I should stop writing entry fragments and go read Plato, but I just realized that, as of Jan. 12, I've been keeping a blog for a year (previous: Fallingrain). I feel like posting a retrospective eventually. For my four loyal readers :)

alex

For my birthday, I found Dumpster Mecca. The back of food service. It's like a one-stop home organizing shop: crates, jars, boxes, bins. I've already redone half the bookshelf I made out of cardboard with much-stronger, much prettier milk crates. Next up: do I have the gumption to dumpster food?

love,
alex

Tomorrow's my birthday, and all I can think is, just three days till the next round of primaries. I feel like checking the polls in the states in question would be cheating.

I'll be nineteen.

love,
alex

Long snowy day. I think I'll go for a walk, clean my room, try not to do anything too productive. I have a whole weekend and nowhere to go.

I am pretty worn out. I need a long walk, I think. I need to recover some sense of place. I have had two days of class and I'm tired, but then, before that I was doing spectacularly new things. The fact that I'm not now in a state of total crash is awesome.

And may I say that Dale is a spectacular writer.

love,
alex

Everything happens for a reason, and I just saw the woman who took me to Nicaragua.

love,
alex

I hate being friends with boys because inevitably they're as sholes to girls. I love this one friend because he's a gentle good person, but he's still essentially using the girl he's involved with.

I don't write about my love life, because there hasn't been much of it, but I have found enough time to use people and to be used - simultaneously - and also to have something, if not a relationship or for that matter s ex, with someone I loved. And use was pretty much what I'd been told it was, exercise that left you lonely. And loving someone was everything I've been told it was, and left me hoping and less afraid.

Have I talked about my alter-egos here? there are people who I look like and get mistaken for on the street, who belong to my church & are activists, I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that.

One of them had a baby. She's not much older then I am. I think I know the father.

One of the things that worries me is how much I want a baby. To know that one of these people had one is enough to dissuade me, though. It's been done. Somewhere out there there is a baby that looks like me, being raised by a woman who acts like me, and that's wierd and ironic and sufficient unto the day.

I don't know. It's all love.
alex

I miss the feeling of my DC friends. I was so happy in that house, so happy. I woke up feeling good about the world. I miss the feeling of them. And this brushes past back into memories of Miami, into all the travels and travails.

I don't want to go to DC in April. I will, but I don't want to.

love,
alex

Imagine DC snow, large, delicate flakes against the orange streetlights, against the fairy-tale lines of the Georgetown townhouses. Imagine us, young, cold, carrying a lot of luggage, stranded, say, in a gas station calling on a dying cell phone for a place to stay. Imagine a house with a name and siding falling off, with stained chipped floors and a constant sagey reek and a bicycle de-icing in the bathtub. Imagine a GW dorm room, an overheated expanse of cheap carpet and the smell of ramen and a person we'd never met before who took us to the cafeteria and told us to eat whatever we wanted, as much as we wanted, and then hugged us and sent us on our way. Imagine subway stations at midnight, the wierd clanking of the wheels and the weight of everything on our shoulders. Imagine brilliant kids, in love with their lives, with interesting tattoos and jobs they love (bicycles flitting among the hulks of the SUVs, priviledged and dangerous, bags of paperwork on their backs). Imagine coming to a place with your hands empty and leaving with your hands empty, having given everything you could and recieved everything you could.

I have seen the heart of a city. No tourist jaunt can give you what being stranded and broke can. I believe completely in the world that I see bright between the cracks.

I am happy and worn and a little disconcerted, dropping back into college everyday. I would give a lot to have pictures. I did consider, for a full five minutes, dropping out of my life and becoming a DC bike messenger.

love,
alex

Love! Love love love love love! I have been sleeping on floors and in corners, I have been living on oatmeal and cheap red wine, I have been falling in love with the kind of people you only meet in a city, I am in love. I am in love.

I will tell you so much more when I have time.

home and safe,

love
alex

Stranded in DC, having an absolutely awesome time. Radicals! Snow! Houses with names! Floorspace! I hope you all are having as much fun wherever you are.

Living on the generosity of strangers
alex

An hour of gospel music and Nikki Giovanni poetry doesn't make me as happy as seeing that one person I've been missing from the array. I admit to watching him a little, in between watching the speaker and the interpreter whose hands flew keeping up. I'd missed his grin. This is no particular person, just the one in the group I've been missing, the one I don't see in the meetings, in the cafeteria, between classes. Even the one who's a professor is used to me knocking on the broom closet she calls an office every now and then. Him, I hadn't seen. It's good to hug someone who wants to hug me, to talk to someone who wants to talk to me, and feel that affection solid underlying whatever's going on.

I know I'm transparent. I also know that I'm proud to have people who saw who I was in Miami, and know me as that. It frightens me a little, but it makes me very glad.

love
alex

Incidentally, if any of you wimped out and missed the State of the Union, you missed some of the best entertainment television in the last year. And if you weren't in my dorm, you missed a happy evening of throwing things at the screen and laughing hysterically every time the camera cut to Ted Kennedy. It was exhausting, but it was also serious funny, especially when the Dems hijacked the bit about the Patriot act ("The USA patriot act is set to expire [seven minutes of applause] and that is a _bad_ thing!". I paraphrase.) However, by next State of the Union, I want beer. Everyone else had beer and I did not. Sad. I don't drink but politics calls for it.

Too busy. Waaay too busy. I should not be writing this, I should be off doing busy things. Love to you all,
alex

come on up to the front of the bus / I'll be ridin up there.

I wanted to tell this story to someone in our bookshop, but I got a ride home because it was raining instead of staying there to breathe incense and talk to strangers. This morning at church, two old civil rights organizers, white kids from California who met at a Carolina sit-in, now old and merry and rambling, with guitars in hand. They sang strike songs, and sit-in songs, and marching songs. They had the kids come up to the front of the sanctuary and told them about Rosa Parks, and how sometimes, when you do the right thing, people won't like it, and they might even make you go to jail, but it's still the right thing. Then they led us in songs - the Sit-In Song, This Little Light of Mine, The Front of the Bus, a wobbly song, Eyes on the Prize. The husband of the couple said he'd learned Eyes on the Prize at Morningstar Fellowship, while working at the Highlander School, and then at the founding meeting of SNCC he taught it to anyone who would listen. (Keep my eyes on the prize, oh lord, oh lord.) We sang We Shall Overcome, standing, swaying, holding hands, and the woman on my right was black, and the man on my left, holding a baby in the crook of his arm, was white. The woman singing told us that it had been a strike song from the South Carolina lowlands, the Food and Tobacco Union song when they struck for months in freezing weather. It got passed through SNCC, and spread like wildfire. Then one night a conference at the Highland school - one of the few places where black and white people organized together - was raided. The police came in, fifty or sixty of them, and made everyone sit in the dark while their bags were searched, in the dark with police with flashlights all over. There was a group of teenagers there, going to the conference, sitting in the gathering hall in the dark, and one of them started to hum, we shall overcome, under his breath. And then a thirteen-year-old girl started to sing, to the old tune, we are not afraid. We are not afraid. And everyone started singing, those children in a seige in the dark, those people who were risking death to be there, and then it was the cops that worried, it was the cops who were startled, taken aback, scared, by the voice of a thirteen-year-old in the dark.

And I found out that the Greensboro sit-in happened on my birthday, exactly thirty-five years before I was born.

It is such a comfort to see old activists, weathered people who are going gray and starting to forget where they left things and still doing the work, still there, still strong. Keep my eyes on the prize, oh lord, oh lord.

I am glad.

love,
alex

From The Guardian:

Olivia Goldsmith, the novelist whose book The First Wives' Club became a hit movie, has died of complications from plastic surgery. She was 54.

The sky has been the same color and the light the same brightness all day today - gray, completely gray. I don't mind a day of not wanting to go out. I love living in a dormitory because on a Saturday, one can get out of bed at ten and enjoy all the benefits of being a morning person. No one's around, the halls are empty, it's wonderfully quiet. (compare this to the dorm sock-skating tournament going on outside my door at one this morning.) It's a three-day weekend, and the dorm is very quiet, and I'm grateful. Every time I swear I'm going to have a quiet evening in my room, I end up talking to someone for hours. That's cool and all. But I'm also getting tired. I spent so many years with the social scope of a tortoise that I have no way to tell when I need time alone. Being not just sufficiently but excessively socialized is a new feeling.

My roommate caught me using her computer last night, since my room computer doesn't have an internet connection. Things will be a little icy for a while.

Speaking of icy, no hot water in the dorm.

We're reading Horatio Alger novels about cute ragged street children in Modernity in Literature. I was reading my Nicaragua journals to refamiliarize myself with actual street children and I realized that I don't recognize the person who wrote those entries. I remember, I can still see the hostel, the streets from the bus window, the cooperativa river, the trees behind WFP house clearer than yesterday, but the person I was before Elaina said a few fateful sentances, sitting on her back patio, is alien. Did my life change right there? Have I simply grown up as I should have, over the course of a year and a half? I am realizing a need to go back to Nicaragua. Next summer. I will find a way to get there.

love,
alex

Today: adventures in crap.

No, really. Both metaphorically and literally.

first, last night, around eleven, the boy from down the hall flushed his cell phone down our toilet. This was funny as hell, especially as he was pretty inebrieted. However, our plumbing did not like that, so now we have a brand new toilet (after the maintenance guys broke the old one trying to get the phone out of the trap). We also have an unspecified bill for a new toilet. Eek. Technically, we should make him pay for it. But also, technically, some of our parents have jobs and some don't. So me and one of my suitemates will probably end up footing most of the bill.

Also, I was going to go get my course packet, but the guy who was supposed to give me a ride to my print shop was pretty late. I figured he'd forgotten and went back inside to watch the hall twister game. Two hours later, I go back to my room and find a message on my machine that says he'll be by to pick me up... an hour earlier. Well, crap, I think, sitting down on my roommate's bed. I look out the window and see his car come roaring up the road (almost hitting the retaining wall above the parking lot). We go looking for the print shop and end up going up and down the bypass five times before realizing that we're on the wrong road. The guy working at the shop lets us in even though it's fifteen minutes past closing time. It's all good.

As the dour way I'm relating these two actually fairly funny happenings may reflect, I'm tired. I started out with a general feeling of dour lassitude and now I have a nauseaus headache. I am going to go burn incense and try to sleep. Maybe I'll play Sims or do something equally brainless and silly. I think I may deserve something brainless and silly.

Oh, I had an actual conversation with my suitemates for the first time last night! I am pleased.

love,
alex

Incidentally, today my Modernity professor was talking about the fifties for some reason, and I suddenly came to this realization re: vague external threat, culture of strident americanism, hell, even going to the moon. I don't want to live in the fifties! This means that I'll be a little late for the next round of the 60s, but it should be interesting anyway.

Does anyone think I'm right?

I really should sleep or clean or something. I think I will eat an orange and read my book for the literature section of modernity. I love you all. I am very tired.

love,
alex

My modernity class makes my head hurt. It's fun, it's interesting, and it may be the first time since long division that I don't already know a good bit of what's being taught. Usually class involves linking together the information I already have in some sort of chronology. This information I have none of, besides having read the Communist Manifesto last semester. Weber, Foucault, Rosseau, (and why, exactly, are philosopher's names never spelled the way they're said?) are not names I'm familiar with, and they're being tossed around like normal people say Oprah and J-lo. Well, I mean, I'm sure J-lo hasn't said much on the crisis of modernity (Oprah I'm not so sure) but we're expected to know the names with the same familiarity. (sad commentary on state of culture? shuddup, you.)

I find myself gravitating towards my more Marxist professors. Not because I think myself a Marxist - I will always be a bit of a romanticist, a dropout, a sober Learyite - but because the Marxist professors are the only people I know who deal with theory and praxis of saving the world. Everyone else has given up hope or doesn't talk about it. My Modernity professor was discussing Marshall Berman's assertation that we have fallen from the revolutionary / participatory modernity of the 1790s to the cynicism of Max Weber's 'steel cage'. The current form of modernity argues that there is no escape from modernity. My professor and Berman argue that without modernity there would be no escape, that the transient nature of modernity builds its own exits. I don't really want to live in an industrialized worker's utopia, but at the same time, having someone believe in hope, period is damn close to good enough.

My head hurts. Ehhhhh.

Today is my longest day, with my last class running three to 6. We'll see. It's my last new class, and after this I'll have gone to all of them once.

I need to clean my room. I've lost two books in the mess already.

love,
alex

So this is what happened:

First, I walk into my Sustainable Development class and see the kid whose expulsion from my program caused me such distress before break. I didn't even know he was still at this university, so I made a bit of a fuss and hugged him. He'll live. Being well-beloved by one's peers never did anyone harm. I am glad that he is back.

The class shows great promise, especially compared to last semester's SD disaster. The Professor tends to drone a bit, but he said two things: 1) we should remember that his main prejudice is blaming capitalism for everything and 2) the course will focus on praxis as well as theory, that is, what we're supposed to do about it. I talked to the Dreadlocked One's girlfriend, who, it turns out, grew up in Costa Rica! This gains an exclamation mark, as I am always glad to meet someone from the part of the world I'd rather be in.

so civil rights, the class I was nervous about (as the professor is a Yankee and a bit more assertive then I'm used to): We meet in one of my dorm's lounges, pulling the couches corner to corner so that we can circle up. He tells us about the history of the class, how proud he is of it, what hasn't worked and what has in the past. He shows us past class t-shirts. We read over the syllabus. The syllabus says the class will decide on an attendance policy as a community. As a community? we ask. Yep, he says. He talks about SNCC and how they were our age, faced with life and death situations, and decided things by consensus. He talks about SNCC meetings that went on for days, with the people who stuck it out making the decisions. Today, he says, you guys will decide on our attendance policy by consensus.

I'm going to ask for a copy, and damn straight I'm posting it here, because it looks like what school should be like. It's on lined paper in my untidy scrawl, and it says basically that we want to be in this class, we are adults enough to come to class, and we're willing to do what it takes to make it up to everyone else when we don't come to class. (there are nine people, and it's discussion-based, so if one person isn't there it's a big deal.) Then we signed it. Then we clapped. It only took thirty minutes, and the discussion was carried out with such unflagging optimism that I left class grinning. I hope this class doesn't wind up sucking, but right now I think it will be very, very good.

love,
alex

A hard morning. I don't know what I'm going to do with these expanses of time, waiting for class to start. I went for a walk, which may have been a mistake, because my brain would not stop chattering and singing and replaying conversations from yesterday with that I'm-such-a-dumbass sense of shame. Very adolescent, that feeling. It will go away in a few days. I have discovered that it takes a few days away from home before I'm anything like a responsible adult again.

But there are reasons I would not have given up that forty-five minute trek through the backwoods. The sight of the pond, deep and clear where the stream rushes in and bubbled, fractaled, iced over across the rest of the surface. You can see the preserved sweep of where the wind blows on the water, and the brave footprints of rabbits who dashed across the unsteady slush before it solidified. Perhaps my first sight of the woods in morning, sunlight on all the surfaces that I have seen shadowed. And one moment - I have started looking for the sources of all the bird songs that have marked my life from early childhood in the mountains. I have found the gray-blue female jay that rasps across the pond, a sound I associate more with hot summer and cicadas. This morning I found the source of the four-note song - dee Dee dee dee - so very clear! Clarion clear through the tall ceders and the frozen pond. A little bird, smaller than my hand, with a black-painted head and gray body, who clung to the lichen-covered sides of trees and picked some small insect from the bark. As I stood still and watched I saw another, and another. Perhaps that four-note song is a warning, because when another kid from my dorm crossed my path going the other way, the woods lit up. I stood above a little precipice and listened to the echo of the song going away up the little valley, overlapping, diverging, each call slightly different, until it faded in the distance. I would spend any length of awkward time cold and anxious in the woods for that moment standing in the sunlight on the bluff above the creek, listening to that song chorusing away through the cedar trees.

love,
alex

It is sunny and not so cold and I should be outside. I'll go, shortly. In the meantime, I am sitting reeling from first-day strain. I feel a little drunk, actually, sleepy and too warm. Perhaps someone spiked my soymilk when I left it in the fridge.

This morning I dragged myself out of bed and discovered - in the worst possible way - that there is no warm water in the dorm. I was determined not to go to my first day of class greasy, so I borrowed my suitemates' electric kettle and washed my hair by filling my four-cup measure with warm water and dumping it over my head. This was not ideal, but it worked. For the rest of the semester, they will have to deal with alex-as-greaseball, but today, dammit, I had clean hair.

The new crop of kids in my program are in, and may I say, they're a hoot. The fall-admitted freshmen contained some attempt at balance - there's a good section of backcountry baptists, Abercrombie girls, you know. This crew is pure stonerhippie. This should be fun.

off to wander about some more -

love,
alex

I have to admit, it's even good to go back to being lonely and miserable on my own terms. I would rather be here, uncertain of who to talk to and panicked about classes tomorrow then at home. My poor parents.

Church this morning was an interesting presentation by the wife of my department head on the idea of - this is a mouthful - indigenousity, that is, being from and of a place. The address was fascinating, though the discussion that followed quickly got bogged down in already-constructed notions of environmentalism. In wider news, the until this point unacknowledged head of our collective has proven why we are in fact leaderless by going into total prick mode, at least via email. We'll see if things get straightened out at the meeting. I am a little frustrated with my schedule because its nice even distribution means I only go to two of my five classes tomorrow, and I'd rather get all the first days over at once. My room is a wreck but my desk drawers are nice and organized. Yesterday I pulled a rather drunken brand new freshman (the ones starting mid-year have just appeared) aside and advised her not to sleep with my ex-boyfriend, who was among her inebrieted cadre. He doubtless knows about this by now. The consequences should be interesting.

I'd forgotten in the enforced camraderie of the last days of finals how lonely you can get here before you're settled in. I need to finish my laundry, get my room under control, put paper in binders for tomorrow's classes, and continue doing one thing at a time until I know what's going on. And stop kicking myself for every little failure with the superkewl kids next door and the endless logistics of dormitory life.

And - last tangental note - I've forgotten what it's like to have to always know where your key card is. Every minute or two I realize that I'm on the other side of a door that has to be swiped and I have a brief skitter of panic while I think of everywhere where my card could be. This despite knowing I propped the door open when I came in. It is almost doubtlessly in the right-hand pocket of my jacket. I hope.

I hope this note finds you all well, and as usual, I would like to apologize to the 50% of my traffic that came here looking for information on Bob Marley.

love,
alex

Started off well - watched Romeo + Juliet with my new suitemate while patching my black pants. These pants, as a side note, are literally decomposing. I have no business doing anything with them but burning them. I love them more than any other item of clothing besides the t-shirt I wore for five days on outward bound and four days in Nicaragua. I still can't believe my mother threw it away.

Anyway, I am content to watch occasional wierd movies with these kids yet remain distant enough so as not to need to go to their parties. The new suitemate is awesome but contributed an entire cabinetful of smelly girly crap to our bathroom.

I did go for a long walk across the hills. The frog pond is frozen almost solid. I love the sun on the snow. Everything is elevated, for a second made smooth and perfect. I am so happy to be back!

love,
alex

Back on campus. I can start worrying about this life, not the in-between at home. A relief.

Very cold and snow and sun sparkling on the mountains. I need to sleep and then go outside. The days have lenghtened perceptably already; 3:15 is midafternoon, not early evening. It will be summer again, after a few long icy months, and we will sit on the front stairs and play music and look at the stars. I am happy here.

love,
alex

So I slip and fall a little...

Headed out of here tomorrow. I had the kind of conversation yesterday with a strange random friend and a handful of sentances are replaying themselves because they make me feel warm and fuzzy. In the wake of that, of course, comes insecurity. The minute I'm sure of how I feel I lose all certainty of how other people feel.

I'm so tired. I'm really scared about going back to school tomorrow and I'm quashing it. I'm not sure why. It will be so good to be back, and I think after this long school might even be a disappointment. I've gotten so attached to it and lonely for it.

I woke up this morning happy, thinking of my friend. It may well be nothing back on campus. So be it.

love,
alex

Great day, preceded by a sleep-in morning of really wierd dreams. Dreams I could be okay with never having again. I hate it when I have dreams about people that make me scared to talk to them the next day. But the overwhelming point of the dream is that I'm pushing myself to be a person I'm not comfortable with, especially where s ex is concerned. (I know spacing it so that I don't get wierd searches makes me look like a prude. deal.) I need to stop feeling responsible to everyone who's attracted to me. I need to acknowledge my right to reservation and self-preservation. Of course, this makes me sound like I'm sleeping with half the state, which is most definitely not true. This would be the difference between not sleeping with anyone and not sleeping with anyone and meaning it.

I am a wierd kid. I am wierd in the head. I will be glad to be back on campus where I am a person among people and not the thousand claustrophobic things I have to be in this house.

Anyway, on to the day, which did not suck as much as the night which preceded it: I got up at one, went to the dentist, hung at Ibooks and had a long conversation with someone I'd never talked to before - points for me - went to the thrift shop to buy a lamp and ended up with a tank top instead, and then I went to the UU campus ministry meeting here. Such great kids! Very smart and shiny and funny and gung-ho. Very Unitarian. We all look the same, I suspect. A girl I used to have such a crush on was there - she went to my high school for a semester and then went to India and then wandered around the south, but apparently now she and her 4.5 GPA go to Hometown University. The kid who was supposed to have brought the chalice forgot, so they rolled up a peice of paper and stuck it in the top of a soda bottle and set it on fire - filling the bottle with smoke and I suspect creating something potentially referred to as paraphenalia - and then they panicked that we'd set off the sprinkler system and smooshed the paper down into the bottle and covered it, sprinkling ash across the table in the process. And then we all sang a song. I think it might partially be that I'm lonely for other college kids, but I miss Unitarians! The ones who want to be there, who are shiny and alive and very young and brilliant.

I just checked one of my dorm-mate's AIM profiles and he's back on campus. I'm actually a little nervous going back, but I'm so happy that I get to.

love,
alex

Birddogger.org- candidates answer questions we actually care about.

I don't really want to think about the elections, to be honest. I would rather just believe that Dean is our only answer, except he keeps saying things I disagree with.

hm.

love,
alex

p.s. if you're not planning to vote, at least go and write in Kucinich. I can guarentee you you agree with Kucinich.

Babylon 5 makes me cry. That is why it's a good show. Today in three episodes we've covered the Israeli/Palestinian crisis and all the histories of hate, governmental conspiracy, AIDs, religious hysteria, and a dozen other things. Guilt and redemption and hatred and salvation and a thousand other things. This is a really rough little show, for something that involves aliens.

I am learning some things lately about action and distraction. I can read all I want about Zapatistas, about the disciples, about doctors who go into the war zones to pull the children out of the rubble while bullets fly past. I can read all of this, and feel all damn warm and fuzzy. That's distraction. That's different from learning. The lesson is always about not being afraid, but at the same time, I wonder about the martyr impulse. I need to find the middle ground between fear and self-preservation, and simultaneously, I know I'm caught up in the little meglomania of youth. This is called being a drop in a bucket of 6 billion other drops.

I have watched too much tv today. It makes me wax excessive.

love,
alex

Two and a half days as a good vegan. Yes, food is sort of mundane again, eaten only when my stomach asks for it. That's okay. Food is not supposed to be my primary source of entertainment, as it has been these past few weeks. If cheeselessness is the price of thinking before I eat something, all the better.

I am going into town in half an hour to hang out with ex-boyfriend 1. I haven't seen him since we broke up, though we IM each other all the time. This should be interesting. My main problem with getting over people is that after I'm over them I'm embarressed that I was ever infatuated. All their flaws suddenly seem really important.

Well, wish me, if not luck, then at least some sense of proportion.

love,
alex

Today in church, our guitarist sang Redemption Song, and it was beautiful.

I'm buzzed. I just presented to my youth group here about Nicaragua and the FTAA protests, and they're all enthused. I got to present with my favorite Baby Anarchist, the one with dreads. At least six people want to go to Nicaragua, though most of them will back out. If we get one or two left, all is well.

I do feel a little bad because I tend to play off people for laughs when I'm presenting, and I think the Baby Anarchist likes his dignity too much to do well with that. So I have to apologize after the fact. But all in all, it was good, and I'm very buzzed and alive and happy to be. My youth group is such good people! Eccentric, wierd, geeky, but utterly beloved.

crashing. ehh. Ehhhhhh.

love!
alex

Okay, so I'm forty-eight hours behind. It's just starting to occur to me that no matter how much January never seems like a good time for a new year, I will remember 2003 as the year when.

2003 is the year when I graduated high school (and for the last time, really, remembered another class of 03 that I was supposed to be in.)
2003 is the long summer I spent watching a passel of children swim.
2003 is the year that all my almost not going to college ended.
2003 is the year I ended up at university by accident.
2003 is the year I went to the mountains again.
2003 is the year I first had s ex, also the second time I fell in love, but with different people.
2003 is the first year since the third grade I've made the honor roll
2003 is the first year my brain was exposed to the dread cannabis
2003 is the year I went to Miami
2003 is the year I first was pepper sprayed
2003 is the year I left YRUU
2003 is the year I went to General Assembly
2003 is the year I had a cult following
2003 is the year I registered to vote
2003 is a thousand things not listed here.

Here's hoping for 2004.

love,
alex

I am depressed & my stomach hurts, but the non-boy emailed me, so all is good. Actually, I had a fairly good day, as I spent it hanging out with our extended-family substitute at the grandfather's house in the county. Actually, it's not so much a house as a compound. There's a pond and a barn and a woodshop that's bigger then the house and a new house planned for a hill across the pond and the most perfect space for a garden I've ever seen. And everything's solar and salvage and lived-in and full of books and I love it. If this family had someone my age in it I'd marry them for their land.

Oh, but I have to tell you something dumbass I did today. I wanted to go walk around the pond, being as I was sick of smalltalk. I put on my jacket and my shoes, then turned to grab my bag. "Where are you going?" my dad asked. "I don't smoke." I answered. "I need my bag for my journal." I should explain here that actually I don't smoke and never have, but he will never believe that now. Oh well.

love,
alex