Sjanneke's 5K raised FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS for orphans in Uganda and if I think about it too hard it makes my heart explode.

Sjanneke coordinated a 5K for the Empower Campaign. The 5K is tomorrow, but tonight was the pre-race pasta dinner.

I'd forgotten how much fun it is - the impreciseness of cooking in waist-high stockpots, preparing mass quantities of food on ancient industrial stovetops in church basements. When I was a kid, I would help my parents prepare large-scale meals at soup kitchens and I loved the frantic, joyful energy of it. I felt grown-up when I was put in charge of an entire task, like scooping fruit cocktail into bowls or drying off silverware and placing it back in the drawer. It was egalitarian - I wasn't in the way or useless just because I was a kid. Anyone with a pair of hands got put to work.

The birthday girl busts a move.

Sjanneke seems to know every African international student at OU. Last night was the birthday party of her friend, Joann, who moved here from Uganda for graduate school this summer. The birthday girl made a huge spread of Ugandan food for her guests, and set aside a special plate for us because she knew we'd be late. A party packed with perfect strangers has never been less awkward, all night people just approached me with right hands extended and big white half-moon smiles.

Sjan and I danced to thumping and wailing Afropop all night. Best party I've been to in years.

Tonight I was invited to watch the Office at the apartment of a girl in my cohort. I like the dissonance between Kip's PTA president looks and her sharp, subversive wit. So, for those of you keeping score at home, Athens friend count: 2.

My evening ended in an impromptu yet cutthroat game of Pretty, Pretty Princess at Sjanneke's. In a Gollum-like lust for The Crown, we accidentally managed to forgo any sort of strategy in favor of maniacally usurping eachother. It sort of sickened us when we realized how twisted the game is. For example, the winner is encouraged to admire herself in the bejeweled mirror as the most "pretty,pretty" of all. So that children's board game is a sociology dissertation waiting to happen.

Sjanneke's apartment is a bizarre converted attic space. The stairs up the side of the house seem carelessly hammered into place, and the whole thing rattles like a rotting wooden roller coaster when you climb it. All the walls are slanted and the passageways narrow. The oven is freestanding, and the shower's about as roomy as an MRI machine. Sort of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari meets Charlie Bucket's house.

But she made me dinner tonight so I'll say that it was pretty cozy. Like a treehouse. Or a mine collapse.

When I say I have no friends here, it's terribly misrepresentative. I have exactly one friend here and she is a fucking ray of sunshine. I would take one best friend over twenty drinking buddies any day.

Sjanneke is endlessly wholesome (runs marathons, taught in Africa, works with special needs children), an excellent foil to me. She does things like needlessly abbreviate words and phrases (coffee is coff-coff, the library is the 'brar) - something I find loathsome when others do it and endearing when she does it. She is, in a lot of ways, the exception that proves the rule.

She drove me to Columbus yesterday and this nectarine was blooming out of her car's cupholder, at its ideal hour of ripeness. After I commented (probably crassly), on the nectarine's fleshiness, she insisted on giving it to me. I refused as many times as I politely could.

So it turns out produce can make my day.

Spinach salad with mandarin oranges, goat cheese, ginger vinaigrette.

Ever since Sjanneke and I knew we'd both be living in Athens for grad school this fall, we started making survival plans. Weekly Family Dinners. Scrabble and wine on the porch. Carpooled trips to Columbus to see our respective dudes.

A week passed. Classes started. Today is my long day at school, and after a week of fruitless, HILLY treks around and around this place on my bike trying to track down a key for my car, a spirit-deflating courseload, and meals eaten alone in front of my computer, I needed Family Dinner.

The ominous thunderclouds, the quick-setting sun in a still-strange town, the fact that my back was killing me - I presented myself with an airtight case for waiting several hours for Sjan, and more importantly, her car to be free to drive me to the grocery store. But I'm trying not to be that girl anymore, so I flicked on my bike's headlight and set out to find the "bike path along the river" that I'd heard about. And the scenery as I spun along the bends in the Hocking was vast, saturated green, astounding. As I rode home from Kroger, it was dusky-dark and the gnats along the riverbed were madly spraying me in the face. I was wiping gnats from my cheeks and forehead like mud spatters and laughing out loud to myself at how absurd it was. When I got home and looked in the mirror they were in my eyelashes and the corners of my mouth. I took a shower and Sjanneke came over and we ate forever.

Riding my bike to Kroger for groceries is something I did in Columbus all the time, but I've spent so much time up in my head this week, solitary and unstimulated, that this was practically narcotic. I nearly cried. I don't know. It made me feel like a person.