Overall updates

This will be quick, but I figured I should give a small update since Saturday. Saturday night I debated going out, and went to 2 bars within 200 meters with Dillon; we lightly drank and by the second place decided neither of us wanted to go out. I think a small factor was that Mortal Kombat, the horrific classic from the mid-to-late nineties was on, and because we were pretty tired from Thursday and Friday. I stayed in and read, watched TV, and discussed utter randomness with Dillon which was pretty fun.
I think I forgot to mention in my last post that our roommate Robert came out with us Thursday. Robert is from Cornell and takes between 5 and 7 classes a semester, which shocks me because at Emory you need special permission from the Dean to even be allowed to take 5 real classes. Anyways he told us that he drank once at a frat party freshman year but didn't really even get buzzed, so this was pretty monumental when he was drinking with us Thursday. It was even more awesome when he told us he wanted to go out with us on Friday. Granted he didn't go in on the 6 liters for 10usd and didn't get nearly as drunk, but we were proud. Saturday he even wanted to go out again, and although we were up when he came back, he was still the party animal of the weekend. Last night he went out [I think just to see a movie] but didn't get back until I was almost a sleep. I think we created a monster.
Having not done anything on Saturday, I decided to at least leave the apartment on Sunday. Dillon, an avid rock climber back at school, has been going about once a week or so to climb, and I had asked if he would show me how this weekend. It was really difficult, and although I wasn't the absolute worst climber at this gym-bar, I was towards the bottom. And by gym-bar, I mean this place is a bar which turned its basement into a bouldering room. And by I mean towards the bottom, I mean other than the 5 and 7 year old girls whose dad was pushing them on the rope, and the 8 year old boy who was running around as his dad climbed, I was the next worst. Pretty embarassing but I didn't really care; it wasn't as embarassing as Haloween and was a ton of fun. It's really hard by the way, and I have far from an ideal climbers body. Although I have worked on forearm strength by doing pullups off of a 4 x 8 slab of wood, I still don't have nearly the amount of ridiculous finger strength as these guys who are absolutely nuts.
As far as my midterms went, I got an A on my historical development of architecture BS writeup, an A- on my psych test/paper which is pass/fail, and a 93 on my econ exam. I unfortunately don't know if this is out of 100 or 120 points, and since I've only heard of one person getting above a 100 (even though there were 120 possible points), I sure hope he makes it out of 100. My last midterm I find out tomorrow.
Sunday night I bought tickets to Stockholm for our 'long' weekend in 2 weeks. I leave Thursday morning and come back Monday evening which will be awesome and I'm only missing 1 class to do so which is fine, especially since I haven't missed any real classes for this class. Another awesome factor is when I get back that Monday night, I have 3 days of classes before jetting off to Amsterdam with Joey and his friends and Jon who is coming to Europe soon. I also signed up for CIEE's trip to Berlin in December which should be real awesome. I have also decided that I finally need to buy an Ipod and steal people's music, even though Dillon showed me this great streaming site called last.fm. Try it it's awesome. So I've been researching which one I want, going to yoga, and reading more which has been nice.
I guess the final part of what's happened since my last post has been the official temporary culmination of my studies at Emory. I faxed in a temporary leave of absence form and got back a response today, meaning that next semester I will not be an enrolled student. Instead, I plan on meeting up with Ari when he and Sam come to Europe. As of now, we plan on splitting the 6 weeks that we have here between Spain and Morocco, and hopefully catching the FC Barcelona home game on January 4th. I don't really know how this will affect my attire for Allison's Bat-Mitzvah because I don't have any formal clothes and won't be coming back to the states until February 10th, but I'm sure we'll figure that out. Once back in Chicago, I am going to be working for Ari's ex-boss, our current neighbor, and my favorite right wing pastor, Chicago's self-proclaimed and crowned king of surplus, Dave Auerbach. Hopefully on weekends I'll get to visit a few friends at big10s too. Anyways, as of now, in early April I plan on heading off to Israel and staying there for the summer. I am ooking into internships and will soon be looking at jobs too while there, and then I'll be home for a little before back to Emory. This actually doesn't mess up my schedule and helps it out, so long as I still finish in 3 academic semesters. Oh yea, and I still will get into the Econ Honors Program if I respond to their email next semester. So, I'm excited to try a new type of foreign living, different from what is now, and what will be with Ari, and what may be sometime after that.

PS: it's scary how little time I have left this semester, and I haven't even learned Czech yet!