endless alarm

Oh, right, blogging! I'll think about this later. I am re-immersed in the rattle and hum of casual college madness and can't seem to do anything with much focus or skill.

In the meantime, my super-wonderful housemate Courtney, aka CoCo Granopia, has started a blog of her own and it's sincerely rad.

The beach was just the best, everything I hoped it would be. Coming back to reality hits you like a hammer, though, after three days of sunshine, surf and bliss.

I can't sleep past 8 in this shoebox because of the eternal construction that goes on right behind us at the Newman Center. It sounds like there is a bulldozer in my bedroom. And the mind-numbing "beep beep beep" of a dump truck in reverse! The worst sound ever. It's like an alarm that you can never turn off.

"We need to all be prepared for genocide," Emily told us last night at her first social justice group meeting. "It could happen here." We weren't sure whether to laugh or to take her very, very seriously.

I feel happy and confused. I had a great, long dinner with Jonathan last night at Med Deli and he made this perfect analogy to my current state. It's some trope Hitchcock used in his films to create a vertigo effect, when the camera zooms in on a face in such a way that the focus seems to be moving forward but the background seems to be falling away. Progression and regression all at once. "And so it's intentionally disorienting," he said. "Kind of what you're feeling now."

One of the Clef Hangers is singing in Italian on his back porch right now and I want to punch him in the mouth.

Catherine needs to come home from Benin. Life without her here is not widely enjoyable.