Unexpected brightenings of long days. When you are forced by your conscience to attend an acedemic winter banquet where you are seated with a professor that you don't really know... and he turns out to be pretty cool. When you decline the turkey and nobody questions it. When you stop a server and request a small cup of tea and she brings you the most adorable one-serving teapot along with cream and sugar. When the professor whose class you skipped the same day is seated at the next table over and doesn't see you. When you get back to your room, start working on homework again... and finish before 1:00 AM. Knowing that the third draft of your term paper is due in the morning and that it's finished, it's a really good paper, and you weren't even too bored rewriting it for the third time because you had a friend helping you find what needed to be fixed. The way she adopted my style of marking mistakes in bolded red font so that it's easy to find and explaining the mistake in hilarious terms.
Fun words like ballerino (what
do you call a boy dancer?) and Hamlet (a baby pig?) that keep you really amused in the wee hours of the morning.
Knowing that in two weeks, you're going to be home, and that you can shorten that to 13 days if you can convince your big brother to drive down and get you a day early.
