Tag Archives: Lafayette

Return from the Dead

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I’m back from the dead baby, this time with 110% as much existential angst and rotten poetry.

This is the final week of classes, and then next week is finals. Tensions are running high around Laf. The Library is mobbed, students are more burnt out than trashed cigarettes and hundreds of pages of reading lie unfinished, threatening our psyches. Final papers and Final exams are starting soon, everyone’s blood pressure is rising, and we’re running around like chickens with severed heads attending to each assignment.

In other words, things are pretty regular.

I’ve had a big crisis of person recently, but I feel its sort of resolved itself. Either that, or I stopped thinking about it. I won the Gilbert Prize, an award given to English majors who the department particularly likes. It comes with $700, honor, and the weight of expectations. I’m deeply honored, but struggle with the idea of me deserving it. Luckily Danny slapped some sense into me, but whatever. Now I’m just trying to clear my conscience by reading through the books I haven’t finished and not giving up. Fighting for what you love, or think you love, even when its hard, is admirable. Even more admirable is doing so without complaining quite as much as I do >_>

Maybe the blog platform isn’t for me – maybe these journal entries work as better therapy when they are in notebook form, because then they also contain my poetry and sketches and shit. Who knows. Everything’s been so crazy recently, I wanted to just journal again in some capacity to get my feelings out. Its helped in the past, so with any luck it’ll help in the now.

We’ll see. Maybe I’ll be back again tomorrow.

A New Semester

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Dorm rooms light up, the air fills with words and smiles, the snow slushes beneath my feet.

It’s a new semester, starting tomorrow, and damn if I’m not excited for it. My break my long, lazy and dreamlike. It was a stasis, a hibernation, a rejuvenation. I’m ready again for the ravages of a semester of schoolwork. But I can take it this time.

Everything is gonna be done right. The dishes will be spotless, my clothes will be clean and folded right on time, my schoolwork will be challenging but completed, and on time. My friends will laugh lightly, I’ll be able to take a breather, but I’ll keep up with the pace of the river. I won’t get caught in the current. And I’ll break the surface, if only for a moment, leaping.

 

Hell Froze Over, Part I

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Everything is bigger in Texas, as the saying goes*, but I ate an incredibly tiny apple today at the University of Texas at Austin.

Hell really did freeze over.

I’m here with Lafayette College’s Speech and Debate team, competing in two back-to-back tournaments over two days named collectively “Hell Froze Over” – for what reason, I’m not sure. All the Speech and Debate names and faces are out here, and it’s good to see some of them again, including an old friend who graduated last year. I’m not too good at the competition (I don’t practice as much as I should), but it’s entertaining seeing some of the better speeches – for example, I saw a Program Oral Interpretation (POI) today from a very well-known competitor named Kaby Brown. In POI, a single speaker gives one 10 minute performance integrating any number of sources from prose, poetry, drama, articles, or other written material. Kaby spoke about the catharsis of giving voice to your inner turmoils through art . . . which is, surprisingly enough, an unusually complex topic for POI (and forensics in general), which have an unfortunate tendency to hit you over the head with their topics.

Texas is pleasant. It’s warm, at the very least, and there’s great, authentic-ish Mexican food to be had here. I’ve had more avocado over the past two days than the previous month. The outskirts of Austin are diffuse, separated by huge tracts of green. I passed a man wearing a cowboy hat and spurs yesterday. A woman in the airport said y’all to me while I was busy knocking over all the luggage while trying to get to mine. It was cloudy yesterday, but today the clouds parted and the sun actually shone on my skin and it was warm. I spent an hour or so standing on a bridge which overlooked the highway, feeling the light breeze and considering how strange it would be to jump off. And interspersed into my tender moments with this environment were my speeches, which came every two-hours or so, and I shook hands with people and learned their names and how long their flights took and how cold it is where they are. The warmth really does make people more polite.

And I’m gonna do it all again tomorrow. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about more individual speeches. Goodnight!

 

*I believe this saying is from Spongebob.