And then (once upon a time) there were two girls, with a power and self-assurance beyond their own comprehension, even, who fought battles with indescribable courage. Granted their swords were their words, and their battles were the simple everyday playground fights to keep people from using the words gay and lesbian as insults, but it reminds me that there are superpowers in this world, not quite like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but still impressive, and that these are the characters and personalities that make up the really good fairytales.

Today while I was working at the library I saw a dead fly lying upside-down on the desk, and brushed it away thoughtlessly to get it out of the way. But as I brushed it its legs wiggled, and, startled, I brushed at it again, flipping it right side up this time. The fly stood there, clearly not dead at all, apparently getting its balance back, and before I had gotten far in my work he flew off as though nothing had happened. A little insect resurrection.

My fish are like that too, defying death somehow through a summer of starvation, flea bombing (in which most of the other fish in the tank died), bedbug fumigation, and lysol sprayed directly into their tank, until the day when my housemate (they were hers) grew tired of trying to kill them off and dumped them in the toilet, only to have me fish them out again before anyone flushed. Now they're swimming around a fishbowl in my room, and I'm still not sure why they're alive at all.

Sometimes it's these small miracles of survival that give me hope.

The Coop was in fact open today, oddly enough. I had been convinced that they wouldn't be done by orientation after all. When I saw it I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. It doesn't feel like the Coop anymore. It's ridiculously pretentious and reminds me more of a nice hotel with lobby, gift shop, and restaurant, than a place that college students go to munch on grilled cheese and fries while doing work, watching TV, or generally hanging out. In a way it comes down to the difference between light and dark wood, the former being bright, friendly, unpolished, the latter giving an air of overpreened high-class glossiness. And I keep hearing rumors about how much the fireplace cost, and the globe above the stairwell, and imagining that they must be the reason that the price of laundry has gone up, and so forth. I haven't seen the menu yet, but I get the feeling a grilled cheese would feel lost in that place. It seems like a terrible thing to say, but I really do hope that we'll scuff the place up pretty soon, and bring it down to a level where it is comfortable, and ours not someone else's. There's something to be said for things that are well-worn.

In the end I decided to laugh, though. Silly Colgate and its pretentious Coop. I wonder how long before they try to give it a fancy name, too?

Yesterday, playing ultimate frisbee with the band and turning my feet green, I realized that at that exact moment everyone important to me was on campus. The band was here, and my closest friends and housemates, and enough people to run Advocates and WRCU, my most important activities outside of pep band. I knew that I could be perfectly happy if no one else ever arrived for the semester, and we just ran around the rugby field playing frisbee for all eternity. But I also knew that the freshmen would arrive today, and that my lovely sunset-robed chapel-crowned campus wouldn't see peace again until fall break.

But this morning I woke up to a sunny day, and crisp fall air that reminds me of the season to come although it still hasn't learned to last all the way through the day. In half an hour the freshmen will start pouring in. Who ever gets a sunny move-in day here at Colgate? They are somehow blessed, tangibly, by this light and this air. And I as well, because I think that I finally have my energy back.

Tonight I didn't feel like I had the energy to socialize as I usually do. It was the traditional First Night of band camp, and there was beirut of course, but despite the plentiful bottles of soda I didn't feel like I wanted to play, or even watch people play as has been my habit for so long. I did anyway; after all I wanted to make an impression and bond with people and be perceived as fun and energetic and make sure the nondrinking freshmen felt comfortable and welcome participating in whatever they chose to, and I had to battle my patented Anti-Charisma which causes me to not be noticed and not bond with anyone at all. It's not that I wanted to go home and get away or escape from it all. What I really wanted was just to lie there and take in their energy, the whole combination of smells and sounds and musics and movements going around the room and through my head: to immerse myself in their enthusiasm and let it embrace me.

Some patterns make my head hurt. The formulation of us-them dichotomies over almost anything. The smugness of those in a group that is in power when people turn to their "side". Sometimes the issues are big: a bisexual woman who has been dating women finds all her hetero friends overly pleased to hear that she's dating a guy -- she's been straightened out. Like them. Good. Or smaller things: I play trombone instead of clarinet, hooray, you've finally seen the light, now you play a real instrument. Or, it's okay to pressure the incoming class to drink, I mean, we're not making them, we're just, you know, exerting a pressure. So they'll be like us. Because somehow that's inherently better.

Even among people who claim that they value difference, there's a weight placed on these trivial things, taking green and yellow and putting a positive value on one and a negative on the other. To what end? Over and over and over again I see this pattern; it exists almost everywhere. A song in different keys, played at different tempos, by different ensembles with different improvisations here and there. But when it comes down to it, it's still the same crappy song, and like any bad song played over and over and over again, it's bound to drive me mad eventually.

Because you know what? I know that I could be valued, by any number of people, if only I followed all their little rules. If it's so simple, why don't I do it? Yes, partially because I'm ridiculous and stubborn. But mostly because I refuse to be valued for stupid reasons. They're not worth the effort. But for all my feigned apathy, it still makes me angry to see their little ordered worlds, with little stick figures lined up on the "good" and "bad" sides of each line. It's such a frequent pattern (we all do it, on some level, don't we?) that I can't help but think that it must be human nature, that this is our song, and it is only a meager, honked attempt at real music.

My head is filled with literature and Boston, and I like it that way. Reading some well-written fiction makes me see everything around me more clearly, and I find myself automatically trying to describe little parts of the world to myself, translating energetically from thought to language. I know somehow that translation is what I've always wanted to do and always tried to do, even if this most basic type is the only one I can claim to be good at, and I do it with the same precision and care that I always imagined, but never did, put into an English rendering of a classical text.

And Boston -- it's a haven, really. Here I can be alone but among others at once; I can observe people but usually not be obligated to interact, in this most taciturn of cities. Here I am free because I don't know anyone, and I am not self-conscious as I inevitably become at a site of past failings. I have a history here, in Boston, but not the sort of history that is filled with the everyday melodramas of life, the once-friends, the stupid things I've done, the people that I ought to remember but don't, the tired frustration of the same problems lived over too many times. It's just a place that I've wandered, where there are familiar streets and shops and subway lines. But at the same time the streets I haven't explored and the ground I haven't walked over seems almost infinite. I have not worn out this city yet.

Someday I imagine that I'd like to live here, but I almost don't dare. I won't pretend that I think there's some magic power that keeps this city safe for me; rather, it is only safe because I haven't ruined it by living here. And I know that if I stay for too long it will just become the home of more bittersweet memories and experiences that induce that old wanderlust in me and send me onward to whatever my next haven may be. Anything, it seems, can be ruined through overuse, and for that reason there are dreams that I shy away from: living in a place that I still love, pursuing a career in an area that is often my only solace. It keeps these things pristine, as if behind glass, but at the same time, keeping them there will prevent me from ever knowing what joy or tragedy may result from everyday use.

I think part of what's so appealing about Stargate SG-1 is the tightness of the team. I mean, they don't always understand each other or agree with each other, but they always have each other's backs. A lot of the things that happen on Stargate don't make sense because they'll go to ridiculous amounts of effort to save one member of SG-1 (and risk a lot of other lives in the process) while at the same time it's easy to kill off SG-12 every few episodes or so. But at the same time, it allows them to create the illusion of a world where (if you conveniently ignore the fate of some of the other SG teams) no one is left behind, where people are always there for you, where real altruism is possible, because you know that if you look after someone else, they'll look after you too -- all in the most dramatic of situations, facing death on a daily basis and so forth. It's not a real world by any stretch of the imagination, but it's one that I like to imagine.

But in this world I've learned that I have to stop the self-sacrificing stuff, because there are very few who would do the same for me. I guess in theory true altruism is expecting nothing in return, which I don't mind generally, but if I never look out for my own interests because I'm thinking of someone else's, what happens to me? I guess my problem is that I imagine some connections to be stronger and truer than they are, that there are people that I feel so strongly about that they must feel the same about me. But more often than not it's a one-sided bond, and my efforts to reinforce it aren't noticed or returned. It's kind of pathetic really.

So I must back away, and take care of myself, and look out for others when I can after that. I have come to see it as a strength that I am able to love so many people so strongly. But I must leave it at that, a sort of wildflower love that I can enjoy without any effort, and not tend the garden of a deep friendship unless I know that someone else is helping me to make it grow.

I think the first thing I'm going to do when I get out of college is get a cat or two. Well, first thing after I find a place to live where I can have cats. I miss having a kitty.

You know, I've been kind of bitter at Colgate for a while, but this has been a summer of making peace with things. Perhaps it's just because I'm tired of being angry. But it's also partially putting things in perspective.

Last semester I spent a lot of time in a sort of oblivious fog, and I walked around campus without even seeing it. It lasted about as long as my anger lasted. But at some point in the middle of this summer I stepped out of Lathrop and really saw the chapel for the first time in a long time. And it seemed so big and beautiful and real. Maybe it was because I was coming outside after scanning pictures for hours, I was almost surprised that the whole world wasn't made up of pixels.

Jason had to move up to Curtis Hall recently, as all the summer residents at Colgate do at the end of the summer. Three floors up, at the top of the hill, the view out his window is stunning. It reminds me of that feeling that I used to get back in fifth floor East, of flying over the hills. That heady feeling that comes from being high up in the air, close to the moon. I'm sad that I can't ever live in one of those rooms anymore. But I'm glad I'm living somewhere where there are buildings that have windows that can give you that feeling.

Last semester I kept wondering whether, had I known about all these changes, it would have affected my decision to come to Colgate. Sometimes, in my head, or aloud to other people, I'd talk about how if I'd known about all this I might not have come here at all, as though this is some threat to the school, that I could have gone somewhere else, that I could have transferred. The old "they'll be sorry" mentality. But saying that hurt me and no one else. What if I'd never come here? Every time I say it my heart aches with the negation of all that I've become over the past two years, all the people I've met and all the experiences I've had and all that I've learned from them. Would I have met good people and had good experiences elsewhere? Sure. But I wouldn't trade these particular experiences, now that I've had them, for any others I can imagine.

For a while, as I saw the tour groups walking around campus, I'd think about what I would say to them if I were leading the tour -- the honest truth, not the happy admissions bullshit. I had it all planned out. But then, one day last week, some people in a tour said hi to me as I walked by. "Do you like Colgate?" they asked. I smiled. "Yeah. Yeah, I like Colgate." I have my beefs with the place, and if you give me a soapbox for long enough I can pick it to bits. But, the short answer? I like Colgate. It's not even a choice anymore. Colgate is a part of me.

I know some things I'd rather not...
Like the time ahead is all the time you've got...

~Ted Leo, "Building Skyscrapers in the Basement"

Some stories are so common and so familiar that I can hardly pick up a magazine or turn on the TV without seeing it played out again. Fairytales, really, with just different names and details scrawled over the same people spending their lives doing the same things. It's a trap, and every time I see it again I panic like a rabbit that doesn't know where to run.

I cannot, I will not, spend my life being the stage crew for someone else, when I crave the spotlight for myself. But for that to happen, the world has to see value in my song too. And the fairytale seems to say that people will always sweep past my side-stage for some "greater" act.

When I walk down Broad Street at night, I can smell trees flowering. I don't know why -- the trees by the road aren't flowering trees, and anyway, it's sort of late in the season for any trees to be flowering. And it doesn't smell like that during the day, only by night. Strange trees.

earlier -- later