Interesting how sometimes you can feel closer to someone because they're farther away.

I need to remember: I can't be friends with everyone, though I can be friendly. A huge social network would be great, but I need to remember to hold to the people that I really like and want to spend time with. I'm not Scott; I can't handle that sort of social overscheduling. Though living with most of these people makes it easier to find time to talk to them once or twice in a day.

I am happy to have people who want my friendship.

love,
alex

hahaha.
I need to get some homework done this weekend. I just slept for five hours, so maybe I can stay up tonight without throwing my schedule off too much.

luv,
alex

The entire goal of this church seems to be to feed me. After the service, my 8th-grader friend (I think I must miss my brother) got his dad to take me to Subway, which was good, as my breakfast was a quarter of cold quesidilla eaten while walking to church. Now I'm really feeling those 2.5 hours of sleep, though, so I think I need to go have a nap. And maybe clean my room, and/or do some homework. That's about it. It's muggy and thinking about raining outside, and I snuck into our new academic building to check things out. It's nice, though not as big as I thought from the outside. Arts-and-Crafts motif, very aesthetic.

luv,
alex

Woke up at 6 a.m. (two and a half hours after I went to sleep! yay college!) in a state of absolute shit-what-am-I-doing panic. The thing is, good sense ("I can't deal with having a boyfriend right now") is warring with curiosity (this could be a valuable learning experience!). I really need to quash my instinct to use other people as anthropological lab rats.

Three days ago I was alone without a friend in the world, and now the pendulum has swung rather too far the opposite way. Gah. I was having a hard enough (though fun) time navigating talking to all the people I wanted to get to know. (and by the way, it's a good sign, isn't it, that I've shifted from "I'll stick with this for a month" to "I have to get to know everyone because we've only got a year together"?) Now I've got this guy who's not just like, hey, let me cop a feel, he's like, I'll go to your church! I'll fix your computer! and generally going for the signs of legitamacy and permanency that never fail to utterly panic me. Well, crap. What do I do now?

ick. people like me are just not suited to having a love life.

luv,
alex

Well that was slobbery.
What a wierd day.
erin, email me, I gotta talk to you.

luv,
alex

Call me a musical proletarian, but no one who plays a collesium could mean as much to me as the little jam band of freshmen that plays out the nights in our front courtyard. Nothing could be as natural as the cluster of kids lying on the grass, bass line echoing off the buildings, some novice astronomer going, I think those are the Pliedes. Nothing could be as precious.

I am happy. I think I can do this. Everything is not always the way I wanted it, but things are good. I think I'll be okay.

love,
alex

And again, it got better. Seven hours of hauling gravel in the woods will do that, apparently. Our program went off to do trail maintenance, and we hauled fourteen tons of gravel. By hand. This makes me happy.

I got to talk to several people I'd been meaning to, and also just plain got to do some mindless labor in a pretty place. It's so pretty up in the forests. I'd forgotten these horizens, how the last ridgeline in the distance descends like a layer of cloud.

love,
alex

As usual, just when it hits rock-bottom, it rebounds. Laws of physics. I am upstairs preparing my solitary repast of soy-cheese quesadilla and arugula (note: arugula does not work well with sharp-flavored cheeses) and this band of merry program fellows is making lasagna and needs various things which I am in a position to lend. In return, I eat way too much lasagna, and we cluster the chairs around the lounge table and have a feast of bread and jelly beans and fudge and canned cookies and ground cherries and root beer. And lasagna. We end up hanging out - just hanging out, talking, eating junk, being friendly. You know. Me and a bunch of other people go to see the matrix reloaded at the dollar theater (review: cheesy good fun, definately not as good as the original) and walk back to the dorm giggly and shivering in the midnight chill. My farmer friend, who was coming to see if I wanted to have dinner (yay!) and got sucked into the lasagna party instead, just borrowed laundry money. I am suddenly part of this tenative yet jolly web of people. They are not the ones I expected, but they're happy. And they're there.

I don't like eating here, my farmer friend says, because everyone gets up right after the meal and rushes off instead of staying and talking. It gives me indigestion.

We are making something here. I am on the edge of it, but I start to believe a little that it will work.

love,
alex

Shit. It's gotta be bad when I don't even want to write about it. I think I've decided that if I'm still this miserable in a month, then I'm going to give myself the option of saying 'this isn't working out'. If I'm still this miserable in a month, I'm going to sit down and look at my options and figure out if it's worth it or not.

The sad thing is, I changed so much, the last four years, and now I'm back to being terrified, shut in my own skin, unable to make that connection that makes it bearable to be in a strange place. I know I'm just homesick, like a thousand other kids on this campus. But the fact is, from in here it looks pretty bad.

alex

Dude, I was walking down the hallway and The One With The Dreadlocks had his door propped open and he was standing on his bed playing air guitar in his boxers.

ahem. Anyway.

Another good class this morning. And so on. Feeling sorta restless but not sure where to go - hiking? the rain finally cleared off. I want to go see The Matrix Reloaded in the student theater tonight but I'd be going by myself, I think. sad face. I know that it's simply a question of being outgoing etc. but I'm not, and the people here are cliquey. I'm not used to that. I'm used to my old school, where we're hippies _and_ we're southern, so by god we'll be nice. At least, the people I hung around were like that, and no one else's opinion meant much.

sigh.
alex

It's pouring out there. I was about to write my mother an email about how I needed a raincoat when I realized - clothing comes out of my savings account, anyway. The post office here does money orders. I am fully capable of withdrawing money from my savings account, getting a money order from the post office, and sending in an order. I need to do it soon, too, before the weather gets any worse. You know, independance, so far, consists of a lot of logistics.

love,
alex

Today, my exciting college career featured a five-hour nap. True story.

I actually needed it, so it was a good thing, and then I went to Gardens & Grounds committee and Activities Committee (activities spontaneously because there was a sock - well, a lei - on my door handle and all my books were in my room) and then I got most of my notes typed and reading done. It's amazing how much better getting work done can make you feel.

Right now, everything's okay, so I'm not going to go into how unhappy I was this morning. Actually, I'm kinda hoping to get some email done and go to sleep again so that tomorrow I have, y'know, actual energy and stuff. My weekend is filling up fast because my program has a service project all day Saturday, followed by a day of Very Important Speakers. Plus Sunday morning I have church, so it's not the shapeless void I had feared. Sometime this weekend I am going to learn to use an ATM for the first time, because I am formally out of cash. Out of cash is a funny feeling. Because my housing & food is already handled, it's very abstract. I keep poking at the idea - if you forget your PIN, you can't buy anything. can't buy anything. Huh. It's not processing. You can tell I'm painfully middle-class.

love,
alex

Can I pause for a moment in all of the busy to ask what, precisely, is the point of all this?

Don't get me wrong, I love my classes. I hear things every day that I've never thought of before, and that's rare, that used to be something that happened to me once or twice a month at best. But now I find myself with this stretch of undifferentiated weekend ahead of me, and nothing to do, and it occurs to me again how ill-suited I am for the company of adolescents. What seems to be maturity is really, I think, fear masquerading as sobresaliendo, but nonetheless it will continue to define my life. Living away from home is difficult, painfully difficult, and it's hard to seperate the fact that I am enjoying this from the constant emotional strain of dealing with it and the terrifying unfamiliarity of the situation. I am coping remarkably well. Deep breath. Keep repeating.

Then we get into the way that my views and my vocabulary have always put a barrier between me and the people around me. It's hard to believe that more education and liberal indoctrination will make me more instead of less suited for society. After a fashion, doing this whole college thing feels a little heel-kicking anarchic, because look! I know things and it pisses people off! watch as I learn more things! hah hah, are you angry now? How bout now? Monrovia is the capital of Liberia, how bout that? Needless to say, I'm also struggling with the fact that I take pleasure in knowing things vs. the fact that it is to some degree egotistical to demonstrate knowledge excessively. Yes, I know that keeping-your-hand-down-in-class is a stupid sexist girly thing, but the fact is if I didn't have that keeping me in check, I'd probably take over.

All too much all at once, but venting is good.

love,
alex

After my last class of the day, I walked and walked and walked and ended up at the UU fellowship here, where people were having a potluck dinner on the patio. They fed me; they gave me a bag of radishes and some garlic bread and a ride home so I didn't have to expand my blisters. Churches are miraculous things.

I'm feeling a real impulse to slack right now. I have some reading to do and of course the infinite notes-to-type, but I have one class tomorrow and one on Friday and then. The weekend. ::shudders:: Because I haven't made many friends here yet, all this free time is looming unattractively.

God, my Politics Technology & the Environment class is incredible. I mean, air-punching absa-fcken incredible. Today, the professor had us rearrange the tables & chairs into a square so we could all see each other, saying it was more in keeping with the principles of our program, which is supposed to be less didiadatic (that was the word he used) and more community-oriented. And he launched right from there into hierarchical views of nature, completely seamlessly, and everything made sense and yet I came out of that class knowing much less then I went in knowing. It's such a relief to have my education in the hands of people who seem to actually know what they're doing.

love,
alex

I am very lonely here; despite that, my roommate and I are on our way to becoming friends, I think. This pleases me.

Aw. Two funny-looking dreddy people flirting in the hallway!

I have nothing to say. I hope I can manage to go to sleep soon.

luv,
alex

Oh my god, the smell of the trails here. Rotting rhododendron and poplar flowers, I think. I think I must have smelled these trails in my dreams, those years in the Piedmont.

I pulled one of my usual "let's be strange and awkward to someone trying to be nice" things and now I feel bad. Eh.

I suspect it's time for more Maalox. It's interesting how I feel awkward, having left the little ecosphere of my last blog. I don't have my readers here, and I did like you guys. Oh well. My journal. La la la.

luv,
alex

Congrats. You're here. I will be checking IP addresses, so if I asked you not to read this and you're still here, I'm not happy with you.
love,
alex