Speaking of names -- sometimes I really desperately want the names of central New York to be mine again. Hamilton, Madison, Morrisville, Clinton, Cazenovia, Oneida, Earlville, Syracuse, and Utica. Route 20, Route 12B, and the Thruway. Broad Street, College Street, Lebanon Street, and Oak Drive. '34 House, Starr Rink, Cushman, Cutten, Frank, the Coop, and Case Library. The Tap Room, Main Moon, Roger's, Nichols and Beal, and Slices. Payne Creek, the Quarry, and the Old Golf Course. They all sort of ring hollow now. As I say their names aloud they feel more fiction than reality. They are part of some daydream, not a tangible existence I walk through every day. Some days this feels okay. But other days it feels Not Right At All, and I would give up my whole inheritance of names in this city to have them back for just a little while.

To try to talk some sense into my staggering brain, we are going to go through an exercise in Latin verb conjugation. Now, my Latin is worse than my Greek and both have admittedly suffered years of disuse, but I hope I can still do this accurately. And excuse me if I ignore the accents -- my old professor would kill me, but in the wonderful world of the internet accents are really more trouble than they are worth for my silly rhetorical exercises.

Amo is the verb "to love". Its principal parts are amo, amare, amavi, amatum. Now, I could conjugate the whole darn thing for you, but no one wants to sit through that. Let's cut to the chase. To make the future passive participle, you take the present stem, ama, and add the endings -ndus, -nda, -ndum (masculine, feminine, and neuter, respectively.) Now you may be wondering precisely how one translates a future passive participle. (The one who will have been loved? Huh?) The trick is that in Latin this participle means "worthy" or "deserving". Therefore one might infer that amanda means "she who is deserving to be loved".

I always remember knowing what my name meant but of course it wasn't until I learned Latin that I realized that it was a clear, basic translation rather than a matter of some sort of distant etymology. I remember distinctly the day in class that the professor conjugated and translated the participles of amo on the board, and pointed out, without referencing me in particular, that the name Amanda was a direct translation of the participle. Unfortunately one of my classmates was not so tactful -- the one who was always just a little too chummy, a little too coy, at that moment turned around from the front row and grinned sweetly at me, as a first-grader may have upon being read a story in which one of his friends' names figured prominently. I cringed and wished I were somewhere else. But I never forgot that class.

I harp on names a lot here -- mostly the names of places rather than the names of people. Mostly I write about how knowing the names of places can make you feel closer to them or feel more ownership of them. Once upon a time I wrote a paper for a class about naming magic -- the power of name-giving in a bunch of literary works, including Genesis, Rumpelstiltskin, and some obscure fiction we had read in class that semester. It’s nothing really –- hell, it’s just a literary device. That’s all it is. But here I am, in this literary world I have created, here I am as a character living in this world of text and spiderwebby images -– since this is true, let us have literary devices, let us believe in them and live by them. Since this is creative writing, let my name have power over me, let the meaning guide my life, let the ancient suggestion of a dead language live as something real. Let me be Amanda, let me be worthy of love, let my life proceed as though some author had chosen this name with the intent for it to be symbolic in this story somewhere down the line. Because if I write this, if I proclaim it, then maybe I can believe it, and if I believe it, then maybe whether it is true or not it will keep me from going insane.

Which brings me to my middle name: Hope. For the love of everything, let there be hope for me, at least. I don’t even have to do a translation to ask for that one to come true.

Jethro Tull - "The Minstrel in the Gallery"

It is spring, that time of spring when the thawing melting growing smell infiltrates all the houses and buildings and chases away the dank stuffiness of winter. In elementary schools everywhere this smell is making children go stir-crazy with energy and the teachers can barely keep them in their chairs anymore. As adults at college we are more restrained, but the fresh smell and the energy and the excitement of being almost-graduated permeates everything we do all the same.

I am sitting at my desk in '34 House with the window open, letting the sun and breeze thrill me. I am listening to Jethro Tull and playing Magic Inlay, a puzzle game filled with shiny jewels and gratuitous fantasy creatures which is our most recent Yahoo game procrastination obsession. It is a one-hour/thirty-day trial, and I have been savoring it while it lasts. The last of my work at Colgate is very nearly done, and I can play games almost guilt-free.

Through the window I begin to hear commotion downstairs, but I pointedly ignore it. A gathering to honor the seniors in one of my student groups had been planned for tonight. I am not going, and nothing could make me happier. They had topped off a year of being rude to me, harassing me and my co-leader, talking about us and undermining us behind our backs, and generally getting nothing done, by then failing to announce my roommate as one of the seniors to be recognized at the event. Disgusted, we had agreed instead to go to the Olive Garden and celebrate ourselves and our accomplishments that way. And with that plan suddenly something that I had been very grumpy and bitter about had turned into something I was excited about and looking forward to. The student group could whisper whatever nonsense they wanted. So what? I got to have an outing with my roommate.

The commotion becomes louder -- tables are being moved, the catered food is being brought in, probably decorations are being arranged. I don't know who has taken it upon themselves to set up this event, and I don't care. This thankless group is symbolic of everything about Colgate that I want to leave behind -- and Maggie is symbolic of everything I want to take with me. The curb outside my window is beginning to be full of parked cars. People are here; it is almost time to make our escape. We wish Jason good luck with the event, which he has bravely chosen to attend after all, and make our way out of the rapidly filling parking lot by driving over the lawn. Goodbye '34 House, goodbye college with all your trivialities and petty student groups. Here's to overcoming all that -- here's to four years of roommates living in perfect harmony, here's to doing our best despite everything, here's to loving our time here but being ready to move on, here's to driving an hour just for infinite breadsticks and Italian sodas, one last time over the familiar hills and curves in the road.

(about song posts)

It's a bit like trying to leave the house in the morning and realizing that you've forgotten how to tie your shoes. I wake up early each morning unintentionally and try to toss and turn away the nameless insecurities marching through my head and the sleepy visions of walking alone down empty streets at night. No matter how good I feel every evening as I go to bed, every morning I have to relearn how to be single, feeling my way through the day, turning and looping different pieces of my life together in hopes that it will eventually form a tight, neat bow the way it used to.

Distractions are wonderful -- a person to talk to, a story to tell them, wallpaper to tear down, html to code, pants to mend. In the middle of these tasks I find I can reach down to my shoes without even thinking about it and tie the bow before I am aware of what I've done. It all fits together again. No one learns to tie a shoe by staring at the laces' twists and turns and analyzing the best way to hold it all together. It is a skill that we learn and repeat blindly until it becomes natural. We have all learned to tie our shoelaces and we have all learned to live, and if we let ourselves relax we can always remember how.

Today is my fifth blog birthday. Five years is a long time for anything to stick around on the internet. Yeeha!

This blog began as On the Wing of My Fancy back in 2001. It was encouraged by Dave and inspired by Yuccacentric and April's blog, which at the time was Starlit Dreams I believe. It started on Geocities back when Geocities was the least evil of the free hosts (I don't know, maybe they still are.) It moved to people.colgate.edu when I moved to Colgate and stayed there for as long as I did, until this fall when I finally bought a domain and webspace for it. It was faithfully powered by Blogger (albeit with occasional difficulties) from its birth when Blogger was still brand new until the recent switch to Greymatter. It went through so many comment systems of varying repute that most of the comments from the old days have been lost. It went through zillions of designs, none of them ready-made templates, demonstrating my gradually progressing html skills, my improving aesthetic taste, and my frequent preoccupation with dragons. It lived with varying degrees of vitality when a significant portion of my Colgate friends had jumped on the bandwagon and set up BlogSpot blogs, and after most of them had grown bored with it and jumped back off, and when Livejournal gradually rose as the new and convenient way for people to blog informally. It started as the ramblings of a moody teenager and gradually turned into the more carefully-crafted writings of an equally moody adult. The only thing that has really remained constant is the craving to write and share, although that too has waxed and waned through the years. But it has always been there, and thus, so has this.

Let's rewind a bit to the summer before I started to blog. I was a somewhat timid highschool almost-senior commuting to Cambridge three times a week to learn ancient Greek at Harvard. The vast majority of my classmates were college students, and at the time I felt very different from them. Though I pretty much remained a loner for most of the summer, I really looked up to a lot of them, especially the friendlier ones who took pains to make me feel included. It seems strange now that I can hardly remember their names.

Towards the end of the summer we were all sitting around -- it might have been after an exam -- and one of the girls was talking about the ridiculous reasons that she had taken up smoking in high school. All I can remember of her now is that she had dark hair and bold glasses, and a brazen manner in which she frequently expressed startling opinions. Reflecting on what she seemed to regard as the idiocy of her teens, she remarked "I hate the person I was five years ago. And five years from now I'm sure I'll hate the person I am today, you know?" I had a tendency in those days to take myself far too seriously, and for me five years was not yet a quarter of my lifetime. To me her revelation seemed astonishing. I wondered if I would ever feel that way about my past.

The short answer is yes. For the sake of completeness I still have all the old archives of this blog listed on the archives page, but I shudder when I go back and read the old ones. I really can't stand the inane drivel and whining of that stage and I would vastly prefer to pretend that it was someone else who wrote all that nonsense. But perhaps it's best that it should stand as a tribute to growth and change and being able to laugh at myself. That, at least, is something I can say I have learned at some point in these five years.

All the same, if you happen to go digging through the archives I strongly recommend that you avoid 2001 like the plague. In fact, throw out the first half of 2002 too. In fact, you might as well not tune in until the name change in September 2002 really. It's for the best. Trust me.

Thanks to everyone who has read, commented, and/or linked to me over the years. I've been really lucky to be able to get to know so many neat people through blogging. In a sense it jumpstarted my whole social life at Colgate, and has sustained me in various ways ever since.

Happy five years Age-Old Songs.

I have to say, I don't understand how people with depressive tendencies who don't have music as their lifeblood even survive. I suppose everyone has their thing though. It's just that for me Bad Religion was the thing that kept me from wanting to be dead for most of this afternoon. I originally turned it on as a defense mechanism against the horrifically loud people surrounding me at the library and keeping me from getting my assignment done. But eventually it turned my feeling of futility into one of... well, hope would be too strong, but maybe possibility is the right word. Survival seemed like an option. A pretty good one for that matter.

Sometimes I wish I could become the music, in an even more intense way than singing or dancing to it. The instruments I play aren't really conducive to rocking out, at least not on their own. I guess that is why I am taking up guitar. Singing and playing and moving at the same time might together measure up to some reasonable shadow of the feeling of absolute immersion that I am craving here. If ever I get to be good enough to play a reasonable shadow of the music I love.

Sometimes I just want to get a can of spray paint and cover this city from top to bottom in the lyrics of the songs that are keeping me alive right now. If I were Batman, the Prudential and Hancock towers, the buildings of the financial district, the streets of the Fenway, and the subway cars of all the lines would be covered in the words to "All There Is", "Epiphany", "The Defense", "The Empire Strikes First" and "Beyond Electric Dreams" by tomorrow. I would be the most useless superhero ever.

After years of attempting to be macho, I think I have come to terms with the fact that I am really a hopeless romantic.

Someday, I hope there is an epic romance in my life. Perhaps not exactly a traditional one, but a beautiful one all the same. And hopefully I'll be clever enough to recognize it when I see it.

And hopefully I'll be wise enough to value it all my life, instead of growing bored and forgetting it's there even though it blossoms right in front of me every day. Taking things for granted is a weakness of mine which I have long found unforgiveable.

And hopefully it'll be wonderful enough that I will in fact be able to forgive myself for the past and decide that it was all meant to happen just exactly this way to come to this one inevitable end.

Consider this my V-day post, because I will probably be somewhat less zen about all this two days from now.

In case you were wondering, I am just as eye-rollingly amused at the juxtaposition of that last entry with the Wuthering Heights entry from earlier in the week as you probably are. "People don't have melodramatic fits and ravings in real life. Oh no wait, they do." At least this one does. What a freak, no?

Harvard Square is sort of an old stomping ground for feelings like this. Years ago I wandered there lost in my own heartbreak, and sure enough now I am doing it again. Before it was the end of my first relationship; now, it is my most recent, but I have apparently learned nothing in all that time because it hurts exactly the same. There is no feeling I have experienced that rivals that one in magnitude. There is a difference though: the first time I wandered there, I was only just learning to let go. It was my first experience of this strange thing called freedom, and now and then I took off in little hops like a bird from the nest. But still I clung to my past desperately and did not want to let go. Now my mistake is the reverse: I have cast off all ties with a haphazard arrogance, claiming to myself that I needed no one and nothing and that I was good at being on my own, but this feeling in the pit of my stomach proves to me that I was wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

At work I find myself preoccupied by dates. Dates are everywhere, written on paperwork I signed off on weeks ago and entered in the computer daily. But now it seems there is an invisible line dividing "before" and "after". Every time I type in a date from a week or so ago it feels like I am falling, and suddenly I am gasping like the wind has been knocked out of me, as though my heartstrings were laid along this line like tripwires. It is hard not to fall helplessly into such a recent past.

I cannot count the miles I have walked in the past few days trying to numb my overactive mind and emotions to everything that I don't know how to handle. I hypnotize myself with the repetitive motion of feet, walking endlessly through Brookline and Boston and Cambridge, shunning the public transportation which would only lead to physical stillness and mental activity. I now know exactly how long it would take me to walk to work should Boston ever have a transit strike (roughly an hour and a half), and I know how it feels to stand over the river in the very middle of the panorama of Boston's skyline, suddenly a part of the picture that I always look at from the T. But at the end of the day I always have to stop walking and go home, to sleep that does not rest me and wakefulness that is like a bad dream.