I want to make a major life change...

...that may be a little premature according to the tangible markers of adulthood I've attained, but should have happened a longggggg time ago emotionally: I am going to start referring to the house I grew up in as "my mom's house", rather than as "home". While seeing my family still feels like "home" for the first day or two, and seeing the friends I grew up with can have the same effect, this place is no longer my home. My home is in Princeton, NJ right now. My home is where I live. It's 113 Edwards 33 Prospect Street, for now, but that will change over the summer, and again in a year and a half, and again and again after that. But this house that I'm in right now, it's not home anymore, and while that makes me feel slightly homeless sometimes, it's something I need to come to terms with.

I've said this over and over this past week:

"I feel like a...'college student'".

Which begs the question, well what do I feel like the rest of the time? (Some part of my brain answers 'a Princetonian'.)

Anyway, I've been...watching LIVE TELEVISION. Watching TV and drinking. Going TO THE MOVIES. Playing video games. Playing video games and drinking. Watching other people play video games and drinking. Drinking for no reason at all. Ordering pizza at 1 am because we're drunk and hungry. Doing the very minimal amount of productive work to feel as though my life is not an entire waste. Making money by doing paid psychology experiments instead of having a real job. Not setting an alarm any day of the week. I suppose the best statement to describe how I've been feeling is "like a BUM". Why do I associate these two things in my head? They obviously don't go together in any way in my understanding of college for myself, or even for the majority of the people who have taken my survey, most likely. So what's going on here?

The following question was inspired by a random wall post from one of my friends to another one of my friends...

Would you date yourself?

It's an interesting question. Really calls on you to do SERIOUS self-assessment, but from an outsider's perspective instead of an insider's one, and from the particular-outside-viewpoint of potential romantic interest. I don't suppose this will be an easy task...

Would I date myself? I'm not sure. I'm a little crazy, but then again, everyone's a little crazy in their own little way, right? I've got big dreams that I will achieve, lest I die trying, but hopefully we've reached an era of life when ambitious guys can handle a lady having some ambitions of her own. I'm not that pretty in a lot of the stereotypical-impossible-airbrushed-dominant-culture kind of ways, but I do my best to work with what I've got and I think it shows. I'm a big girl, but a big guy needs someone who can take it. I'm not the housewife type, but we're talking about just a little dating. I'm a bit clingy, though, which I can see being an issue, but my clinginess is a byproduct of the fact that I give as much of my heart as I can spare to the people who are important to me. I'm kind of an intense person about a LOT of things, but who wants to be a candle when you have the potential to be a bonfire? I love to snuggle and if you don't I don't want you anyway, XD. I'm not very walk-all-over-able, and I will challenge your ideas and want to have intellectual debates but again, if this is a bad thing in your book, keep right on movin. I drink, and I curse, and I sometimes have problems with authority, and I don't "do the whole religion thing"; there are other lifestyles that simply can't get with those qualities, and I respect that--I probably couldn't be with someone who is super-religious, or someone who categorically does not drink or curse, just like I couldn't be with someone who smokes. I'm not a great dancer, but I will get out on the floor and shake somethin, and according to Lee Ann Womack that's what life is all about, right?

But I think I'm approaching this wrong. The question is not would some rando guy date me, it's would I, knowing everything I know about myself, date me? I, knowing how I am when I'm by myself, knowing that I change my mind all the time, knowing the kind of thoughts that run through my head and the way I approach things like friendships and relationships, knowing my every little bad habit and all the things that piss me the fuck off about other people. And I'm...struggling with this. At first, I am inclined to say no, because I don't really like to be alone with myself. I'm working on it, but have not successfully reached comfort in alone time yet. (Unless this counts; blogging might be my only legitimate hobby. Meditation too, kind of. I want to take up yoga once the new semester starts.) But I love the person I am when I'm spending time with the people I love. I'm an extrovert; my energy and happiness and the warmth in my life mostly comes from my relationships, which I put so much of myself into and expect so much from. Knowing everything I know about myself means knowing my goals and aspirations and knowing the person I'm striving to become as well as I know the person I am, right? I would date the person I'm trying to be. I think that means I'd also like to help me get there...     

Signs of being an alcoholic...

I just told a friend I couldn't get free facials with her on Thursday at 7pm because I'm planning to already be wasted by then. XD

Does King Deserve to be King?

One of the biggest tangible changes being an African-American studies certificate pursuer has made in my life is my like, newfound...let's say "objection" to Martin Luther King Day as a holiday, as part of a larger...yeah, I think we can actually say "disgust" with the commonplace representations of the Civil Rights Movement in contemporary American classrooms and homes. I hate being lied to, particularly by authority figures. I hate the images of Christopher Columbus and Abraham Lincoln that are portrayed to young children everywhere. I hate when culture tries to rewrite history to make it more convenient. And similar to all these hatreds, I hate that America puts MLK up on a pedestal without addressing any of the flaws in his strategies and ideologies. 

Now don't get me wrong; Martin Luther King was an incredible man who did phenomenal things for black people in this country, and who tried to do similarly phenomenal things for poor people. There was a time when I would have said that I owe my very lifestyle to him; but that kind of statement, and the mindset it reflects, is exactly what pisses me off so much about this holiday. I owe my lifestyle to the Civil Rights Movement, fact, but while culture elected King as the Movement's face, there are so many other people who made contributions just as--if not more, in light of the fact that I am a black WOMAN--relevant and effective on my day-to-day being. With all of my knowledge of African-American history, I can think of NO reason King deserves to be elevated over Malcolm X or Ella Baker. I can think of NO reason for the American public--even the BLACK American public--to think of Rosa Parks as just some little old lady who wouldn't get up from her seat on the bus one day, as opposed to the die-hard political activist she really was.

Martin Luther King was many many wonderful things, but he was also a stickler for some pretty bad ideas: a) political sexism, and b) passive resistance. I think that to some degree, the black "community" as a whole is still struggling to recover from the lasting implications of the utter dominance of these ideologies, and the effective hero-worship and idolization of King in this country simply pushes conversations about the inherent badness of these ideologies further and further under the rug. If we can't address the faults of the persons we are told to view as having been great in the past, how will we ever recognize them in the future? Sexism in the black community is STILL un-talked-about by anyone but black feminists, and fact: no one really listens to them anyway. My mother STILL says she's oppressed as a black person but not as a woman, and black women's position in society will NEVER increase until we can eradicate the existence of such limited mindsets. But how can we if we continue to praise King as our savior? Political sexism is, in some aspects, even worse than in-everyday-life sexism, because it's like saying there are specific areas in which women can never be equal to men and certain arenas in which they should never be listened to, as opposed to just being generally ignorant. Passive resistance too often leads to just sitting there and taking the shit this country throws at us, and maybe I'm a radical but I will fight to the death for the things I deserve. We all should; it's the only way to get anyone to listen. The Movement has DIED; now we all practice passive resistance, and our men and boys rot in jail, and our children fail in failing schools, and our success stories are ostracized and remain single and childless for being strange exceptions to unwritten rules...it's not getting us anywhere. Blindly accepting King as the face of the Movement, as the King of race relations in America and as having the chief ideas that should be recognized and remembered just sets us back into the faults of his time, and I for one shall not regress.

Lament!

WHY

ARE 

ALL 

THE 

BOYS 

WHO 

LOVE 

ME 

GAY?!??

Something Incredible Happened Saturday Night...

Nearly 8 years ago, my mother and stepfather got divorced. [Insert chorus of HALLELUJAHS! here] Lots of wonderful things resulted from this, along with something terrible. As soon as the divorce was final, my stepbrother's mother decided that he was no longer to have any contact with his "other family". She wouldn't let him talk when we called, and when we kept calling, she changed their phone number. My brother, the one who is the same age as me, with whom I bathed and slept and played and grew and loved during all the earliest years of my life, was suddenly gone forevermore. 


I've missed him to varying degrees throughout the rest of my life, more and more since Greg reminded me what family is supposed to feel like. I don't really give a shit that we're not technically related anymore; that is my brother and I won't really tolerate anyone saying anything different. When he turned 18, my mom and I really started trying to get back in touch with him, because his mom couldn't stop us anymore. First we called his father, but [don't get me started on] that man hadn't spoken to his firstborn son in years and was disturbingly disinterested in our desire for reconnection. Fuck him. So then I started periodically searching Facebook in an attempt to find him, but he has both and very common first name and a very common last name, and I didn't know where he lived or where he was going to school or anything that could help me narrow the search. I have two friends at school who live in the area he lived in when were growing up, and I asked them if they knew someone by his name, and one of them did! But it wasn't him. 


To make a long story short, we were very discouraged. Short of hiring a private detective, there seemed to be no way to put our little family back together, and that fact was generally a small piece of sadness inside me all the time. (I am so sick and tired of people ruining MY family with THEIR issues. You no longer wanting to call someone "boyfriend," "husband," or even "son," does NOT automatically entail that I no longer want to call him "mine" in some form. There are some bonds I can never imagine breaking, no matter how hard they are strained.)


I can't really even express in words, then, how I felt when I checked my phone after watching a movie and saw that I'd missed a bunch of texts, two of which were as follows: One from my little sister saying B**** had friended her on Facebook, and one from Facebook saying those impossible little words: B**** J****** has requested to add you as a friend on Facebook. I was just talking the other day about how fragile life is, how it can just turn upside down and inside out in the blink of an eye. Sometimes upside down is a wonderful wonderful way to be. Life has this funny way of scaring and blessing you at the same time. My dad is so sick, just laying in bed because sitting down hurts, waiting for a call that he can come back to the hospital, and I am so worried about him. But my long-lost brother just walked back into my life and has missed me as much as I have missed him. He wants to see me as soon as possible and I just want to hold him for hours. I just want to look at him so I remember his face again. I have his number and I can't wait to hear his voice.

Confession: Everything I ever say about family and how mine isn't that big a deal to me is total and complete BULLSHIT. I think I just tell myself that to avoid remembering how much it hurts to have lost such important parts of it. But I don't have a word for how deliriously ecstatic Facebook-chatting with my brother the night before last made me feel, or for how terrified I am about my dad's health right now. My friends are my family, but my family is my family too, and my heart is feeling so much at one time right now. Daddy, I love you. BJ, I love you too. There are some bonds that can never be broken.

This post is not meant to be a Debbie Downer...

 

I usually have something witty and cute to say about life in general, or my life specifically, like how they say change is the only constant in life, but today I want to take a moment to recognize that that volatility makes life really really fragile. Not only in the oft-talked-about highs-and-lows/rollercoastery ways, but just in the ideas that it can change irrevocably in the blink of an eye, and it can be over just as fast.

"When a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations, to try to impose some order on the chaos and make sense out of that which seems senseless." -- Barack Obama

 National tragedy this week in Arizona: Six regular people living their regular lives decided to go out and participate in democracy--crazy idea--and it cost them their lives, some of which were long and full, but others of which were truly just beginning. 14 more people were injured, with various degrees of severity; their lives have been changed forevermore.

Princeton tragedy: We lost a Tiger this week. A freshman girl from Virginia, who lived in Forbes and played on the softball team. Two of my friends knew her well, and I can't begin to imagine what they're going through because I have never lost a good friend. Her death was ruled "natural causes"; she had evidently been having medically unexplained seizures since May, but had decided to come to Princeton instead of deferring a year to try to figure out what was wrong. I've heard a lot of people commenting that they didn't understand why she would do this, but reading the articles on the homepage about how her friends are mourning her, she wanted to sleep in her uniform, and even her parents called us Tigers her family, it makes sense to me. This place has given me the best years of my entire life thus far, years I sometimes doubt will ever be matched, and from what I can gather, it gave her the best 5 months of hers. And that makes me glad. I just...she was (relatively) fine at dinner the night before, and they found her dead in the morning. Just like that.

Something that has the potential to become a personal tragedy: Okay, I'm being melodramatic. But I'm worried. So I've been pretty quiet about this because I don't know what to think, but things have escalated to the point that it must be shared: my father has been in and out of the hospital for the past week-and-a-half or so. This may be more information than you need to know, but he woke up last Thursday morning with a full bladder and couldn't go. The pressure just kept increasing and increasing so he went to the hospital and had to get a catheter put in. That was in for a week--and he missed work for a week--and when they took it out this Wednesday, he still couldn't go. Now they're saying he has to have surgery next week, and they're going to run tests on samples from his prostate, which means prostate cancer is a feasible explanation for what's going on right now. How do you go to bed one night feeling relatively alright (my dad has high blood pressure and diabetes) and wake up the next morning showing potential signs of having CANCER?! He gets regular checkups and everything! My mom says I'm worried about nothing right now, but I can't help it; I'm freaking the fuck out. 

Too much has happened this week. The world is a crazy place, and our time in it could very well be shorter than any of us imagine. So LIVE your life, okay? Drake has some new song out with Nicki Minaj (said in a disgusted tone, but the reason behind it is another story for another time) in which he says, Every one dies but not everybody lives, and he's entirely right about that. I'm NOT going to say to live each day like it's your last, because let's be real: you'd probably end up in jail or in the hospital or do something to directly cause it to be your last.

I will say this though: I was doing this self-affirmation exercise for a while last year but I stopped: at the end of the night before I went to sleep I would think about one positive thing that happened that day, one thing that made that day worthwhile. It sometimes meant actively taking steps to make something worthy of this title happen each day, and that's something I want to start doing again. It's something EVERYONE should do, because whether we like to think about this or not, your whole world could turn upside down, inside out, or just plain dark overnight. 

Cheesy Blogaversary Post

Sunday marked a whole YEAR of me keeping this blog, and that should be celebrated! I don't know if I thought I'd stay with it this long when I started it...I hadn't really put all that much thought into it, but though school/life sometimes wins over me updating this regularly, it means so much to me and here's to hoping I have another year of wonderments and misadventures to share with all of you! Yay!

Warning: the image below is NOT attractive.

This is not me anymore. My mother was shocked to see nails on the ends of my fingers when I was home over Winter Break, and I am determined to keep them! They're approaching longer than they've ever been--which isn't particularly long, but hey--and it will surely be a test of my willpower (and the effectiveness of Develop 10 Brand Bite Ender clear nail polish, which tastes TERRIBLE) to get through this finals season with my nails intact. BUT IT WILL HAPPEN. 

This has been a declaration of purpose. Old habits die hard, but they will die. 

Ex-lovers and friends

So I have a friend who, when discussing her recent exes, always brings up that she wants to be friends with them after the dust has settled, not like my situation with J (just-the-letter J, not J******) where he keeps trying to hang out with me and I want nothing to do with him. I finally felt the need to clarify that I don't want nothing to do with him because we dated, I want nothing to do with him because...looking back on that chapter of my life, I have no idea why I EVER wanted anything to do with him. I like to call him all-the-rebellion-that-was-supposed-to-infest-my-teenage-years-balled-up-into-7-weeks. 

What I didn't remind her of, though, is that he's not the only ex I have, not the only situation for her life to be compared with. *sigh* We were laughing yesterday at a Yahoo article that said one of the worst New Year's Resolutions to make was to quit Facebook, because everybody uses Facebook. That's...not exactly true. More and more recently, I've found myself desperately wanting to Facebook-stalk one person I can't: my first ex, the one none of my friends like to talk about because they think I was being ridiculous about the whole situation. I'm not going to go through the whole thing again: he's been talked about before. I don't tell people this, but every time I'm home I hope I'll randomly bump into him at the mall or Wal-mart or somewhere. When I'm bored and randomly clicking around on facebook waiting for something interesting to happen in someone's life, I sometimes type his name into the search box just to see if he reactivated his profile, because I want to know what's going on in his life more than I care to admit. 

Don't ask me why. I don't know. I don't want to get back together with him, not in the slightest. I meant what I said in that tear-filled phone call from freshman year, and I will not retract those statements. But I hate that not wanting him romantically means I can't have him at all. I hate that I miss the way I feel when I'm with him, because I'm almost positive that what I'm missing is the naivete and sense of endless possibilities that encompassed the entire time we were close, but even more so I hate that we can't be friends. He has faded nearly entirely into person-I-once-knew status, and dammit, I want to know him. But sometimes that decision isn't ours to make.

Habari gani? Kujichagulia!

Habari gani? Kujichagulia! Kujichagulia means self-determination and is the second day of Kwanzaa. On this day, we pledge to define ourselves, to name ourselves, to create for ourselves, and to speak for ourselves, instead of being defined, named by, created for and spoken for by others. On this day we design for ourselves a positive future and then vow to make that prophecy a self-fulfilling one.

Kujichagulia is my favorite day of Kwanzaa. Do you, Kujichagulia says. Be a rebel. Find something--anything--to throw your fist in the air and yell about. Today is the day to say FUCK the establishment, FUCK the status quo, FUCK people who are resistant to change, FUCK anyone who can't appreciate your beauty and your truth.

Africans. Niggers. Negroes. Coloreds. Blacks. African-Americans. Niggas. Persons of the African Diaspora. Multi-generational African-Americans. Self-definition is an interesting concept to me, particularly as it relates to identity markers. Black people in this country have been struggling for centuries to answer these questions: What is blackness? Who gets to define it? Through time it has been the whites, then the upper-middle-class blacks, then the militants...no one's really sure who it is now. There are lots of people who say blackness should be whatever every individual black person wants it to be; but then how do the non-black interpret blackness, and how do we honor yesterday (unity)? I ask the same thing about gender identity, sexual orientation identity, political party identity, class identity, age identity, religious identity...labels in general. I always say I don't like labels. I don't like generalizations. I don't like that if I said I was a feminist, you would have a prescribed notion of what feminists are, a mold you'd try to put me in. I worry about the same things when I say black. When I say female. When I say 20 year old. When I say Princetonian. I WILL NOT BE COOKIE-CUTTERED TO FIT YOUR NOTIONS OF REALITY.

Heh, Kujichagulia is kind of why I started this blog to begin with...

Habari gani? Umoja!

Umoja means Unity, and it is the principle for the first day of Kwanzaa. Our families and communities need unity in order for them to be productive and to survive. On this day, we pledge to strive for and to maintain unity in the family, in the community, in the nation that we have helped to build, and with our PEOPLE.

 Unity is a concept I've been on a bit of a roller-coaster struggle with this year. I went to the Black Solidarity Conference at Yale in February, and it was the first time I witnessed and took part in what seemed like a real movement of any sort--a large group of people coming together around some issue, trying to be solutionaries (to steal a word from the Umoja Student Development Corporation, where I worked this past summer). That experience was so enriching and inspiring that I really thought we could recreate the feelings it gave us on campus, but over time I learned that it seems that three people simply aren't enough to change a community climate. As time has gone on, I've begun to doubt whether "community" is really even a truly applicable word to describe the population of persons of African descent on Princeton's campus--or anywhere for that matter. Community implies some measure of overall togetherness of thought and action, to my best understanding of the word anyway, which I don't believe we have on any grand level; additionally, it must be asked whether the streamlining process inherent in "strengthening" any community engenders gross generalizations--would an attempt to make the "community" more cohesive be nothing more than self-generalization? How do you reconcile a supposedly encompassing community with the population it so clearly does not represent? What is a community without unity, and with so many factions and interests coexisting [somewhat] peacefully within the population, is true unity even a legitimate possibility? How can intersectionality and unity coexist productively? 

I have questions but no answers.

The Meaning of Christmas...

GAH, MY FACEBOOK NEWS FEED HAS TURNED INTO SOME RELIGIOUS WEBPAGE WITH SHOUTOUTS TO JESUS, AND CALLS TO REMEMBER THAT HE'S THE REASON FOR THE SEASON. *runs for cover*

Just so you know, this is not another religion-bashing post. This is, after all, their holiday. But as someone who didn't realize that Christ had anything to do with Christmas til late childhood, I'm endeavoring to understand what exactly Christmas is supposed to mean to me. I love that the Wikipedia page for Christmas recognizes the secular aspects of the holiday early on; I feel...validated in my understanding of Christmas as an American cultural holiday, as opposed to as a Christian religious one.


I've talked about Christmas a lot already, because this Christmas is...different for my family this year. To make a long story short, times are tough for everyone involved--myself definitely included--and thus things are being kept...simple. And I've been kind of down in the dumps about it. But on the phone tonight, my friend M a) inadvertently reminded me how good a friend she is and how much I miss her, and b) told me that it takes a Christmas like this to appreciate all the other Christmases. And she's right. It's a Christmas like this, apart from the small children and the cookies for Santa and the tree and the anticipation that makes me sit back and think about what Christmas really means.


Christmas means taking at least a few days off from the rest of life. Christmas means being with my family, even if not everyone is thrilled about this. Christmas means doing everything within your means to get your loved ones in the Christmas spirit, meaning the spirit of love and peace and joy and giving. Christmas means love, the kind of love that, while it may lie peacefully dormant for most of the year, shows itself flamboyantly in bouts of colorful joy every once in a while, and gives of itself even knowing it can expect nothing in return. Christmas means creating your own traditions to supplement the ones your childhood gave birth to. Christmas is being in the arms of someone who loves you, and resting your head on your mom's shoulder, mixed in with a hint of how it feels to be picked up for the first time in years. Christmas is the familiarity of your Grandmother's kitchen combined with the thrill of a young Denzel and a pre-crack Whitney in The Preacher's Wife and the slightest of desires to jingle when you walk. Christmas is always wanting to believe Santa is real, no matter how old you get; it's hating snow but wishing for it anyway. Christmas is warm and somewhat fuzzy and somehow magical. Christmas is love.

 

Thanks for bringing me home.

This post is in honor of all the people you don't realize how much you've missed until you're with them again. We've somehow reached that age where the weeks between seeing old friends can turn into months and even years easily if we're not careful. I'm writing to tell you to be careful. Take a random opportunity to do a familiar activity with a familiar face. That feeling of sliding comfortably back into a past you thought was lost forever is what being home is all about in the first place isn't it? It's funny how people can hold onto little pieces of your heart for so long that you forget they even have them, til you're with them again and you feel home; home is where the heart is, and tonight reminded me that, while not broken, my heart is in a million places. Only a true friend can remind you of memories you forgot you had. Only a true friend turns a bad day into a warm, fuzzy one. Only true friends remind you that no matter how old you get, or how time changes you, there is always a way to belong.

Go find those people in your life over this break. Do something with them. Actively remember the person you once were, regardless of whether once was last month or ten years ago, and add this to your resolutions: do more to espouse the things you loved about her.  

Period.

Dear Pad Commercial Designers,

Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but your vials of

blue liquid convince me of absolutely nothing.

Touchably dry, my bloodstained fingertips scoff.

Your free floating cartoon pad drifts like a magic carpet

across my screen, and as it loop-de-loops, it promises

to stretch to fit my body’s natural curves.

Problem with that statement number one:

You sound like a Pamper’s Cruisers commercial.

Two: someone once told me a “regular” sized pad is designed

around the body of a size 6 woman, and I don’t like

what you’re implying about my “irregularity”.

And seriously, anyone who was just dying for a thong pad

is in dire need of a reality check.

But don’t think you’re getting off the hook that easily,

Tampon Commercial Designers. No, I’ve got a complaint or two for you.

Who are these actresses you cast? What menstruating woman in her right mind

really wants to lounge flirtatiously on a pool chaise in a bikini

between overly muscular gentlemen, or chase her dog barefoot

through the wet sand, or go clubbing in the tightest of black dresses,

or nail that difficult new yoga pose while sporting white spandex?

Sorry to be the one to break it to ya, but no one trusts you that well.

And just because you make it tinier (read: easier to leak) and dress it up

in a polka-dotted case does not make me want to show it off to my class,

and I won’t be the first person in line to twirl in slow motion through the field

of flowers or splash gaily in the waterfall either. Now is not a good time to discuss purity.

Of course, not everyone paints periods as a pocket full of sunshine, but Midol and Pamprin

Commercial Designers, you’re next on my list. If I see one more woman get half out of bed

then fall back in, or poke her water weight in the mirror/struggle to button her work pants,

or moan in agony while grabbing her waist/back/head, I’m going to scream.

Yes, it hurts. We all know that. We’ve all known that from tender ages of innocence.

We also know that the cute tight pants are out of commission for a few days, and no matter

how tight the budget is, that morning coffee is a must this week. We know we’ll be crying at

the sappy movies and not having the energy to move, but the real world expects us

up at our normal times and moving at our normal rates and not taking twice as many bathroom

breaks because we either feel like we’re back in diapers or our tampon is so small we can’t feel it

and that’s worrying but either way popping two pills doesn’t stop the feeling that we’re dying

so either show the woman with the clenched jaw and the halfhearted smile who suffers invisibly 

or shut the fuck up.

That last bit is meant for all of you.

Signed,

Your Consumers

I "paint" to make myself feel better...

They say the most suicides happen around the holidays...

...because people whose families are gone or split up or just not coming to town get really depressed, especially as said people get older. The opposite kind of phenomenon happens to me when I go home for the holidays...

The hardest thing for me to get used to about being home is consistently the shock of how much time I spend alone. I thought this would change this year, because I have a single, but I simply don't spend any significant waking time there, so it unfortunately has no desensitizing effect on me. Even at a school that falls into the "small private" category for my JP, on campus I'm almost always in the presence of other people. Even though I live in a single, a hundred or so people live in my building, and I can hear the girls across from me laughing sometimes. It's no big deal for the girl in the shower stall next to me to ask to borrow my body wash; bathrooms have been deprivatized. (Yes I just made that word up.) I eat all my meals with a subset of the same group of 70ish people, the Large Library has a crew, and there are certain friends I can't see without hugging.

But my house isn't structured for such interactions. With the split levels, it's really as if every person has his or her own floor. My sister and I flip-flop between the living room (2nd landing) and our bedroom (5th landing), rarely coexisting in the same space. My brother's room is on the third landing, next to the office with the computer he broke, so no one else is ever there, and my mom spends all her time in her room on the third landing. We each exist in our own separate worlds, and rarely do they meet.

My friends aren't within walking distance here. Even if they were, I don't feel the same ability to just show up uninvitedly; here in the real world, there are families and gatherings and other plans.

So here there are days when I realize I hadn't spoken until after 3 this afternoon, simply because there was no one to say hello to til then.

India would say Sometimes I'm alone, but never lonely. I wish I could agree with her. And E says this shouldn't bother me as much as it does. She says free time is a gift that I should be thankful for, but free ALONE time has always been a curse to me. I'm good at creating space and time for me within lots of hustle and bustle, but I'm at a total loss when "free time" stretches before me like a lake with the stillest of waters. It's not even that I would like to have everything planned out, because I'm not the biggest of planners, it's just...if I'm watching TV, I would rather have someone to laugh at the TV with, someone to steal the blanket from, someone to roll their eyes at me when I tear up. It's that, while I wouldn't mind getting one of those fancy new touchscreen handheld Scrabble console things, I would always rather have an actual partner to play an actual game with. It's so quiet here. I miss the strange commingling of first-person-shooter and Mario Galaxy sounds coming from the Game Room.

Fact that others may find sad but I just consider to be a fact of life: My friend circles have always felt more familial to me than my actual family feels most of the time. That only really bothers me at all around the holidays, when everyone disappears from AIM and Facebook and talks about all the fun they're having/going to have with their families. I smile and nod like I'm cosigning that, but really all I think about is how much I miss the people I share my life with. Those people and the people who share my DNA or even my permanent address have never been one and the same.

Thought that actually saddens/terrifies me: Is this what's waiting for me when undergrad life ends?

[You're a] Good Man

I don't want this to be the India song I associate with your name, because it's far too beautifully tragic, and you're The Truth and a Complicated Melody already, but last night you said something that made me realize that you're a good man. Not only suave, witty, ambitious, handsome, brilliant--but genuinely good. One of the best I know. You commented on a father-son relationship in Love Actually and told me that you want your son to love you like that. You would have given me one of your dramatic looks if I'd told you this then, but I think that's beautiful. It's like, I already know you're going to be a great father someday. I can already tell that I'll be jealous of your relationships with your kids, not because I want kids of my own but because as much as I hate to admit this, I always wanted parents like that. The kind who love openly. I know your mother is proud of you, even if you aren't always proud of yourself. Hell, I'm proud of you, more and more so every single day. This is just another way I look up to you. I'd have kids if I could be like you. But though I can cherish all of my friends and love you all with open arms, I'm still learning how to love one other person with an entirely open heart.

I went to New York to see a show last fall

and had to purchase a MetroCard to get around, obviously. This was the card I got:

 I still have this card. It sits in my wallet with my Visa Check card and my photo IDs and my CVS card and my U-Store Membership card and my insurance card and when I find it in the midst of looking for one of those zillion cards, I pause for a split second and I have to smile. It says in tiny letters that it's part of an Arts for Transit project, and mentions the artist's name. I think this card is fantastic. I hope that the small moment of joy it continually brings me is what the artist--and New York City as a governmental figure?--wanted me to feel, and I want to do all in my power to ensure that I have this card until I am old and grey.

My friend K who I talk about, he told me today that optimism is his new plan for the next few months forever. It made me so happy, because I am always so worried about him putting too much pressure on himself and forgetting to have fun and remember that no matter what happens, the big picture is BIGGER than this and in it, he's a wonderful individual. But it also got me thinking...

People constantly tell me that I'm a bright, bubbly, cheerful person. This afternoon a friend told me she can never imagine anyone saying I'm a mean person. Part of me (the you're-your-own-worst-critic part) gives them a look like, Whatchu talkin bout, Willis?! but the bigger part of me recognizes the truth in what they're saying. I think about how I talk to K, or to F or to T, I think about the feelings I try to leave in my wake wherever I go in daily life, the impression I try to impart on my friends and acquaintances, the beauty and growth I try to see in the trials of life, and the care and warmth I try to give to everyone who matters to me in some small degree and realize that I am a bright, bubbly, and cheerful person the vast majority of the time...to most people, but not always to myself.


It's time for that to go. It's not necessary that I don't want to worry about shit, but just that I want to be confident in my abilities and assured in the fact that I can handle my life, and stop stressing over shit that doesn't matter. There's just no damn sense in being your own worst enemy, under any circumstances. Optimism. Live life limitlessly.