at this juncture.

i feel like i'm never going to get packed. i've already packed up a lot of stuff, but it feels like the stuff is neverending. in about three days, i'll be panicking and throwing everything away or throwing it all randomly into boxes and garbage bags. my dad will be telling me, "i told you waiting til the last minute to pack was a bad idea." i'll be crying and having shortness of breath and gastrointestinal problems. it'll be an awesome farewell.

on the plus side though, i've been having such a great time in the company of lovely individuals whom i am proud to call my friends. i'm carpe-ing the diem and making the most out of my last days here. and if that means i spend my last few days freaking out and throwing everything i own in the garbage, then that's what that means. stuff is replaceable. these memories are not, and if i do not make them, i will not have them.

the things i will have to leave behind though... mostly furniture, but for some reason feels like giving memories away. giving the green foldy chair to the goodwill guy felt like handing over my memory of watching movies with leah and john sophomore year. my prom dress from senior year... i can't even fit into that thing anymore, but i don't want to give it up.

but it's the time to move on. things change, and i'm trying not to be frightened of it. i'm excited by it, but daunted. there are swells and snatches of emotions i catch during the day, whether it's brought on by mere contemplation or by a chord change in a song, or a line in a poem, or a stranger i see. sometimes i feel uncontrollably joyous, and sometimes i feel completely overwhelmed, like i'm being sucked into the undertow and i can't find which way is up.

but hell. as long as i'm here and you're here, i don't really care. no one's taking away my birthday, and we're well on our way to a good time.

some lunchtime reading.

"It is equally part of right thinking to reject decidedly any and every form of discrimination. Preconceptions of race, class or sex offend the essence of human dignity and constitute a radical negation of democracy. How far from these values we are when we tolerate the impunity of those who kill a street child; those who murder peasants who struggle for a minimum of justice; those who discriminate on the basis of color, burning churches where blacks pray because prayer is only white; those who treat women as inferior beings; and so on. I feel more pity than rage at the absurd arrogance of this kind of white supremacy, passing itself off to the world as democracy. In fact, this form of thinking and doing is far removed from the humility demanded by 'right' thinking. Nor has it anything to do with the good sense that keeps our exaggerations in check and helps us avoid falling into the ridiculous and the senseless.

"There are times when I fear that someone reading this...may think that there is no more place among us for the dreamer and the believer in utopia. Yet what I have been saying up to now is not the stuff of inconsequential dreamers. It has to do with the very nature of men and women as makers and dreamers of history and not simply as casualties of an a priori vision of the world."

-Paulo Freire, from Pedagogy of Freedom, page 41.