In Which I Show You My Life

Hello! Remember me? Oh. Well. That's okay, I wouldn't either. It's been a long time, after all.
So, because I so very rarely update this anymore, I am going to do just that -- update this blog! With my life! Yay! Exclamation points!
...
Anyway.
I am thick in the second semester of college, attending a lovely university in the Midwest and double majoring in business and political science. (Yep. That's right. Business and political science and still writing fiction. Defying stereotypes over here. You're welcome.) Last semester, I may have sucked at blogging, but I ended up on the Dean's List, stopped sleeping, and started writing a story about demons, so that's all quite good. Also, my coffee maker broke and the girls that live next to me in the dorm never stop talking. No, not even at 3 in the morning. In fact, that's the perfect time to start squealing and laughing and shrieking. I think that might have had something to do with the last bullet presented. (If you aren't in college yet, look forward to dorm life. No, really. Shared showers, in which half eaten apples mysteriously appear? Drunk people wandering the halls and asking if you'll be their mother? It's all very exciting.)

Also, that's my school. Ten points to Gryffindor if you can guess where I am. (Because college has taught me through late night Pottermore games that this is my house.)

So, instead of talking about my books and classes and tests and lack of coffee, I am going to show you something I was fortunate enough to partake in last January.

It started like this:

Actually, it started a lot more like this,  because we had to wake up at 3 am. 

But soon, the excitement overtook the weariness! Kind of. It helped that we weren't plagued by a broken coffeemaker were full of patriotic excitement. Have you guessed where I was yet? No? Does this help?

Notice the rising sun. Now, I'll have you know that the last time I was awake to see the sunrise, it was because I never went to sleep because I was busy watching trashy television with my friends and forgot to sleep. So, if you haven't gotten it yet, realize that this was a VERY IMPORTANT MOMENT. Finally, the sun crept up into the sky, and by crept, I mean it took its sweet time. Now my view looked like this.

Patriotism! Also, I do mean this is my view. A very excited woman in a very large hat got her hands on little American flags and waved them for roughly five hours straight. No, really. Five hours. It was impressive dedication to annoyingness love of country. Minus the flag, this is what I was looking at.

We had good 'seats.' We were the second section back, behind a bunch of celebrities and public figures. (The cast of Modern Family, for instance, waved at us as they went to their seats. How kind, right?) As a measure of why the second section back was so nice, here's a shot of a part -- only a part -- of the crowd.

Have you guessed where I was yet? Yes? Probably. You're smart. If not, don't worry. We were all waiting for this man.

That's right. I was at the 2013 Presidential Inauguration. I drove with some people from my school, crammed in a twelve person van, from Missouri to DC. I had never met any of these kids; we were pulled from various programs and years for the trip. We spent hours in the Smithsonian Museum; I spent hours drooling over the Library of Congress. We went to the monuments. We played word games with strangers in the crowd. And we saw this man:

Take the Presidential Oath of Office.

After, the streets were packed with people. 800,000 people flooded the surrounding area; to walk two blocks, it took almost an hour. If you ever want to know what the apocalypse might look like, put 800k people in a five block radius. Trash lined the streets and, when an ambulance had to come through, it took almost ten minutes for the crowd to get out of the way. The lines for food were hours long. and people kept screaming about various things -- what they were trying to sell, or that we'd just elected a dictator, or the words to Bootylicious. Hours and hours later, we got back to our hotel in Virginia, and within the next thirty hours, we were back in the Midwest.

So yeah. That's my life thus far. I mean, I'm doing other stuff too, but nothing that I really feel like posting pictures about. 

Cheers, all! Stay warm!