My arms are his territory. I'd wondered about that, about whether there was some physical claim left on me, some tactile memory. That's where it is, where he used to wrap his arms around me and go to sleep. My arms will remember him long after the rest of me forgets.

Oh my god. It's worse then I thought. It's the perfect goddamn rebound relationship. He lives seven states away, and I only talk to him via computer, but he makes me feel good about myself.

I don't want to fall in love with a name on a screen! I want real relationships - friendships, flirtations, infatuations - with real people whose faces crinkle when they smile, who live here and speak in voices instead of in the tinny mental reading of text.

Have you ever noticed how I always decide things are bad ideas, and it never stops me?

some day I will be sensible. Anyway, I expect to be out of the computer-dependant funk pretty soon. Out of the very borderline friendship with the boy from jersey, probably not.

love,
alex>

Going to sleep at nine. Or at least off the computer.

I think I'm manipulating someone to make myself feel better. But the thing is, it will probably come to nothing, and you know? how some people just sort of hand over the reins to their emotions because they want something something something to happen to them just for happening's sake?

just leave the young in better condition then I found them, I suppose. I'm not doing it on purpose. It does suck, though, how in time you end up seeing every mask from the other side.

sorry for the obscurity - I'm exhausted in many ways -

love,
alex

Well, the ex-boyfriend is out of the building, gone for the weekend. Sinking feeling. I don't think I'll ever be over him. Of course, it's only been, what, two days? Still, I need to be careful. I need to not use his friendship - if we actually manage this friend thing - as a crutch to keep from moving on, making other friends, you know.

Two weeks till Miami. I discovered today that I can run half a mile at a stretch. Of course, I need to get that up as much as I can, so I'll be going to bed early tonight and getting up at a godawful time tomorrow to go to the track. This is a good idea. Really.

You know my problem? I got lonely when I was here by myself over break, and I never really got un-lonely. And I miss him.

love,
alex

Well, the ex-boyfriend is out of the building. Sinking feeling. I don't think I'll ever be over him. Of course, it's only been, what, two days? Still, I need to be careful. I need to not use his friendship - if we actually manage this friend thing - as a crutch to keep from moving on, making other friends, you know.

Two weeks till Miami. I discovered today that I can run half a mile at a stretch. Of course, I need to get that up as much as I can, so I'll be going to bed early tonight and getting up at a godawful time tomorrow to go to the track. This is a good idea. Really.

You know my problem? I got lonely when I was here by myself over break, and I never really got un-lonely. And I miss him.

love,
alex

Asterix404: HE WAS A CHRISTIAN!!!!
Asterix404: babe I deff do need to save you
Brighid314: yep
Brighid314: liberal methodist
Asterix404: god damn now thats horrable
Asterix404: and there arn't such thigns
Asterix404: good god woman
Asterix404: a christian

It never ends, does it? What really sucks is he tries so hard not to be a jackass 19 year old, and really, no one expects him to be anything but that. I would have a much easier time ignoring him henceforth if he'd just go ahead and be a terrible human being. But no.

I tell you what, by the time I'm thirty I don't think I'll have any friends left that aren't relics of failed relationships.

It's beautiful today, warm and very sunny. As I did not sleep enough last night I am going to go take a nap with the window open and call it getting fresh air. Maybe I'll have more energy to get my reading & all done after that.

love,
alex

::snort:: so it turns out me & the boy did break up before fall break. Yeah. I sorta wish I'd known that earlier, so I could have spent more time getting over him and less time sinking farther into infatuation. I'll be okay. I just love him.

I had one of those really good days where everything falls apart around you and it just doesn't slow you down.

love,
alex

My program's new academic building just opened. All day, kids have been climbing up the stairs, staring upwards with this look of wonder on their face. That's what the upperclassmen get for never visiting the new dorm, I guess.

I think the boy's avoiding me. I don't know, and I wish I didn't care. But the fact is, I'm having a really good day today - you know the kind of day where you wake up once and realize you're still alive, and then you sort of wake up again and realize that you're glad? Sounds morbid that way, but it makes me sickeningly cheerful.

love to all,
alex

The drive back - with a strange quiet vegetarian chain-smoker, up and down the mountains - was foggy, rainy, misty in a twenty feet in front the world ends kind of way. I will learn the regional terminology. The grade is not 'the grade', it's up the mountain, like there's only one and all the other hills are part of it. The trees are still changing along the way, beautiful and watercolor in the fog.

I talked to my youth minister about the Boy. She gave me this look, and said, Alex, you're a dignified person, and falling in love is an undignified thing. You're going to have to go easy on yourself. I saw him already - having constructed a plausible excuse to go by his room - and I forgot in four days the sort of breathless trepidation that I feel when I see him. He's such a putz, and I'm so infatuated.The other thing my youth minister had to say when I talked with her about was, "Alex, you haven't had a positive thing to say about this guy, and you can't stop smiling." Which sums it up very well. I bring up his bad points in an attempt to quell the dumb grin and I just can't.

I gave a talk on Nicaragua at the Quaker meeting youth group this morning. I'm not sure what I got accomplished, but I sort of got in the zone where I'm talking about something I love and nothing can slow me down. Which made it easier. Seeing them made me miss my own youth group, but it may be good that I didn't go to that. Right now there's drama, and I'd end up on one side or another of all the bridges that are getting burnt.

What my family does, when we're together: my mother is huggy, because I'm the only other person who is. I speak bad Spanish at my brother, who speaks no Spanish despite classes and gets frustrated. Yesterday my sister and I read Annabel Lee together, then we sang Loreena McKennit's adaptation of The Highwayman, and then I read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to her and my brother. My brother has my same drastic taste in poetry; I gave him his first copy of The Second Coming by Yeats (well, pointed it out on the internet) and it became his favorite poem, and now T.S. Eliot is joining Yates on his list of favorites. I think I'll give him a book of poems for some holiday.

My grandparents were visiting. My grandfather hangs out in the house with us; my grandmother putters around the RV and only materializes for meals. I'd forgotten, in the several years it's been since I saw them, how much I love my grandmother. She's not a very nice person; she's petulant and often mean and has had a tough life. I really love her, and I'm not sure how this happened, and I wish that I could spend more time with her. They always move on after two or three days.

It's good, and also wierd, to be back in the dorm. My friends here all had dramatic fall breaks. (example: "son, we're getting divorced." "Oh. Well, I'm gay." Yeah, that's a fun one.) I had the distressing realization that I don't really care who I see or don't in the vast catching-up, except for one person. The betrayels of the infatuated mind. You just watch, right here, where I suddenly have started to care? This is when he'll probably end it. There are few things I hate more than the prospect of future suffering. Heh.

It was a pretty drive back, and I am glad to have seen my family.

Love,
alex

There is a post that I wanted to write before I wrote about the dark: I didn't get a chance to because my mother came by to take me to dinner. Yay parents. Yay parents with credit cards. Lemon poppyseed parfait! $1.95!

Wandering through the woods earlier (this time in daylight) a little off the stoner trail above my dorm, I found this bamboo hut in the woods. It's a frame, basically, made of bamboo and what look like cheap guitar strings and hemp twine, and someone made bamboo windchimes to hang there, and someone painted rocks to hold up the four posts with suns and spirals and with the name of our program. Someone painted the name of our program. On their hut in the woods. I will never get sick of how people love being here. I

This may be obscure. Please note: I am terrified of the dark.

Terror is a way through.

I have always felt, obscurely, that wandering around in the woods, preferably in less-than-ideal conditions, is central to ego disollution. The first time I rea lly understood where fear came from, I was thirteen (as old as that? maybe twelve) and had stood outside in my pajamas in the midst of a grove of bamboo in a windstorm at midnight. After that, I understood fear. Fear is the sudden desperate urge to preser ve the boundary between what is out there and what is in here, in the self. That's why we hate the dark, I think. It makes us doubt the boundaries. Tonight I walked through the woods down to the pond, no company, no flashlight, walking into low hanging branches and stumbling over roots, murmering to myself, terror is a way through. Did it do me any good? I can say that I managed to scare myself really badly. An hour in the woods in the dark will do that. I can say that I saw a lot of stars, and that even in the dark and cold the pond is so peaceful I never want to leave it.

I need to learn about fear. I need to find a way through.

love,
alexw

Ursula K. LeGuin is one of the very great joys of my life. It takes a while - easily my dozenth reading, in this case - to recognize how a book of hers is constructed, written like a peice of music, with themes that repeat, slightly rephrased and always so subtle that the ninth time through they're barely apparent and the tenth time only a little stronger. I am beginning to do this thing, with the bare ten novels I have here, where I finish a book for the plot and go back and read again two, three, four times for the style, for the subtle in-line finishes that only craftsmen and connoisuers notice. It's a strong book that will hold up to that kind of reading. Right now it's The Disposessed. Before this it was Orson Scott Card's Lovelock, and I think that may be only because Katherine Kidd's sarcasm and voice saved it from Card's usual dry morality. Le Guin can write her little literary symphonies alone, and they are always always such a pleasure. There is a scene in this book that changed my life. The hero - well, protagonist, at least, Shevek - is alone, and fleeing from the police, and in a completely alien city. And this begger, this old drunk comes up to him and asks for something to buy a drink, and Shevek gives him the last of his money. You have to read it in context, I guess. That changed everything, that little paragraph.

There are just enough people here that now I'm wondering why I'm not socializing. I think tomorrow I'll have pancakes for breakfast. Tomorrow night I go home, and I'm not sure how I feel about doing that. A lot has changed since I last saw my mother. A lot hasn't.

love,
alex

Glorious solitude! Free to play my music loud and jump on my bed, free just to walk in the woods, more than that free to walk without the constant pressure of the social brain, all the thousand things that must be noted about how every person you pass stands, speaks, moves in the world. It's so much pressure to be just outside the crowd. Now I am the crowd. I rambled through a lengthy bit of wilderness this morning, getting my shoes covered in mud and my jacket coated in burrs, which is an excellent way to tell when you've been somewhere worth going. It's so cold out! I lay on the short grass of a gravel-road margin watching the sky and singing to myself, and thinking, this is the Appalachian childhood. Not the twisty-misty mountaintop trees and the fog and the moss forests, untouched in all their through-hiker splendor. Appalachia is parked pickups and goldenrod and keep-out signs, and gravel roads that crunch underfoot like wet snow, and rambling fields around ruined shacks far from where anyone ever goes. Appalachia lives in those red-and-gold leaved hollows and does indeed have a rusted Chevy Nova buried under creeping vines, and a thousand flowers growing in the wild-rose wrecks above the marsh. Appalachia is a name and a noise and a constant wind and the downy-seeded brambles of my childhood, bowing anxious amidst the cloud-scuttle and chicory. I have missed it. All these quiant towns, so oriented towards the fall colors - this isn't New England. This is Appalachia. It's the color of rust, and we know it. I never want to live anywhere else.

love,
alex

Dinner: Hostess blueberry muffins and a bag of Doritos.
Company: an empty dorm.
Mmm.

love,
alex

Sad and lonely! (cha cha cha).

Not really. It's just an interesting internet age social conundrum: there is a sinking feeling caused by seeing no one you want to talk to on your buddy list. I have spent the whole day in the dorm, to the point of skipping a class to clean my room, but that's okay. My room is very clean. My papers are written, with one exception. My primary challenge right now is remembering that break hasn't started yet; I have an interview to do tomorrow and a paper to write on it the same day, along with an almost-full compliment of classes.

You know, everyone always said, don't get into a relationship in the first semester of college. I think I'm in a relationship. It kind of snuck up. It was kind of just a Thing, and then it wasn't even that, but now it's back with a vengeance. He's slept in my room three nights straight, again, often as not just so we can talk and fight over blankets and irritate my roommate.

Funny quote break: "Do you need me to step in and bust some heads? I'd kill them for you!" - Chris, my RA, on the people with the room above mine.

Anyway, I think I'm being wierd about the relationship thing, but I'm being wierd in the trying really hard not to get too attached too fast sort of way. To my mind, this is more productive then getting wierd in the we'll-be-together-forever way. I have noticed that trying not to get attached doesn't keep me from feeling jealous, though. Interesting. There's a whole range of emotions I've never had cause to go through before, and I'm trying to sort of catch the corner of each of them to hold onto and think about and wonder why about.

I'm tired. No one is online to talk to. Bah. Good night.

love,
alex

Oh dear.

This morning we watched "Mohammed: Legacy of a Prophet" in History of Literacy.(incidentally, it's an excellent documentary, which I highly recommend). In one bit a woman scholar was talking about the experience of Mohammed when the prophecy hit: terrifying, enveloping, compelling. At one point she said that Mohammed sometimes experienced the calling as a great ringing like a bell.

A great bell.

Sitting on a patio in Managua, Nicaragua, talking with an old Sandanista woman, I heard her speak these words: "I want people to know that at one time it was better. That the hungry were fed and the sick were cared for and the people were listened to. Because I don't see that happening again." And when she spoke those words it was as if I was a bell that had been struck, a reverberation, an immense terrifying sense of here. I spoke of it as a calling, then.

I need to commit myself again to this work. I need to begin the process of accomplishing some response to that calling. Coming to college was part of that, but unless I remember what I'm doing this for, it isn't going to get me anywhere.

eh. not trying to be scary.

love,
alex

Ahem. So, after several days of being lectured constantly by my friends about the dangers of backsliding once you've decided that a relationship is Over, I kind of woke up next to the Boy this morning. Whoops. Oh well. I'm just going to stop worrying about anything related to him altogether and hope that, being young, this is the kind of thing I can get away with emotionally.

In related news, I finally caved & threw away the rest of my Ortho-Evra. The constant zits were bad enough, but it was being hungry constantly, after I ate, while I ate, no matter how much I ate that I couldn't handle. Never mind my waistline, it wasn't good for my budget or my temperment. Still, in a soon-I-won't-be-starving fit of celebration, I ate a lot of sour-cream and cheesecake type things yesterday, and none of my pants fit. Eh. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to take pre-Miami training seriously.

I had a couple of good conversations yesterday, one of them with someone I'd been meaning to talk to since school started. Also, today someone complimented me on my hair, which is made me exceedingly happy. However, I overslept and missed church. I guess this is a good reason to go Wednesday.

I haven't gotten half as much done this weekend as I'd hoped, homework-wise, but I got enough done that I think I can get by. Thursday and Friday, I'm going to have to set a study schedule and stick to it.

I haven't gone outside yet today - one thing I dislike about dorms, how you can get by without standing under sky for so long - but out the window streamers of spiderweb are blowing iridescent in the afternoon sun. I will always miss how beautiful this place is.

love,
alex

In a fit of early-morning pique, I chopped three inches off my hair with desk scissors. It looks fabulous. I like looking in the mirror a lot more.

Yesterday after my angst attack I went out and spent a good two hours clambering up mountainsides and through streambeds, always bent to pass under the rhododendron. It was wonderful to be in the woods again. Then I came back to the dorm and spent an hour hauling mulch for our strawberry bed. Today I am sore. This is a good thing.

I am one of the few people hanging around the dorm doing laundry & homework tonight, and I think that's a good thing too. I enjoy some peace and quiet.

things are good.

love,
alex

In a fit of early-morning pique, I chopped three inches off my hair with desk scissors. It looks fabulous. I like looking in the mirror a lot more.

Yesterday after my angst attack I went out and spent a good two hours clambering up mountainsides and through streambeds, always bent to pass under the rhododendron. It was wonderful. Then I came back to the dorm and spent an hour hauling mulch for our strawberry bed. Today I am sore. This is a good thing.

I am one of the few people hanging around the dorm doing laundry & homework tonight, and I think that's a good thing too. I enjoy some peace and quiet.

things are good.

love,
alex

That would be the sweet sound of compromise you're hearing.

The deal: I will stay on campus for two days of fall break, then go home for the weekend to see my family. This suits me perfectly, as I will see my family, have time to hug the grandparents on their way out, and yet I don't have that horrific rushed feeling that the second classes end I have to drop everything and hurry home. It will be good to have a few days here with many fewer people and the peace and quiet to do work.

love,
alex

I'm going to Miami! I'm going to Miami!

I am going to protest the FTAA. I am going to battle for democracy in the streets (in a peaceful way, well, on my side) and I will probably be tear gassed and rubber bulleted and possibly arrested and right now I am so happy. So happy. So excited.

This guy and I, we're going to start training together to improve our run-like-hell-from-the-cops skills. Oh yeah. God I'm excited.

Meaning! Perseverance! Hope! Without these things my life is a pit! With these things it is illuminated! I want to live this life, I want this to be my life, I want everything illuminated. Call it false prophets. I will still follow.

Getting up at 6:30 tomorrow to practice my running like hell.

love,
alex

long outpouring of negativity.

I need to vent. Deal.

This room is too close-packed, four rows of computers four feet apart, each computer a bare three feet from its neighbor. I can smell an amalgum of toothpaste and shampoo and deodorant, US-p eople smells. Today I gave half a presentation that I was unprepared for, and tried to avoid conversation at lunch. I am trying to let go of striving, once again. I am realizing that it is only the procrastination-panic and the native intelligence that is keeping me from failing. I've had too much.

I think at center a part of my problem is that I can't just be tired or stressed or lonely. I have this idea that getting overwhelmed is a sign of some life-destroying character flaw. I won't pretend this isn't a real concern. I also need to acknowledge that once I stopped blaming everything on everybody else, I became pretty unmerciful towards myself, especially as far as getting behind. There is no good answer, besides that I need rest.

One of my classmates - I sat with him at lunch today - is staying on campus fall break, and he's using it as an opportunity to hike out into the woods and fast for two days. I have never been more jealous of anyone. I know that I need to go home and see my family, but that's incredibly non-restful. It means sleeping on the floor and dealing with a constant barrage of upset people. And my grandparents will be there. My grandpare nts fight non-stop at the top of their lungs. I know that it's pretty horrible of me not to want to spend time with my grandparents, but even thinking about being around them for three days makes me feel all crawly and crowded and sick. If I was rested an d calm and happy, sure, I'd love to spend a few days with them, fighting or no. But right now I'm so tired and three days of screaming and crying and constant insinuations about the state of my virtue and the destination of my soul? not so much.

So ye s. I know family is important. But I would give anything to be sitting in the woods with Haze staring at a tree for two days instead.

love,
alex

It's bad. I'm trying to fight it off and actually get stuff done. I'm just so tired. I'm questioning everything, and I know that it's because I'm tired and lonely and afraid of everything because I'm tired. Today I discovered that I in fact want the boy back. But I think that's just because having him around soothed my loneliness. I think I haven't found the people I need to. I don't know. I'm going to go home and hopefully spend some time with my youth minister from my home church, and maybe things will get a little clearer. I miss religion. I went in the episcopal youth house on campus and I almost converted on the spot. All youth religion is the same, I think. It involves more in the way of sleeping bags and pasta suppers then doctrine, but God is there. I miss home.

love,
alex

I had a dream about this. About sneaking through maintenance hallways and rooftop hatchways until I stood on top of the hotel, except in my dream it was so much higher up, with the whole city laid out before me like lights from an airplane, and below that top platform was the mesh from Toronto City Hall. Even in my dream I was amazed that I wasn't scared. And I was proud. I think I need an adventure.

Yesterday turned out much better then I expected. I think part of my problem is that living around so many people, I tend to assume I'm getting socialized when in reality I'm just getting exhausted without making any real connections. Also, it turns out that when the Boy says just friends, he really means friends. I suspect that in the end this is a bad idea, but in the meantime it's good to have company.

I'm writing a NAFTA fact sheet that attempts to lay out good reasons to oppose the FTAA without being shrill. I'm having trouble with this because either it's not searchable in English or the Mexican government just doesn't keep labor statistics. I know that it's next to impossible to keep track of small-scale farmers in a country the size, diversity, complexity, and development status of Mexico. Still, I'm used to US/European style numbers on demand and it's frustrating.

love,
alex

They're clearing out a section of mountainside for the new football station. Digging into it, bulldozers and all. The top of that hill is a grove of trees that's very precious to me. They're all orange and red against sky, against the growl of the machinery. Every time I walk where I can see it my stomach clenches and I want to cry. I don't know how to stop this.

I am very confused, but I suspect rest will help. I'm going to go watch a movie, eat pistachios, and go to sleep.

love,
alex

I'm so tired.

Work left for tonight:

rewrite paper with name detail compare
underline name detail compare with squiggles
Different class: read entire Communist Manifesto. Note comments.

love,
alex

See, two twin entries, here, one my usual hippie self and the other me being necessarily vicious.

A lot of students at church today, which was good to see. The sermon was from one of the six founders of our church, a man who grew up in a town three miles from the university in which everyone went to the same Baptist fellowship. While he was talking, people kept nodding & commenting on things that he said, and I realized that at least 50% of the members of our church grew up in the area. That's good to know, especially in a tourist town like this.

I walked back through town, and spent a long time in the local witchy bookshop. I love how it smells in there. I love the hari krishna chants playing over the sound system. I love sitting in the back corner where they keep fascinating things like 'the cannabible' and 'the big book of housing systems' and reading my way through their periodicals. Turns out the head of the womens' group at my church does readings in the back room. Her full-time job. This, I admire.

On the walk back - the trees are so golden! how can the trees be so golden? - I noticed a particular noise of birds. One of the things about this elevation is that the crickets are always louder than the birds. I stopped under a tree - maple, I think, but yellow - and watched until I could figure out what the noise was. Little fluffy newborn-looking birds, like chickadees or nut hatches, very tiny. They must be migrating.

And now, the mean bit:

If the boy tries to de-ditch the relationship, I have to reditch it, I think. I think it's an imperative. The mixedness of my feelings are not under discussion. This last week was the happiest I've had here, being free of obsessing about him.

That's all.

love,
alex

You know how you go away somewhere and come back and suddenly everything's so small? The dorms look like toys set on the side of the mountain. I had a really good mini-break. I realized that I've learned to be afraid, being here, and I remembered who I was before I was afraid. I realized that I'd lost sight of the shaping passion of my life, that nicaraguadense fire. I remembered what it was like to be a gringa. I met & became friends with a sizable sample of the far left on my campus. I discovered that I will, indeed, be attending the giant angry street party outside the FTAA, and if my as s is not in jail Fort Benning shortly after. I met a lot of old friends. I remembered who I want to be.

My roommate says he showed up twice. Twice. While I was gone. Once at three in the morning. See, it was an innocent enough Thing while it lasted, but from this point it would just become a bad habit. I've been happy to be free of him.

None of this will increase my willpower & keep me from doing something stupid, I suspect. But no. I will put my foot down. enough of him.

love,
alex

Democratic debate transcript.

I know that Clark is coming off looking bad because everyone else is going after him. And they're doing that because they're pretty sure he'll win the nomination. But I just don't approve of this guy. I think sneaking him into the White House as a Democrat was like Dubya coming in as a compassionate conservative. You think, hey, they can't be that bad, and then wham. I will vote for him unless someone comes up with a tie between him and Project for a New American Century.

And can you believe Edwards? What a putz! What a mealy-mouthed... okay, I'm ashamed that we elected him as a Senator at this point. Everyone else is trying to discuss the crises (crises, multiple and serious) that are facing this country and he's nattering on with the EXACT SAME THINGS that everyone has said in every presidential campaign since the beginning of time! He keeps trying to get them off Iraq and onto how the humbleness of his roots would mean he represents the common man. Right. Speaking as a common woman from his state, he won't even talk to us. Not even with an appointment. At least they aren't going to nominate him.

Dismaying realization: of all of them, I like Sharpton. he hasn't got a snowball's chance in hell, and I'm not going to pretend that race has nothing to do with it.

I love how everyone gets their pet lobbies in. Lieberman goes for the Hispanic vote. Everyone goes for reservists and veterans, just because of the time. Edwards goes for The Common Man. Carol Mosley Braun goes for women, of course. Sharpton doesn't play that. Dean has us in his pocket anyway.

Went to sleep at 3:30, got up at 7:30 after sleeping very poorly. I'm headed to a conference this weekend. Maybe I'll sleep in the van. Heh.

love,
alex

Two current debates: One, I want to take pictures of people here before I go home for fall break, so I have to get up the gumption to, y'know, accost random people I know with a camera. Not good at that. Two, you would not believe what I'm debating bringing back to my dorm: computer games. The bane of my existance. The addictive fuzzy-brain-mold substitute for real life. The Sims.

On one hand, I know that computer games are counterproductive etc. etc. On the other hand, sometimes you really need to hide from the world, you know? I can't be productive all the time, every single day. It's exhausting. I want a cave.

It's raining and I haven't gone and ordered my raincoat yet. Bah.

In more uplifting news, I went to see David Sedaris yesterday. That is a funny, funny man. I've been retelling stories to J. and she keeps making me tell them again. It's gotten to the point where we go right to the collapsing with laughter while gasping out random phrases: "six to eight..." (clutching sides) "pretend to kick you..." (tears of mirth running down our faces) "Spain! SPAIN!". So if you ever get a chance to see David Sedaris live, it's worth it, go.

That's about it. I should make the requisite I-am-a-nonshallow-person reference to the news, but really, to that whole STATE, if you're going to do something like that with your votes, I'm going to ignore your governer until he goes away. Trust me, most of my family lives in Minnesota, I've seen it before.

love,
alex

Took a lot of pictures today. I'm using a disposable camera left over from summer vacation; when I get done maybe I'll scan them in. None of me, mostly of trees.

Good day, despite an anxiety-ridden visit to the infirmary. They had a lot of trouble taking my blood pressure, which may be why I'm so dizzy lately. It was hazy today and very autumnal.

That's sufficient, I think. I really need to go study. But today I started doing my work again in the one class I had let slide, and I was happy all day because of it.

love,
alex

Insense' que vous ^etes pourquoi / Vous promettez vous de vivre longtemps, vous qui ne pouvez / Compter sur un seul jour.
-Also not morbid.

Ai, mamacita, I am so happy here. Today I walked back from class in a haze of red leaves and wind, walking through my building thinking how good it will be after break when all of my program is in one building and it's one house all together. My school. My very own.

needless to say, I'm having a cheerful day. That is good. Off to write papers.

love,
alex

Headache, not helped at all by the fuzzy moniter. Today I skipped anthropology for the first time to write a paper for Environmental Politics. A sleepless weekend is catching up with me; however, I should note that I was very pleased to eat lunch with an interesting assortment of people from my program today, and also that the cafeteria pierogies were excellent. I'm really hungry these days, I think because the damn Ortho-Evra is pumping so much progesterone into my blood that my body thinks I'm eating for two. The campus ministry for my church has really been dumped in my lap, and I'm off to look for flyers and sloganish things so as to leaflett and attempt to form a group that does not suck. That is all.

love,
alex

Okay, now after about 6 more hours of sleep I am realizing a lot of things that stand to make me pretty sad. How much I thought about when I'd see him again. How I, not him, was the reason this was a Thing and not a Relationship. How I need to learn not to keep myself so safe.

Do you realize that this makes two guys in a row who have ended relationships with me because they want a platonic friendship more? The first is now one of my best friends. High hopes for the second. Still, what is this about me?

love,
alex

Alleluia praise God. The Thing with the Boy is _over_. I went to talk to him today & he went, you know, this has just gotten too wierd. I don't think that this is what either of us need from life right now. I think he was being honest, and he was right. We're both a little young to have an arrangement as cynical as what we were heading towards. We need to be free to do falling-in-love getting-our-hearts-broken giddy adolescent sorts of things, not settle for a non-relationship that exists between the hours of midnight and 6, Saturdays and Sundays. I am glad that he was enough of a friend to see me through this far. I'm glad that he's an honest enough person to just let it end when it needs to end instead of sucking us into something that probably wouldn't have been healthy for much longer. I feel so free having it over now.

Let's see if any of that will keep me from crying. Sometimes you just gotta let it pass on through.

In other news, went to church & hung out with the other UU kid in the dorm, who makes me very happy. I need to be free to be a UU kid, too.

love,
alex

So _this_ is why I haven't been having fun yet at college. When they said I had to go out on the weekends, they knew what they were talking about.

So, went to my Very First drunk party - an actual kegger with an actual keg - in order to be sober company for my friend J the DD. I spent most of the evening lying with J and Ryn and Amanda on a couch in the living room, watching the people get gradually less and less steady on their feet. I love my program. We live together, we have classes together, we party together, this was a (My Program) party. This was held for the birthday of one of my friends, actually, and so it was primarily really cool people, and it made me very happy just to sit in a corner of the couch and talk about bullshit and lean on Jess and go outside to the moony cloudy sky and walk back to the car laughing and laughing, dead sober unsteady on my feet.

Car back - Mada carrying the smell of the solid-blue-smoke garage on her clothes, Jess slowing seriously for every cop car, three drunk and two vicariously tipsy teenagers singing Sublime and rolling back home through the yellow-flashing night. Now I will go to my room and try to sleep a little before the rest of them show up again at three and knock on my door.

This was a good idea. I have people to wake for church tomorrow, so I have to actually get out of bed this Sunday.

Now, passing the window of the computer lab, people wave and tap on the glass. This was a good idea.

love,
alex

Today, as part of our lecture on the Biblical role of the Canaanites, my 60-year-old dr-of-theology professor sang "There Can't be a Revolution Without General C opulation".
Twice.

In other news, I spent a long time out in the woods yesterday straying off the path and generally causing erosion and falling in puddles. There is a stream here that has worn its way down through the sedimentary rock, a canyon in miniature in a tunnel of rhododendron. I had to half-climb half-crawl through, to a place where I could stand upright on a rock overlooking the still pools. It is so beautiful here.

love,
alex

"That would be the greatest science fiction movie ever! Like, an eight-legged woman that ripped the heads off her mates and ate them! And she could have guns!"

- my Environmental Politics professor
during a conversation about interspecies ethics

You know, the new Chemical Brothers video has really surprised me. On one hand, it's a little hackneyed for Chemical Brothers, who usually deliver a sarcastic punch or punchline or at least a vaguely queasy feeling. This one seems to be straight-up feel-good, and in a cliched sort of way. But on the other hand, I can't stop watching the damn thing.

Okay, I know I'm obsessing. Forgive me, this is sort of a new thing in my life. But I would like to feel secure in his opinion of me. That's all.

love,
alex