ran into J*m H*nle last evening. He's leading what sounds like an excellent new preorientation- Intellectual Inquiry. There's a painting in the gallery of Northampton a long time ago, before Paradise Pond was even there, I think, and they're going to look at it under an electron microscope and discuss it and go up in a hot air balloon to see what the valley looks like now. Trouble is, it's poured rain every day this week (presumably my fault for forgetting my rain coat) and so they haven't been able to go up in the balloon.

"Any breeze at all is too much breeze," Jim explained to me.

"Well, you might risk it. Maybe you'd be blown away like in The Twenty One Balloons," I suggested.

"I don't know that one," he said.

"Oh, you'd like it. It's this guy who's blown off course in his hot air balloon and winds up on an island that's built on a diamond mine where everybody has restaurants."

"Restaurants?"

"Yes," I said, warming to the theme. "They have so much money because their whole island is full of diamonds so they devote their lives to being excellent cooks and having fabulous houses and they all go round to a different person's restaurant every day."

"Sort of a modern fable," said Jim.

"Yes," I said.

There was a silence.

"Okay, well, see you later!"

"Goodbye!"

I wish they'd had that preorientation when I was a firstyear. Mine was fun, too, though- we canoed along the Connecticut River and camped out. Immediately afterwards virtually everyone I met there was vaporized- I haven't seen them since. So it wasn't a completely successful attempt at making new friends, but at least I learned how to paddle a canoe.