almost 22! life is in a good equilibrium right now. teren messaged me at 12 noon here and i realized that my birthday is started, it's been nice walking around celebrating my birthday and annie's who was born one day prior. of course i don't feel older. it's still nice waiting up, staying up, until midnight hits. i wonder if my family's going to cut me cake in absentia. i have a proposition to learn for lab, and a reading to do for french, and tomorrow, there will be a bonfire with nine others in the woods with a lot of beer: mia's favourite, my favourite, etc. girls only! because all my close friends in fe are girls or their boyfriends, but it's nicer to just have a "girls' night out". the woods - brown woods, dark woods, a fire burning and drunk girls shrieking. that's the plan for tomorrow. tonight's plan is quiet and calm and maybe some writing. it is already my birthday! waiting for it to come is the nicest part, though.

over my initial euphoria but things are still predominantly good. i have no afternoon classes on tuesdays and thursdays

just a comparison!

yesterday i was stressed and lonely through the afternoon, i sat in bed and was too stressed about my impending paper to head out to the bakery or seek friends, and i tried to work up motivation to continue on my paper for four hours, which felt like ten. i read a hundred pages of george eliot's daniel deronda instead of reading heidegger for my precept, then i finally went to seek a friend, and we talked about my stress for a good half an hour, and we went for dinner at the dining hall. i'd been working on this paper intensely for a week straight, with possibly two weeks prep prior, which sounds ridiculous to a lot of you and not ridiculous enough for some of you, and to write this ten-page double-spaced paper i'd put about 40-50 hours of work into it. which sounds crazy, but it's don quixote that i'm writing on, and that's a thousand-page book, and of course i have to come up with my own encapsulation and interpretation. no research, no secondary sources, just me and the book and a lot of note-taking and thinking and writing.

i've been doing it so much that i've gone slightly insane and made links to don quixote with everything in my life. don quixote is very personal to me! but comparing the different campuses to the different stages of don quixote, comparing myself, and my friends, to different things in don quixote - that is probably too much. at noon i reached the point where i was convinced of don quixote and sancho's never being able to be each other, two selves travelling along the same road but always having different ends, and that was terribly depressing - what do you do if you're both don quixote and sancho? answer: you read nietszche and create a culture hall within you! i wish i had thought of that.

well. i hope shu doesn't mind.

this coming week, shu has: a lit paper due monday, a linguistics paper due thursday, a pysch paper plan and a neuro exam on friday. and drag ball to organize on friday.

i have: my ten-page paper (actual limit is 8-10, i may hit 11 with great effort) due monday, my heidegger reading for my new heidegger precept on monday (which i might spend eight hours on. my choice!), and.... that's really all that's stressing me out. colleges are so different.

it's eleven forty and i recently got back from the coffee shop, where i was talking to a friend after seminar. seminar was endlessly frustrating and i keep losing track of the conversation, partially because of natural limitations, partially because of human factors. i got out and was endlessly frustrated and bought a bunch of food at the coffee shop, and wound up speaking to a girl in my core group about the authors we've been reading, as well as personal things. recently someone told me that there's something about the focus on intellectual connection here that's really disorienting, personality should matter much more in terms of friendship and liking. that is one thing to base friendships upon, and i can definitely do that. if that's the way a person sees the world, that is how the world will react to you; you'll find people who you love whose personalities you love, and that will be enough. but if you're looking for something else, and once every two years you meet someone whose mind you love, and you see it in class! you see it in conversation! you see the person's personality through public and private speech, there's a connection through the intellect to something deeper than just the intellect. when a person loves the same thing you love, and sees the world through a similar window, there's already a kind of natural friendship present. in some sense, it's more about being understood than anything else: there are people whom i speak to that make me feel foreign, and there are others whom i speak to who bypass and subsume foreignness by understanding. it is very odd how that happens and who that happens with.

i climbed up to the swing by myself for the first time today. i'm usually too scared to hike alone, because there's always the possibility of being lost, and my parents always say not to, of course i'll get lost! in fact yesterday while hiking with h and a we did get lost on two consecutive mountaintops. but today i just headed up to the swing, the flat patch of rocks, and with the school in full view and my room in sight i sat for three hours and wrote, and called mish for the first time in a while. i have been radio-silent for a while! i'm in santa fe for the year, and it's freezing out at night. we've had snow on the mountaintops once or twice in the mornings, in the past two weeks. today was summer-like sunny though and i spent so much time writing outside. this evening, at the library, i browsed fiction and literature with h and grabbed seven novels for leisure reading. it's the first time my school library feels like a normal library, that's a wonderful feeling. i shivered back to my room and listened to someone's poignant boy troubles and studied some, and called my mom. left a message on emma's phone telling her i'd be in touch after my seminar paper's in. texted morgan for the first time in a long while, telling her how i'd dreamt of her last night. she and i were in a huge dollhouse-maze with terrifyingly exquisite rooms, tall rooms, playhouse rooms, and we were trying to find something. we wound up at a lecture and she had to go to armenia, because that's probably where she is now, and i wanted to stay to listen to the lecture. people were answering questions and mr p was there watching. the day before i dreamt that i was in the brightest place i've ever been in, i was on a journey to somewhere and i had a book that would explain everything to read on the way. i was wearing two pairs of sunglasses and i was still squinting, and the people with me were trying to lead me. it was the whitest place i've ever been in! rather like santa fe when i first came.

In Language class, people were talking about how words communicate things incommunicable, and how we would never be able to truly know that another person understood what we were saying, and I said: When the other person reacts in a way that you can completely account for, the other person understands what you said. When the person's actions and words in response line up perfectly with something that you can give an account for, the person understood you, and you are simultaneously recognizing both that the person understood you and that you understand the person. You can cross the word-barrier by being one person, and you can be one person when the account that you give for yourself is identical with the account you would apply for someone else. So we do know that we're speaking of the same things.

If someone said: I like him, and I said: why? I don't like him, we know that we see two different things in him. The him that you refer to is so much more likeable than the him that I refer to. Or if we saw the same thing, his ability in.. running, for instance, then your love for his running is genuinely incommunicable to me because I don't love the same thing and react in the same way.

"Whoever reaches into a rosebush may seize a handful of flowers; but no matter how many one holds, it's only a small portion of the whole. Nevertheless, a handful is enough to experience the nature of the flowers. Only if we refuse to reach into the bush, because we can't possibly seize all the flowers at once, or if we spread out our handful of roses as if it were the whole of the bush itself—only then does it bloom apart from us, unknown to us, and we are left alone."

Lou Andreas-Salome

So it might be nice to write about how this year has been, because I have been away, but more because this should still hold part of me. I came here earlier today and looked at what I wrote every new year's from a few years ago. There is a lot of me that has changed but much of what grounds me has not. That was slightly reassuring.

This passage from the Ethics has been on my mind recently:

"As in regard to the virtues some men are called good in respect of a state of character, others in respect of an activity, so too in the case of friendship; for those who live together delight in each other and confer benefits on each other, but those who are asleep or locally separated are not performing, but are disposed to perform, the activities of friendship; distance does not break off the friendship absolutely, but only the activity of it. But if the absence is lasting, it seems actually to make men forget their friendship; hence the saying 'out of sight, out of mind'. Neither old people nor sour people seem to make friends easily; for there is little that is pleasant in them, and no one can spend his days with one whose company is painful, or not pleasant, since nature seems above all to avoid the painful and to aim at the pleasant. Those, however, who approve of each other but do not live together seem to be well-disposed rather than actual friends. For there is nothing so characteristic of friends as living together (since while it people who are in need that desire benefits, even those who are supremely happy desire to spend their days together; for solitude suits such people least of all); but people cannot live together if they are not pleasant and do not enjoy the same things, as friends who are companions seem to do."

It's harder to define my friendships than most, perhaps, because I don't tend to spend that much time doing activities. I enjoy talking about things that are important to me, but everyone enjoys those - that is not an activity and more importantly it isn't an activity that can be done together all the time. There must be a life led before it can be assessed. Talking in itself becomes talking about nothing; and there's only so much analysis that can be had of nothing before it turns into nothing itself. I would know.

I don't think that it's unfair to say that we've all moved to different places by different ways, and we're all barely talking. It's odd, because I know, reading an entry two years back, that in some sense if I were ever in serious trouble I could approach people with whom I have friendship in potential. But more often than not it's not that which I need; I want people to be in my life and part of it. I want to live with people and have friendships actively with these people that I know that I can have friendships with. But we're in different states and different countries and that simply isn't possible in the same way... not that that was always existent before, though. It's just that there was always actualized something whereas now I feel like I have a bag of potentials that I'm content to carry around with me. I'm used to it and I guess that's what always happens with distance but I wish it weren't, I don't know, this way.

LJ used to be a kind of mass-sharing, where everyone knew what everyone cared about at every present moment, and while that's kind of insane and scary (that everyone knew everything about everyone, however cryptically), I wish that would have happened now. But it's still different, because we tried that for a while and it didn't work, and in any case we were all having so many experiences that pushed us in different directions.... Eug is into hiking and outdoor things, Shu is doing many pride-involved things, Mish is doing art and etc, Bon is gaining new experiences. Everyone's just expanding into new areas I'm not even certain that I can conceive of.


This year feels so much more like just this school year than the entire span. I don't have much to say about the end of the last school year, I was really happy and really depressed, really full and empty alternately. I would be with people and that would leave me filled and drained in completely unpredictable turns. I had drama and then non-happenings with a girl who was my closest friend. I had a group of friends whom I was very good with, which completely fell apart at the start of this school year. I was increasingly involved in seminar and the program, more than I expected that I would be just looking at the reading list, but see - the first semester of freshman year centres around Plato. The second semester is all Aristotle. I was ready in a certain way for Plato but I was born to love Aristotle, and that's different, and my entire relationship with Aristotle involved elements from my seminar tutor and from the people I was friends with in my seminar, whom I loved talking to out of seminar about seminar, and just... everything. The second semester was one long love affair incorporating both the people and the books.

And then my major paper, the culmination of Aristotle and the program in the first year, was over and I fell into a hole (which I went to a counselor about because I was scared) and summer came and I went back to Singapore and I was falling all the way. I had my family and I was in Singapore and I was not occupied, and I was trying to be self-occupied, and that didn't work because I was in such a funk all the time. I would be in the house and be depressed and I would tell myself that going out would help, that I should step out of the house and meet with people and that I would be okay then, and I would do those things and they wouldn't help. And sometimes I would find something that would work, and I would be full of excited hope until the next time the same thing was imminent and then I would try to put it into action, and it wouldn't work, and I would fall and I would be so scared of hoping. I can't remember if I wrote during the summer but I had hoped and given up so many times that I was just in a daze by the end.

I went back to SJ completely depressed and feeling ugly and expecting that the year would turn out disastrous. I reached my new house with my two suitcases and hauled them up, and waited for my friends to come, and in the next few days I was entertained and distracted by novelty, and I was somewhat in the world if not completely alive. I remember looking at the way my roommate managed to organize her things in her half of the room by placing a thing here and another there and in an hour her side looked filled, and I had my boxes all lying stacked and my clothing in my suitcases and I didn't know where to start so I lay in bed and was acutely miserable. Then I called my mom and started laughing-crying to her and she calmed me down, and the next day I packed some things and proved to myself that I wasn't completely incapable.

At the start of the school term then I talked to Annie my housemate about how I didn't think that SJ was all I needed for the rest of the world, something I believed until the summer where I very hugely proved myself wrong, and about how SJ may not be the best education in the world.

School started and I approached things extremely clinically and held myself far back because to a certain extent I didn't believe in the program anymore. But classes started off interestingly. We were reading the bible for seminar and we'd started music, and I was a lab assistant so i took first year lab classes over again, and my math and language tutors are good tutors. And I really, really liked the Aeneid and we had decent discussions about foundational things in class, so I carried on in an increasingly good way until I guess I was pretty much in love with something, but I don't think that that thing is quite the program in its original form because I realized something that isn't going to go away.

I was also wearing dresses and pretty things around because I was overcoming fear and because I wanted to, and that turned out to be normal after a while which was all I really wanted. I also learned to cook and I realized that I really liked being able to exist in the kitchen. I was roommates with Amy and housemates with Annie. We got furniture. I sold my books at the bookstore. I did laundry. I got my first checkbook and signed my first check. I am familiar with how to use an ATM. Annie and I muddled through giving two dinner parties. I went out for dinners with various of my friends' parents. Thanksgiving dinner at the President's house was lovely and non-awkward and I rode my bike there, and wound up having a really long conversation with the President of some school. I got a bike. Annie got a car. I'm not scared of talking to people about anything anymore, when I have something actual that I want to convey (such a relief because it was such a ridiculous fear). Small achievements.

Bigger achievements: I have a phone with an unlimited plan and I talk to my parents decently often. I text Shu. I asked my ex-seminar tutor out for coffee (after I skipped the Anselm seminar). I went out with my friend and two people on a lark and we conceptualized a study group with a brilliant tutor, which wound up happening. I have been going to places - I have been to DC more than six times in this school year. I barely stepped out of SJ last school year. I am alright with being stranded at places or lost because I am good with asking for help. I am presently doing a sort of giant touring of the East Coast, traveling up to DC with Morgan and watching Oklahoma, then by train to Anne's at Rhode Island, then by bus to Jim's at Albany and Trevor's at Corning, then again to Lizzy's just outside NYC (tromping around in the snow in NYC one entire afternoon), and then I flew down to Annie's in Athens. I'm going to visit Shu in Atlanta after. It sounds like a lot of traveling on paper and it rather is, but in actuality it's a lot of sleepy bus rides and occasional conversations with strangers. And also meeting people's parents and seeing their lives, which I have handled okay all trip.

I have actually been fairly depressed all trip despite all odds because... I tend to get depressed. That was easy. Actually, the sky was grey and the snow was grey and the brown sparse branches let the grey show through. It was drab and dead and cold and ugly, and i'm starting to realize why people hate winter. The only upside in all this gloom (humans combating nature) is christmas lights; every house has christmas lights of all colours strung from trees, threaded through fences, lining the windows and the roofs. For hours on end the only real colours I would see were christmas lights.


Regrets: most of my regrets have to do with people (in school, not back home) and it is profoundly uninteresting. Maybe I am old and sour. I do things and I feel much more capable than before, but I rarely feel alive. My current hypothesis is that classes, or conversations, are so intense that nothing else outside matches up, and yet classes cannot (should not) perpetually happen. Lizzy's theory is that SJ and Annapolis leave no room for a personal life. We don't do anything meaningful with each other that extends outside the books. She's transferring to a school in NYC.


To sum up and be depressing: this year was searching. This year was finding many, many non-answers; I conquer fears and move beyond them and realize that there's no final reward. I achieve things and expect something that mostly isn't there. Maybe I'll just go back to where I have ground and stop there, rest and grow, or maybe I'll just keep moving and hit upon something.... the answer is not SJ. I feel like Socrates with his non-answers but Socrates does have answers, they just aren't stated. Either way, whether I move or not, I know that I'll still be searching. That's next year.