in the days that are only for counting down
Saturday,April 21, 2007 at 1:24 pm (Barnard & New York: Semester 2)
all we can do is wait.
The end of another college semester is drawing near. I am sitting in my bed on a saturday morning, up early with the intentions of getting to the library fairly early and working all day long (sigh). This semester has two weeks of life in it yet, but with the weather finally turned warm, and my life fixated on whats to happen afterwards, it feels as though i’m leaving much sooner.
What do you say to a semester that has been so volatile? What do you say to the death that slapped us all in the face, why is it that this death has been splashed on every newspaper across the globe but the daily massacre of people in countries all over the world has hardly made the back pages?
What do you say to amazing trips and weekends, to painful phone conversations, to peaceful moments, to chaos, to exhaustion and to elation? What do you say to still feeling so muddled in who you are and where you’re going? And perhaps, what do you do with the realization that you might be getting closer to something more whole: to being in a way you’ve been longing for?
A summer approaches. The summer in which I say hello to all the old familiar things, and in which I feel it is time to love them to death as it is my last chance. The last summer of “childhood”, because next summer i’m moving to Santa Fe to write my novel. Or something.
Its good to grow older, I think. I haven’t made a final decision on that, but i think my twenties are going to better than my teens. I have that plan anyway.
cloudy hole in the world
Monday,April 9, 2007 at 2:55 am (Barnard & New York: Semester 2)
I had a dream last night, in which the apocalypse came. It was set at Olivia’s graduation party i believe, on the top floor of a tall building in Annapolis. It over looked some kind of canal/river in the middle of the city, in which boats were coming and going. I looked out the window while we were eating hor dourves and mingling, and noticed a boat moving really quickly across the water. I had this feeling that things weren’t right, and started to alert other people to it. They started to notice, and just then the whole world turned into this swirling cloud, and began to suck everything into it, like a vortex. Somehow this is how I saw the apocalypse, and although I was initially gripped with indescribable terror, once i was being sucked in to the cloud as well, I breathed out and realized I had to let it go– had to let it be okay to die. I felt this desperately huge sense of loss and agony at losing absolutely everything in my life, but I just breathed out deeply and said, “it’s okay to die, don’t be scared”. Then I remembered the mayan prediction that the world would end at 2012, and I felt a sense of comfort in the fact that they were right, and we were just following fate’s course.
Then, instead of dying, I arrived in another world, in which everything was cartoonish. Not quite fully animated but like it had a hint of cartoon overlaying the “real” world. Something like a lego city but with very real traces of the old world (i.e. the one we know right now). I had no chance to get to know that place, because then I woke up.
I have some theories on why this dream happened, and what it means, but I won’t go into that. It was scary.
motorcycle diaries
Monday,February 5, 2007 at 1:58 am (Barnard & New York: Semester 2)
so i just watched the motorcycle diaries. Impressions:
- i want to read more about che guevara and the cuban revolution
- i feel uplifted and inspired by the movie, unlike others like it in which i feel depressed and horribly useless
- there is simplicity in human injustice, and true humanity in its nature. For all the confusion and complexity, for all the insurmountable desolation and challenge, when it comes down to it it is really humans and real feelings like love and pain and suffering that exist among the complicated labels for everything that is wrong in the world.
To be a person means to make choices. To be a person of priveledge means to have many more to make. To be a person with a future and chances and a sense not of obligation but of destiny to improve the world, means what?
It is not enough to be good enough for myself, for my friends or my family or standards anyone has given me. I do not feel good enough for any of those things, yet i’m striving to be good enough for something larger and less tangible– for significance. Good enough to be one of the changers, movers, difference-makers. I want to make a difference, and I want it to be in one person’s life and I want it to be in a town and in a country and in the world.
I want not to fear the emotional mental or physical challenge. I want to discard my senses and sensibility, I want to employ words and inspire and I do not want to remain within the boundaries. I want to be absurd and extreme perhaps so that I know any change I wish to see, or chance I wish to take will not fall outside my realm and sensibility. I want no limits, yet i am burdened with a conscience and this “sensibility” that I have either learned and must somehow learn to discard, or possess out of instinct and will battle it forever.
I can not be big if i am not free. and i am not free if i am fearful. and i am fearful because there is much to be feared because failure and death and heartache and danger and anxiety and insomnia scare me. i am afraid of that which i wish to be fearless of. do i learn the lessons of the mad ones, or do i tolerate my fear and live within its bounds?
do i myself become mad? or do i stay sane and insatiated?
