Saving the universe, one New York liberal at a time...

So I just went to see "An Inconvenient Truth," the Al Gore global warming movie, with my parents, and it's surprisingly good. I mean, it's a documentary, but it's interesting and Al Gore comes across as pretty genuine, which I wasn't expecting from a politician. Top marks. Makes you want to bomb the oil companies' headquarters or something. (Or maybe that's just me. Has anyone else read The Monkey Wrench Gang? It's really good. I want to do stuff like that.)

Also on the subject of saving the world, I just saw two of my high school friends last night.
One of them, Izzy, is going to be on the Supreme Court. You think I'm just saying that, but this girl has the entire Constitution practically memorized. She can recite all the U.S. presidents in order, backwards from Bush down to Washington, in eleven seconds. Right now she's interning at the Brooklyn DA's office.

The other one, Liz, has a ten-year plan, to do ROTC, go to law school, and go into JAG like her brother and be an army lawyer. So she's a big conservative, but whatever. I knew her back when she played with a family of teddy bears.

So anyway, the point of this is that I want to declare publicly that I'm very happy without a ten-year plan. Thank you.

Is there really no place like home?

So I'm at home. In lovely Dobbs Ferry New York. My cats are nice. My parents are nice. Everything is very disconcertingly the same. Not like I really expected it to change, but somehow being really tired and having had such a traumatizing past few days (more on that later) made me think coming home would be more emotional or scary or disconcerting. But no, it's just... coming home.

I have this mural on my wall that me and two friends of mine, Gershon and Mike, painted in the spring of my sophomore year of high school. We put masking tape up in the shape of a jazz band (trumpet, piano, drums, and acoustic bass) and splattered lots of colors of paint on top, in swirls and spirals and snakes and polka dots, and then we took the tape off so there's an outline of a jazz band in the midst of all this paint. Anyhow, I have this incomprehensible urge to get rid of it. Paint over all the paint on the walls, take down the brick wall of concert tickets and old posters that covers almost half the room, get rid of the posters we took marching against the war in Iraq. It's not that they aren't all part of my history, but somehow, and maybe this is just the complete exhaustion talking, they don't feel emotionally relevant anymore. With the wall, this is a good thing; there's a lot of things about high school that I'm really really glad are not emotionally relevant any more. But, coming home in general - it feels weird, how it's no longer the crazy emotional rush of memory and history that it used to be.

But I promised to talk about my traumatic weekend. Just because, as if having to leave everyone wasn't enough, it included such highlights as:
- getting nearly bitten by the dog I will be living with for winter and spring (the skin isn't really broken - well maybe a little bit - but there's a huge painful discolored mouth-shaped bruise on my thigh)
- getting attacked by a cat on the mini Bald Spot (scratches on left hand)
- having to drive through a massive zero-visibility thunderstorm to get back from Lakeville

anyway. So it's been dramatic. And spending the past day in Northfield with so many people gone, and then sleeping in the quad with hardly anything there except Rachel, Russell, and garbage, has just been weird, and scary, and really lonely. So maybe it's good to be at home, and then I can come back to Northfield with a clean-ish slate. -ish.

The beginning...

So good news and bad news: Rachel is back from London, and Shannon left yesterday for a week at home before she comes back to Northfield for the summer. This is not such bad news for me, because I'm going to see Shannon all summer anyway. But having all the happy reunions with Rachel, and seeing all the sad goodbyes to Shannon, and trying not to keep a mental tally of how many people I'm going to have to let go of temporarily-for-a-long-time, has inspired me to start this thing: both as some kind of record of the adventures I (hopefully) have over the next six months of being on two different sides of the globe, and also as some kind of a way for people to keep in touch with each other. Especially if I do a better job than certain other people with blogs.

But anyhow, there are still two and a half more days until everyone leaves, and I should go out and make the most of them rather than sitting and writing about how much I'm going to miss people who haven't even left yet!


Maybe there will be a terrorist threat at the airport and no one will be able to leave.
No, I definitely should not joke about things like that.

Except Northfield would totally be a 24-hour party.