It was quite a busy weekend: The Real Food Summit, which I have been helping the Yale Sustainable Food Project to organize (in the form of typing lots of names into innumerable spreadsheets), finally rolled around. Some two hundred students from about 50 colleges all over the Northeast came, and for two days talked about getting "real food" (ie local, organic, fair trade, humane, etc) into universities and other such influential institutions as a was of affecting broader social change. I did mostly a lot of running around for it, but the events that I did get to attend were great. It's a really important issue, and I am becoming increasingly aware of my need to do something about it in my life, to stay involved.
Halloween was last week, which is a pretty big deal here. The Yale Symphony Orchestra performed a sold out concert that night, set to a student-made film: "Harry Potter Goes to Yale." My suitemates Ally and Adanna dressed up as Michael Jackson then and now. Molly was his hooded child. The suite on the first floor carved a pumpkin and put it out on their window sill. Unfortunately, the squirrels ate its face, which is at once gruesome and humorous.
On November 1, in honor of Dia de los Muertos, one of the Mexican Student groups set up an altar outside of Commons, and gave away atole and pan de muerto. There were four men playing music, two on guitar, one on flute, and another singing sad and beautiful songs.
I had to write a paper on a sculpture of the Aztec rain god Tlaloc, in the Yale University Art Gallery, a few weeks ago. I spent a great deal of time looking at pictures of him, as well as at the postcard I had purchased with his image on it, pondering his meaning. I was ready to never look at him again by the time I finished. Yesterday, in my drawing class, the assignment was to sketch images from postcards from the Art Gallery. The professor held them out face-down to us. I was one of the last people to select a card. "Oh no!" I cried. "It's Tlaloc!" I suppose he's trying to tell me something... Something good, I hope.
I just finished an 8-page paper, and my mother is coming to visit me this weekend, which will be fun. I'm quite excited about the upcoming Thanksgiving break, in large part for culinary reasons--I intend to make many lovely pies, and other such things.
It's been getting cold here--I think it's around freezing at the moment. It's been crisp and fallish, and there have been some nice sunsets. The light at this time of year is always lovely, regardless of where you are, it seems. Fall is such a lovely season, meditative and fleeting, smelling of wood-smoke and trodden leaves.
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