I have so many things to say -- real, honest things, not wordy fluff -- but no time to sit down and write. Soon. Soon.

The funny thing about a long-term leaning towards depression is the nostalgia it induces. When things seem bleak I find myself remembering times not so long ago when everything was just absolutely perfect, as I'm brought back to these daydreams by a song or a feeling. And consciously, I know that things weren't at all perfect at the time in question, and in fact I may have been just as depressed then as now, but somehow the convenient gap of time in between makes that past moment, or any other moment really, better than the present. Perhaps feeling depressed is about living moments long after they've gone by instead of while they're happening. And, refocusing, it's easy to imagine that months from now in my depressive nostalgia I'll look back on this very moment, sitting at my desk, listening to the Whitlams with unfinished Greek in front of me, watching Cornelius in my lap painstakingly washing himself, alternately licking my my finger and his own little paws before passing them over his face like a cat.

Perhaps this is the point: the present is what's taken for granted.

It's the end of the first weekend of April Visit Days, and as I watch the prospectives wandering around campus in the beautiful weather, I'm reminded of my own April Visit Days two years ago which meant so much. But each year when I've gotten the emails and the letters in my mailbox encouraging me to continue the tradition and host a prospective, I throw them out. Perhaps it's because as much as I try to be friendly and engaging to all the prospies I meet, I never feel like I'm really making a connection. Perhaps I'm afraid of not being able to communicate to them what an excellent place this is, what great people these are, and how much it has all meant to me (yes, even though I complain). It turns into a weekend of failed connection. I'm not able to live up to being what my hosts were to me.

But who knows? Could Marty and Dave have known, back when we sat in the admissions building and I took painstaking notes about their answers to questions about pep band, how much of a connection they were making? That I'd show up for more visits and talk to them online and that we'd eventually be really good friends? Maybe my face was as much of a mask as the faces of these new prospectives, and maybe I've said something that's stuck with them after all, and maybe next year... who knows?

earlier -- later