It's the inbreath of sanctity and sanctuary - coffee, dirt, must, a hint of parrafin, the breath of old house. All Unitarian fellowships have a house somewhere in their history, a little turn-of-the-century affair with single-pane windows and a stained, scratched wooden floor. It's the house where the youth group meets, to sprawl in promiscuous, parsimonious heaps and talk and sing the old songs. It's the house with the kitchen - never up to code - and the basement - always flooded - and the wide-beamed doorways and dirty carpets. Breathing in, some grown-up former young person believes, again, that maybe they can find a home here. The question is, when the service is over, when the shiny new sanctuary one building over exhales them into the street, will they still believe it?

I grew up in Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville, in the late Christmas service with no lights on, a candle in every hand in the perfect mountain night, and the hymn Silent Night rolling back, back, into the eaves of that wood-and-rock building. I grew up, through the church, well-loved and with a place in the world. I suppose that's all anyone can ask for.

love,
alex

Maybe it's time for me to start thinking about how much different my experience of my life would be - health-wise, life-wise, energy-wise, enjoyment-wise - if I faced up to things instead of spending most of my time running from them. Today, for instance, I have been killing time, stripped of any real enjoyment of the sun and the cool-not-cold air by the constant lurking panic of what I'm trying to put off. If it was something big - love, tragedy, you know the sort - I could draw pleasure from addressing it with some style. But it's the pages unread, the papers unwritten, the dirty dishes, the lagging laundry, all the unglamorous, interesting, tedious grind of daily life.

I know if I went for a walk - in this sunny, beautiful day - I would get no pleasure from it. So I guess for the first time in weeks or months I should face up to it. I could give that a try.

love
alex

I think I may have the coolest diagnosis ever. After some time with a tape measure, and a second opinion from the nurse, the podiatrist says, well, one of your legs is a full half-inch shorter than the other. That might be why you're having trouble.

Incidentally, I'm telling _everybody_ this, and it's been suggested that this could be my new superpower.

Also, on the way to the podiatrist, I had a bit of a misunderstanding with the bus driver and ended up disembarking between stops onto a steep slope covered with loose gravel. I landed in fairly spectacular three-point sprawl. This is not funny unless you're familiar with my campus bus system. You see, I just fell off the Applecart.

Ahem.

Anyway.
Have a nice afternoon.

love,
alex

Gimpy feet day!


A whole new set of inflamed tendons means I've been holed up in my room all morning eating cereal to excess & watching movies. What I would give for an in-room internet connection. Convivial though this lab is...

It's a beautiful day out. I'm going to gimp on out there and sit and read some Chilean mining history. It will be great.

Nothing much to report. I'm just trying to put off the walking.

love,
alex

A series of extraordinarily gray days. I think I'm starting to realize that part of my problem is my inability to be still. My need for distraction (the reason why I'm writing this now, as it happens) jerks me away from any center I might develop. Some good things have come of this, mind - the lack of distraction in my room is sending me to the gym more often, for example. but in general.

I just got some extraordinarily bad news disproven, by the way. My entire day has turned around.

love,
alex

Random collegiate hygeine tip: Vigorously rubbing a palmful of talcum powder into dry, dirty hair, and then brushing, can save you _so much shower time_. I've been skipping the shampooing for five days, and my hair is still silky-soft and presentable. Just in case you wanted to know.

I had something else to say but I forget what.
Oh yeah.

You never know what you want until it becomes unattainable.

love,
alex

At what point, in navigating the intricacies of faculty politics, do I have to switch from puppyish enthusiasm to corporate blandspeak? At what point does "that sounds awesome, I'd love to help" switch to "I would be glad to lend assistance to this endeavor"? And why, oh why, working world, do I have to spend eighteen years coming out of my shell and the next ten years learning to go back in?


These and other mysteries.


My February apathy is catapulting itself headlong into a springtime madness of overinvolvement and overexcitement. I'm okay with this. It means I'm run ragged by two in the afternoon and have to sit in a dark room trying to take deep breaths for a while. But if that's the consequence of making everything happen all at once, so be it.


I'm struggling on the same old springtime fronts, though. You know. I can explode out of my hermetic little shell into a mass of enthusiasm and life and making things happen and doing everything I can. But that's all over by noon, and then it's just me, tired, barely able to carry on a conversation, feeling like a lonely twelve-year-old beside all the glamorous togetherness of, you know, those hippies I live with. It hurts that I will never be what those freshmen in their patchwork skirts and tank tops are to each other. It hurts that there were so few days when I was really a member of MyProgram, when I really felt like I was part of the tribe. And that's over now. I graduate & become a college student like everyone else in a month or two.


I really hope I don't spend the rest of my life trying to prove my MyProgramness to myself. I hope I don't spend the rest of my life measuring everything against those clumps of silly beautiful people who'd all been to Bonnarroo and were secure in their internal status and tiny feuds.


Soon, maybe, I'll learn to distinguish between being a popular nineteen-year-old and an interesting person. If there is a difference.


After all, I'm twenty now.


love,
alex

What I dislike the most about growing up and being around your family is that you can no longer be right, you can no longer win arguments, you can't even win in that way where you let someone else win and then sulk and whine and try to make them miserable. Instead, you have to deal with your own hurt feelings, and your need not to hurt their feelings. I suppose I could just say, hey, you hurt my feelings right there. But I'm not going to do that until I'm sure my motives aren't still proving myself the better person, ergo winning.

love
alex

Dear University:

Guuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhh.

love,
alex

Can anyone else, incidentally, detect the abrubt contrasts between Fun!Chipper! and Deep!Thoughtful! that characterize my blog these days? Sometimes I read back, as with previous post, and wonder who the hell wrote it.

Then I realize that I'm still holding on with four.5 hours of sleep and a bazillion tests looking me in the face. And I forgive myself for coming off as chipper and shallow. Because I cannot be everything all the time, and sometimes I am cheerful and go to the gym.

Good. I'm glad we had this talk.

love,
alex

I am in the computer lab, checking my blogs for updates. (There are blogs that I should put on the blogroll, but I do not, because I am like that.) It took me several minutes of wondering why they were not new, but then I realized that I had last checked at 5:30 this morning, while I was in the computer lab looking up the MLA rules for footnotes. Keep this in mind. 5:30. AM.

In other news, yerba mate? Tastes like coffee mixed with green tea mixed with dirty socks and cigarette butts. In my opinion. Though what with the whole sleep at midnight, up at four thirty to write about protectionist policy versus free trade in the 1850's in Argentina, I sure am liking the caffiene.

I am going to go now. Jamie has made me sign up for the Precor at the gym in thirty minutes! I am going to die!

love,
alex

(redemption song) -


So I will write this cynically, because that's how it is, but I want to let you know what just happened to me -


This guy is talking at our campus for Programmed Diversity Month. He left Aryan Nations - after being a youth recruiter and member from 16 to 35 - because he had a son with a cleft palate, and one day the leader of Aryan Nations called him into his office and told him that come the overthrow, he needed to make preparations for euthanizing his son.


I thought the wierdest thing that would happen after the talk would be the pale blue-eyed high school teacher who wanted a list of neo-nazi gang signs because there had been a ho-mo-seck-u-al incident where a teacher didn't know a rainbow pin was bein' used to promote thei-ur lifestyle. The teacher said she didn't want any more wierd groups promoting in her school. I just wanted to get away from there then, maybe with the girl with the nose ring and the butterfly sticker on her cheek, so that we could make fun of the way she said lie-yf-style. But then this other woman came up to him. I admit I'd pegged her, kind of. Ruffly blouse, denim jumper, little purse, very blond, not thin, lots of makeup. She started talking to him about how the movement was really softening up recently, how there'd been a kid with Down's at a white power rally, and then she started rattling off the names of female klan leaders. "Just to let you know where I'm coming from..." she said about five minutes in. "If you know that particular name, I don't really have to ask." the guy responded. I sat there contemplating the broad shelf of her hips, the corn-silk color of her hair, her grip on her faded denim purse. I sat there listening to her discussing how she was a corrections officer, how a lot of law enforcement up in our mountain towns were "in the movement". How she'd started a group at her high school when she was sixteen; her father had left the white power groups and she'd recruited him back in. The speaker had grown up a foster child in a poor Pennsylvania town; when he wasn't speaking he was a handyman for an apartment building complex. I marked poverty in his skin, in the color and the texture and the way it clustered around his eyes. I listened to him gently, gently talk to this woman, little ideas here and there, saying, call me, I'll email you. We can keep talking about this. I listened as they compared political notes, talked about ego conflicts between major leaders. I listened to the compassion in his voice. I listened to the sick scared twisting in my chest.


He said when he first left Aryan Nations, he lived in the woods alone, because it had been so long since he'd known someone who wasn't a nazi.


I don't know. I don't know! If I made it make sense, I would be wrong already.


love,
alex

I am trying to come up with a birthday meditation. I should think about something being lucky, to have lived this long and this well. Race and class analysis is making my stomach hurt, so I am letting go for a little bit of why I am lucky to have clean drinking water and a full round of immunizations, even though I am not forgetting that I'm very lucky. I would, insteady, prefer to dwell on some more personal source of the great fortune that is my life. So here is my birthday thought: Thank God that the birth control pills of the mid-80s were less effective then they are now. Thank God that my parents turned out to love each other at that point. Thank God that they were two librarians with the money to rent a ratty little house by the coast, and bathe their baby in a plastic tub in the front yard all summer, and feed stray cats. Thank God for Will the Barber, a justice of the peace, who married my two-months-pregnant mother and my gangly, tan father under a tree by a vacant lot in the town of Columbia. Thank God for every morsel of food that has passed my lips, thank God for every tree I've walked under, thank God for the floors and sidewalks and paths I've walked all my life. Thank God for my family, for making me a part of this world. Thank God for luck, for making me a part of this time. Blessed be.


love,
alex