Organizing is like kickboxing, only better.

love
alex

In which our heroine figures out the ending to "Citizen Kane" a full forty seconds earlier than the rest of the room. Some days I feel so smart.

love
alex

My friends don't care what my hair looks like.
It took me a 19 years to learn this.

love
alex

A bright day, and most of my work is done. I just need to find allergy meds. Oww. My sinuses.

love
alex

I have had a good weekend, dammit. The fact that I feel like crying right now should not change that. I went hiking, went out to dinner with my friends, saw the third Matrix - which was really good! I was shocked! - at the dollar theater, made bread and when that didn't work made bread pudding.

however, I couldn't get to sleep last night because my room was messy (of course I just lay there in the dark instead of cleaning it) and because the birds on the hill by my window start singing at one a.m. Also, my church buddy stood me up in favor of nursing his hangover, which made me way grumpier then it should have. Sigh. Infatuated much, Alex? And I'm having a Fat Day. I didn't think I was enough of a girl to have Fat Days, but there it is.

There have been many more pros then cons this weekend. I have shown initiative and been outgoing. Yes. Outgoing. I'm just being grumpy now. Also, I have a paper due at 10 a.m. that I haven't started thinking about. Which means I can pull an all-nighter with the Sunday Night Usuals in the main lounge.

Alright. I'm going away now. I'm going to eat bread pudding and finish cleaning my room and go for a walk. It will get better.

love,
alex

Large social events, I am realizing, inspire me with something approaching terror. Nonetheless, I went to my program cookout, had an excellent veggie burger with cheese, played frisbee and listened to guitars and drums in the meadow. If I sat a little apart, and looked a little frightened, well, I was there.

love
alex

I need to remember, in between the sunny beautiful days (which today is) that I have many friends. I have many friends in many places, but most of them are here where we can eat lunch together and talk politics and saving the world in the sunshine and the springtime. I need to remember all of them, on those cloudy days when I've retreated to my computer. They are everywhere and here.

love
alex

Today's Commons lecture was on the symbolism of headstones. It was interesting. I find the occasional comforting reminder of mortality very useful. It's nice to know that only so much can happen to me before things stop happening. It's nice to have the occasional quick reminder that I can't protect myself from the world. I've been thinking a lot lately about my own fear, about how I try to keep myself safe from every little failure and embarrassment. But I'm going to die someday. What am I saving my dignity for? What 'one day' am I procrastinating towards? Either I am right now or I'm not.

love
alex

A constant cold, bright, about-to-rain day. This morning, walking back from the movie theater where we held class, a dove looping and diving, arrow wings against the sky. Beautiful.

love
alex

A fourteen-year-old at the high school my brother and sister go to was r aped by two other freshmen. Apparently the opinion among the student body was of course she got r aped, she's a sl ut.

It will be a long time before this feeling of needing to vomit and cry at once goes away.

alex

The beautiful and the young are playing soccer in the courtyard, long dreads and skinny white legs flashing in the sun. So bright they make my chest hurt, watching from an upstairs window.

alex

A year and two days ago I stayed up until three in the morning with a candle guttering on top of my computer moniter, praying, praying my little heart out. A year and a day ago forty students from my high school walked out & packed into compact cars to go downtown and rally on a street corner. I remember cold drizzle, and cold feet, and the counterprotesters across the street who looked so much cleaner than we did after four hours in the rain. I remember a beautiful boy from the Quaker school in the march that evening, megaphone to his mouth, knees bent almost to the pavement. What do we want? Peace! For how long? Forever! Forever! Forever! dancing in the street in the cold and the fog and the red and yellow lights of stopped traffic.

The counterprotesters wouldn't come over to share our pizza no matter how politely we invited them. That night my baby anarchist walked with his other white-Rasta friends in the fog beside the cop cars, fists in the air in the flashing light.

love
alex

One of the dreddy boys in the dorm just cut his hair. He looks like Harry Potter. He said he got sick of people asking him where they could buy weed.

It was 60 yesterday. Now it's snowing.

love
alex

I think I need time away from people. Away from the almost-solitude chitchat of internet people, away from the constant pressing not-quite-there of the real-life crowd I'm surrounded by every day. I know what key they snore in, their preferred brand of alcohol, their feelings towards their parents. At the same time I know none of this really, from conversation, from connection, I just pass through the constant physical and social detritus they shed around them - careless as any teenagers. I am lonely for solitude. Away from their messes.

love
alex

When I run into people from my program on the rest of campus, it's like meeting someone I know, by accident, in a different city. We are a small town, insular, gossip-mongering, comforting, familiar. I had an intimation, coming up the steps that divide us from the rest of campus, that some day I will realize suddenly what a great chunk of my life has been absorbed in this place, what a huge chunk of growing-up I've done in this place. I will definitely cry, however old I am, if my program closes, if this building is taken away. I will look back on this as one of the highlights of my life. Isn't that scary, when all I really do is study, hang out with my friends, hike, go to church, be activist? Still I will mark the doors in my memory, this is where this happened, this is where this happened. Right now, though, this doesn't seem like the best years of my life. It just seems like life, for the first time in a long time.

love
alex

The rednecky one comes to the window when I'm typing and makes faces against the glass. He wears torn Grateful Dead shirts and workboots. He's read the entire works of Plato. Whenever I'm around he calls me a militant ecofeminist and then says things about all the meat he's planning to eat this week. I tell him he's full of crap. He tells me I'm a treehugging hippie dipshit. If we were in the second grade, he'd be pulling my pigtails and putting bugs in my pencil box. But we're not, and he's older and trippier and likes short, nonthreatening women, and anyway, I don't pay much attention to him, I spend more time thinking about the Unitarian boy who's tall and geeky and just like every boy before him.

love
alex

I don't think the Spanish party in power lost the election because of the terrorist attacks. I think they may have lost them for lying about the terrorist attacks. One tenuously-formed opinion.

Human beings continuously amaze me. Human beings murder innocent people by the hundreds. Human beings rush to the still-burning train stations by the hundreds to pull survivors from the wreckage. Why? And Why?

some of my information gathered from this letter, most of the rest gathered from the reports of fellow students and alumni who are in Madrid right now.

love
alex

Hah. Next in the long line of reminders that I'm young and stupid: after exhaustive research of my contraceptive options, and one (one too many) experiments with GlaxoSmithKline screwing around with my hormones, I'm beginning to understand why the stupid and young are known to rely on prayer. I promise not to engage in that particular idiocy, but seriously, folks. This is getting ridiculous.

Not, frankly, that this has any relevance to my present lifestyle, but goddamn, mother nature seems to have it in for us.

love
alexe

So I saw the non-boy today. He hugged me like three times in five minutes, and he gives long hugs. It occurs to me that just because I'm over the tragic immediacy of Being In Love, adolescent-style, it doesn't mean he no longer loves me. I would hope, at least, that as one ages one learns to love generously.

I smell like hippie now.

It's raining all day and I'm thinking wondrous thoughts. The whole of the South, by van, doesn't carry as much inspiration and power as a five-minute walk across my mountain in the rain.

love
alex

One more can of orange juice and I called it quits. I can guarantee you this is the first time I've gone twenty-four hours without food, except for maybe that flu in the first grade. I didn't know I could do it. I like hunger, but I like food more, so I've never tried before.

I'll see how I feel tomorrow. Most of the people in the dorm who fast run a three-day cycle once or twice a month, juice to water to juice to food. I think one day of juice might be about all I can handle, but I'll see.

love,
alex

I wouldn't get in a car with someone who was drunk, but for some reason almost every driver recently has been high. I don't know if I'm really stupid for putting my life in their hands anyway. The thing is, mostly I see less reckless stupidity when people have smoked. I know I should just learn to drive and play constant dd - I certainly am suited - but I don't want to pay the insurance.

poll: on a scale of one to ten, how much of an idiot am I being? I contend that as stoner #1 is really a much better driver and stoner #2 is more careful and knew the city where I didn't, I may have been making the most sensible choice. Answer! Harshly if need be.

love
alex

Brighid314: I was almost saved last Sunday
Brighid314: it was really scary
Asterix404: saved from what?
Asterix404: pig eaters?
Brighid314: no, Saved
Asterix404: non vegintarians?
Asterix404: oo oo a big bear?
Brighid314: you really don't live in the Bible belt, do you?
Brighid314: haha
Asterix404: OH FUCK NO

Post-southern-food juice fast. I've never tried any sort of fast before - the closest I've come is skipping breakfast - so this is interesting. I wish the cafeteria market would reopen so I could go get Odwalla smoothies. Right now I'm going on two vending-machine orange juices.

wierd to be back. Having a do-nothing day. I sorted all my change earlier. I have $3 in pennies.

much love
alex

It all matters. It was all beautiful. It was all indescribable, now, in retrospect, when in reality it was a long week of sleeping in the van and listening to speakers and endless museums. Lots of Southern food. Lots of love from the people we came to. Welcoming people. I am wiped out, but I want you all to know. It was a good week.

love,
alex

A quick note from the Delta State U library computers - having met Joanne Bland, Dave Dennis, Hollis Watkins, Margaret Block, and a host of other luminaries - and seen Dr. King's birth home, first church, the bridge of Bloody Sunday, etc. -

As important, the moon rising on the infinite swampy horizen last night, huge and lopsided orange, as a vanful of college kids bumped across the backroads of Sunflower Miss. looking for a juke joint or possibly just an empty field and a six-pack. We are very young.

love
alex

I don't like the long smog-belching walk to the health food store, or the yuppie hoards when I get there. What I like is coming back to my dorm and my suitemate who says, I'm making banana bread, do you want some?

I am at home here.

love,
alex

So, um, my suitemate and her boyfriend woke me up.

Twice.

I would normally not mention this in a public format, but as they didn't bother to close their door I don't think they care.

Dormitory life. Eckk.

love
alex

Holy shit. I'm done with midterms. How did that happen?

love
alex

I'm okay. I'm okay.

Went to the counseling office today. The nice lady recommended exercise and deep breathing. I think we need activist shrinks, though. My primary concern is that I can't face riot cops again, something that a nice smalltown university psychologist maybe doesn't really get.

I don't think it's possible to have a romantic relationship without manipulating someone horribly. I think humans are twisted little buggers. I think it's interesting how stereotypical and apparently true it is that women have to let men think they're the strong ones precisely because they're so much weaker.

wtf, y'all.

love,
alex

Yep. It hurts. Why was I expecting it not to?

Stupid boys! Stupid idealistic hippie me!

I'm okay. It's more of a minor annoyance.

love
alex

Cafeteria food! Bleargh!

Luckily, as of yesterday we have dorm-wide composting, so after I pay $7 for food I don't want to eat, it can become healthsome fertilizer. There is always an up side.

Waiting for someone to get back into town. I've been checking my email obsessively all weekend.

love
alex