So I just spent an hour re-reading our chat logs from your senior year - the year we shared together at Reed - trying to remind myself who you were, when you were alive. And it seems like all that I found was me putting you off, declining every kind offer to hang out, get dinner, see a movie. I can't stand it. It seems like our whole friendship was just postponement, putting off a chance to really get to know each other until some imagined date when we were less busy, less anxious, less frantic, less Reedy, and all that's left now is a string of little moments, too far apart and too few.

You were so generous with your time, your friendship, and your intellect. There aren't a lot of people I'm close to. You should have been one of them, but I always figured there would be another chance. You brought a lot of wonderful things into this world, but you had so many more left in you, too. It's the idiotic randomness of it that cuts the deepest. Your story just stops. It defies narrative; it makes the whole world seem meaningless. Life one moment, death the next, order to entropy, and time wrecking everything in its path. But I guess that's time's job.

Goodbye, Lindsay. You were too good, and too young. I'll miss you.

God, I am so confused. Not traumatized, not going insane, nothing dramatic like that, just in one gigantic tailspin. This semester has been great, but it can't end soon enough.

I think today's the day for some Halo 2 therapy.

-reg

Ich habe von meinem Grossvater ein Buch bekommen. Es heißt "Der Struwwelpeter". (Schauen Sie! Ich kann den Dativ und das Perfekt benutzen. Mein Leben ist gut.) Hier ist ein Bild:



Mein Gott.

-reg

Yesterday began with me sleeping through two classes because I was busy feeling sorry for myself ("This pit of self pity is not going to wallow in itself, goddammit!") and ended with me curled up with an intelligent, extremely cute girl from my First Year Studies whom I'd had a vague crush on most of last year. And would you like to know what I dreamed about that night?

Separable prefix verbs. Why does this keep happening!?

This is an excerpt from my German Reader. For linguistic reasons, this is only going to be amusing to about four of you. The rest will just have to muddle through with the Fish. However, it's worth it. I wish I could make shit like this up.

Kapitel III:

Probleme der Jurisprudenz

Arthur Andernach studiert Jurisprudenz in Berlin; er geht jeden Tag in die Universität. Was Arthur hier hört, interessiert ihn nicht immer, aber er lernt es doch. Oft aber findet er das Studium interessant. Nicht selten gibt der Professor Arthur eine Aufgabe. Dann sitzt Arthur zu Hause und schreibt. Vielleicht interessiert es Sie, so eine Aufgabe zu lesen. Hier ist eine:

Franz Müller ist jung, gesund und stark, aber arm; sein Onkel, Gustav Müller, ist alt, krank und schwach, aber reich. Er ist sehr reich, und doch gibt er Franz kein Geld, gar kein Geld. Franz aber weiß, daß er alles Geld des Onkels bekommt, wenn der alte Mann stirbt. So steht es in dem Testament des Onkels. Franz ist jung und braucht Geld, viel Geld. Er denkt: "Vielleicht stirbt Onkel Gustav bald, vielleicht aber auch nicht. Ich kann nicht warten; ich brauche das Geld jetzt." In der Nacht steigt er durch ein Fenster in das Haus des Onkels und geht in das Schlafzimmer. Der alte Mann liegt im Bett und scheint zu schlafen. Franz tritt an das Bett und stößt ein Messer in das Herz des armen reichen Mannes. Doch was ist das? Aus der Brust des Onkels fließt kein Blut! Sein Arm liegt still auf dem Bett. Der Arm ist steif, die Hand eiskalt! Auf einmal versteht Franz: der Onkel war tot, als Franz in das Zimmer kam! Das ist zu viel für Franz; er schreit und fällt auf den Boden. Hier findet ihn Gustav Müllers Diener und ruft die Polizei. Das ist die Geschichte. Arthurs Professor abert fragt: "Ist das Mord? Halten Sie Franz für einen Mörder? Wenn nicht, was ist er dann?"

Wie finden Sie die Aufgabe? Interessant? Halten Sie sie für leicht? Denken alle Studenten in Ihrer Klasse wie Sie?

...what an awesome country.

For the last three days, my life has been just fucking enchanted. It's like all the good parts, as I remember them, are here, and there's not a bitter world hating misanthropic sentiment left in me.

It started on Saturday night, when, in the midst of a bitter misanthropic funk which Julia declined to rescue me from, I IMed a girl I saw on iChat's rendezvous panel whose status message said "currently naked. un-currently away."

"Just for whatever it's worth, that's the sexiest status line I've ever seen," I said.

The next day, around afternoon, she IMed me back and said thank you. We then proceeded to discover that we were both enormous Faulkner and Kundera whores, at which point I invited her upstairs and we hung out for an hour, decided to go see a movie in Bronxville, and had a fabulous conversation as we walked there and back.

Oh, and she's rooming with her identical twin. Make whatever you will of that.

On Monday, I dragged my sorry ass out of bed to get to work at Academic Computing, where I intended to get some last minute studying done for a bitch of a film test I had coming on Tuesday, along with a conference appointment for my econ class. Of course, I ended up borrowing "America: The Book" from the library and procrastinated from 9 to 5. But! Within an hour of arriving at work, an elderly woman I helped burn some CDs on Friday came by with a potted flower to give to me, and a bag full of truffles. My day was pretty much straight uphill from there - at dinner, I spent about an hour and a half chatting/mildly flirting with a gay Indian guy from work, who expressed utter shock that I didn't have many friends here, because

"You're so interesting to talk to!"

Immediately afterwards, I went to the pub's pillow room to finally get to work on organizing my film notes, when I was accosted by a small pack of first years who briefly assessed my taste in nickelodeon cartoons and then immediately invited me into their inner circle. I spent the rest of the evening with my head resting between the legs of a girl named Aviva from the Rocky Horror Picture Show (which I declined to participate in this year) while she played with my hair and we watched "Being John Malkovich."

Then she invited me to tag along with her friends for dinner, and finished the night by asking for my number. And one of her friends said

"You have such a cute butt!"

Man, I live for this shit. Of course the consequence of this was that it was already 2 AM and I'd gotten no studying done, so as I went home vaguely dazed and prepared to get to work, who should show up but Redd, desperate for a DV encoded credit-free clip of the FLCL outro. And Lo, the summer I spent teaching myself how to rip DVDs to any format known to man finally paid off.

I slept three and a half hours (it was more like a light nap), cooked my first two fried eggs for myself on my own stove, with my own frying pan (so damned liberating) and then got off to class where I not only breezed through my conference with Frank, and not only hit my film test for which I was completely unprepared out of the fucking ball park, but exchanged SNs with (yet another!) amazing psychotic girl named Alex on more medications than I can count.

Then the guys from the previous night phoned me, and I ended up at an election night party at a guy named Pedro's house, which lasted until 2:00 AM when I decided it was time to go home, and ended up being the only one sober enough to drive a flatbed truck full of SLC students home on the Bronx River Parkway. And I kissed Aviva goodnight, and noted something to the effect of

"I have no idea what's going on, because I definitely just met you two days ago, but I think you're pretty awesome."

And now, here I am. Kerry didn't win, but on the other hand, he hasn't lost yet, so my streak isn't quite over. I've got a movie date with Joy on Thursday, and my mother's coming to town this week and has tickets to "Twelve Angry Men" on broadway.

And Reed called me, and are going to send me admissions materials that might allow me to get in during the spring as a partial credit student without having to go through SLC at all. And there are gigantic piles of brown leaves to jump in, and more keep coming off the trees, and it's impossible to look at the fall colors and not be totally inspired and happy.

Life doesn't get any better than this.

12.) Share the only free center seat on the airplane with a cute jewish girl from princeton exactly your age who was the world rock climbing champion when she was eleven, who has a black belt in tae kwon do and is willing to exchange phone numbers with you at the end of the flight.

11.) Midnight run to voodoo donuts immediately after landing. Triple Chocolate Penetration, baby. (Later, rolling down council crest at four in the morning)

10.) Milk and Cookies with your three best CTY friends in the whole universe.

9.) Borrow your mother's boyfriend's double-height ladder, clamping pliers and monkey wrench and (with Cathy, Braidy and Josh) abscond with the sign to the long-abandoned Heaven Café and Bistro.

8.) Share a superficially amiable basketball game with your Father, with whom you've never figured out how to have a relationship that doesn't consist of a long, bitter, never-ending political debate and who refuses to allow your mother to accompany you on the car ride to the airport.

7.) Vote.

6.) Fail to visit Powell's Books, Spartacus, Hotcake House, Jay Christian and Michael Li, and to sleep more than four hours a night.

5.) Solicit Cathy, Josh, Braidy, S.Bake, Inscrutable Sarah, Nick Thiessen and Debbie Schauffler for the Top Ten List of Ways to Cruelly Eviscerate Julian Ramirez-Bierring's "short story" in workshop on Thursday.

4.) Spend three and a half hours: saying "hi" to old teachers for ten minutes each; getting a tour of the new OES buildings by a girl you hooked up with once four years ago because her laptop had a bigger hard drive than yours; and hanging out with people who used to be your bitter, antisocial freshman girls and who are now bitter, antisocial, lovelorn and jaded juniors girls who are no longer "yours" in any sense, but who at least seem to get a kick out of hanging out with you.

3.) I ♥ Huckabees (Amelia); The Motorcycle Diaries (Nicholas, Natascha, Inscrutable Sarah); Team America: World Police (Alice, Jason, Lizard)

2.) Wake up every living soul in Natascha's house trying to return the damned library video camera and hair scrunchie she left in your car after film class.

1.) Watch the OES campus turn into a Van Gogh painting in the 3 AM mist, and the tree by Aardvark catch the light like you will never, ever be able to describe. Talk with Cathy about the colors you dream in.

-reg

1.) I'm visiting Portland. Arriving around midnight on October 22nd, and leaving at 1:45 on the 26th. w00t! (Anybody who wants to pick me up from the airport would be a total babe...)

2.) My father is getting married again. She's a 32 year old studying to be a chiropractor. She's nice. Having a little brother 20 years younger than me is going to be a bit odd, though.

-reg

Today, a thick overcast fog decended on Bronxville. I don't think it's going to go away this time. I also have my first cold of the year.

I'm feeling really sickeningly emotional now. I want someone to talk to. I'm afraid to approach anybody here, because I have no strong, comfortable friendships. It's times like this when I really accutely miss my support network in Portland.

I'm in the process of missing a phone date with Jenn because I lost her number. I'm betting she didn't remember it anyway.

Since I can't do anything right emotionally, I should probably just shut up and get some reading done. But... I can't.

It's only October 2nd. I'm not dealing with this very well.

I guess this is as good a time as any to write an enormous, poorly organized and highly personal account of all the shit that's been going through my head for the last two weeks. Hold on to your pants.

So, quick review: My goal for this semester is to take on a challenging courseload, produce extremely good work and redeem my GPA at the possible risk of burning out by the end of the semester and suffering a nervous breakdown. I've used this strategy before, at the beginning of Senior year, to great success, so I think it's not so horrifically dumb. I find that I tend to rise to the challenge when I overschedule myself, so if putting myself into a state of complete gridlock from Monday through Friday is what it takes to squeeze performance out of me, so be it.

Among other things, this attitude made a lot more sense when I was taking Adderall and felt like a fucking superhuman. Now that I'm off, the reality of my schedule is starting to sink in. To wit:

( Behold! )

(For those of you keeping score at home, that's 18.5 hours of class a week, not counting bi-weekly Fiction and Economic conferences and the associated independant study components; and 9.5 hours of work a week. Also, for the record, I make $6.50 and hour - I have a friend who pulls in ten times that doing naked housecleaning for dirty old men in New York. Anyway, this is obviously somewhat short of a Jenn Kirby level of insanity, but... not much. Just remember: The coyote doesn't fall until it looks down.)

So I was pretty confident, actually, that I was going to be able to handle all of this. If I were back on my medication now I'd probably be a week ahead in two classes and have time to hit the gym four days a week.

Unfortunately, there's one thing I can't do on meds, and that happens to be for the only class I'm completely unwilling to drop: Fiction.

Under normal circumstances, I think, my right and left brains tend to be mildly out-of-sync - that is to say, one or the other is usually extremely bored, and tends to distract its partner from whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing. The nicest thing about Aderall is that it basically tranquilizes my right brain at the same time as it boosts my left - I can do hours of work without being distracted by colorful but ill-timed comparisons to eclectic realms of academia, or without thoughts of that cute girl on the first floor popping into my mind. In fact, that was the nicest thing. I thought that for once, I'd be able to make it through Crush Season just fine, just by staying on 5 mgs a day. I didn't even want to surf e2 or wikipedia anymore - I just had better things to do. It was like having the crush-whomping stick of old back and amplified by an order of magnitude, and without all the emotive bullshit getting in the way, my left brained analytical powers could fry whatever I was working on like an ant under a magnifying glass.

On the other hand, I think that my brain hemisphere's adversarial relationship is probably my single most worthwhile attribute. Without it, I can't make analogies across disciplines that make perfect sense but occur to no one but myself and Lewis Thomas; or see the philosophical application of the impermenance of foodstuff to the quest for artistic self-determination. Basically, I turn into my Father: The slightly less emotionally daft sequel, which - whether or not it's a valuable contribution to society or not - is not me.

It was so utterly humiliating when I realized this - I just sat down to try and articulate an idea I'd been working on for a while (Two former lovers who will never see each other again spend one last day together, and even though nobody would ever catch them and they both desperately want to, they don't kiss each other good-bye at the end. Why? What sort of background do these two people have that shapes their morality in the absence of objective notions of good and evil? Is it trauma from a previous experience with infidelity? Is Love a suitable replacement for God in the constellation of faith? Are they just paranoid nitwits who can't tell what the other one is thinking despite their pretensions toward neigh-telepathic chemistry? Which experience is closer to true love: the feeling of falling, right after you let go, or the feeling of being caught? What part is the feeling of your voice being picked up and carried by someone else standing next to you singing perfectly in sync? If Love is the same as God, what are the metaphysical consequences of frivolous sex? What Would Epicurius Do?) and all that came out was garbled, hyperkinetic meth-head nonsense like I used to get from Merry last year when I'd talk to her after she'd done lines of aderall; or when we had to read Sartre in Intellectual History. Trying to discuss emotional nuance without the ability to feel and reprocess those emotions is an impossibility. You know the way a stroke victim sounds when they're trying to talk out of the wrong side of their brain? It was like the exact opposite of that.

So once again, my narcicism is going to get in the way of doing the expedient thing. If I were really interested in not fucking up this year, it seems, I'd just drop fiction and consign myself to the stimulant regime. But I can't do that. I need to create; I need to synthesize; I need to express. If I willingly bludgeon my ability to do that, there's no point to being at this school at all.

Fuck.

-reg