Two Hours - or something like that.

I walk down the hill - basically walking off the only "college feeling" part of this campus. The steps: step after step after step after step...this is as though I'm marching straight to hell, straight down. And all for what? I'm leaving behind what feels so right about my education. Leaving a building in which every noon little children cry "frere jacques dormez vous? sonnez les matines!", leaving a building where the doors are too narrow because people didn't suffer from "uncontrollable/spasm induced eating" like they do now. The aura, the feel - this authenticity is inexplicably comforting.

For that - my resolute departure from what I'm beginning to value, for the struggle of picking little particles of oxygen from the ice that is posing as air, for this I am not met by outstretched arms reaching and saying, "little dear, come and snuggle in my bosom - be warm, be comfortable, be authentic." I am not met by arms outstreched and a soft, familiar voice that encourages and reaffirms.

I am met by traffic, roads diverging and police officers (probably crooked police officers at that) whistling and shouting and waving their hands like lunatics trying to get a prehistoric Isuzu truck to accelerate through the turn more quickly. I walk out of college and I walk into life. I walk out of east Tennessee, out of some sort of heritage, out of the authentic and I am greeted so harshly, so rudely, by this little taste of what we've become - New Yorkers. Car's horns and boots clomping on cold pavement form a sort of weird array of notes...notes that in my green ears seem dissonent. Cars are backed up at menial intersections - intersections where mobs of the dreary, the disorderly and unkempt; mobs of dirty faces and messy hair spread over unengaged minds and enenthusiastic hearts.

It's 9 o'clock and these mobs make no noise, aside from the routine cough, snort, sneeze, sniffle that come with the season.

How my world has changed in a matter of minutes. This morning - on the way here it was early - no one is up at 7:45 and I strolled to class up the grassy hill, not the cold steps...I was hiking, in the woods: whistling, thinking - this is terrific. The air was nice and chilled, like God had mixed the air with ice cubes and chilled it in martini shaker. It was a refreshing cold --- and with no cars or people out to interrupt these delusions - I continued on.

Now - right now, the whistling isn't coming from my carefree lips but from overindulgent policemen who wears a badge as if it were a crown. The chilled air has turned to into an oppressive regime to kill my immune system. The people are out and the cars are honking.

My delusions are curbed and reality is thrust down upon me from some malicious endeavor to stifle and suffocate wonderment and glee from the earth. I tread down the cement stairs, passing by few familiar faces to smile at. I wind up standing still, reading, waiting for the bus to pick me up and drop me off at my next class like a letter being sent from one place to another (inanimate) - I've traversed from a state of mental enjoyment to a solemn and desolate indifference. This bus is an image of my voyage from the hill to the ag. campus - this representation - is as though i'm moving from St. Petersburg (with its tradition, its history, its agelessness) to the rather latitudally but ever so distant longitudinally Ust'-nera to toil in the dredges, the treachery of Siberia.

(If only there were a comment card for the KAT buses so they might know of their role in my despair)

The bus serves her duty faithfully, perhaps to anote that there is something in the steadiness of life of which I must embrace before I can maintain a mind so fastidious and solid to avoid the emotional ebbs and tides of living.

I enter the building: the Brehm Animal Sciences Building and once again I am transferred a million miles in state of mind even though I've only traveled a few spacially. I have no qualms or expectations about being met by a loving, embracing Aphrodite to lead me around and familiarize me -- and thus I am not surprised as I enter the building to the dark and deep heavy stench of manure. My nostrils feel as though I've been running my hands through mulch all day long.

The first human I come in contact with reminds me once again that the speed and busyness of which I loathed earlier is a distant, distant memory. He is dressed in some ropers that are covered in dirt, some jeans, a khaki shirt that has been darkened over its lifetime by "field research." Atop this shirt is a denim jacket, and atop a head of greasy, unwashed hair is a camoflauge "Carhartt" chapeau...uh...I mean hat.

I recall the preppy, yuppy mob that littered the streets back on my usual side of campus. I remember the thinkers (the english, classics, foreign language, music, art, &c majors) who brood over black rimmed glasses. I remember the style, the populus, the conversation, the smell. Oh what a difference...the smell hear mirrors a farm - but then again everything here mirrors a farm. I suppose that is except for this computer.

Perhaps, this ebbing and flowing of which I've mentioned earlier is the static - the usual. Perhaps, what I'm seeing in a microcosm today is that which is a universal reality that echoes through the caverns of human life - of humanity even. And that might be summed up by the potent cliche, "The only thing that is constant is change."

Perhaps, that could be true - circumstancially of course. But I see something constant within the human...something constant, something universal - there is a aquifer of truth underneath this life, this reality I know. And perhaps, today - a day in which I've experienced (actually experienced, not merely trudged through) the changing atmospheres of existance - has revealed a deeper truth than the oft-used axiom above. This new idiom goes a little something like this, "The human experience is a constant struggle in an everchanging environment."

Fax

Tupac is without a doubt, hands down the greatest rapper of all time.

"Wisdom is what's left when we've run out of personal opinions."
- Cullen Hightower

"I've heard it said that there are two types of men in this world--one is looking for a woman to make his life complete and the other is looking for a woman to join his complete life."
- Donald Miller

rockin' names

GOOD NAMES FOR ROCK BANDS

The Flying Shards
The Fierce Prune-Eating Hamsters from Space
Marcel and the Turpitudes
The Groin Whappers



Dave Barry

politico

"I would usually smile and nod and say that...there was - and always had been - another tradition to politics...a tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater that what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done."

The Audacity of Hope
Barack Obama

the life

"...'Ben has the life, doesn't he?' Paul comments...'Works all day, comes home to the woman he loves. You couldn't ask for a better life,' Paul says."

Through Painted Deserts
Donald Miller