Significant Offerings

Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 Madison, WI 12:25pm

The night before the first day of class... It has come once again. Not for the last time, no. I will have many nights before the "first" and "last" in my life. I have had many already. I am sitting in my new apartment room that I am sharing with a guy I know half well, and I am thinking to myself: How did I get here? That is quite unoriginal isn't it? Rather, maybe I am thinking: What are all the wonderful things I will do tomorrow? That's better I suppose, but still not quite touching it, well touching but not grasping... yet. My hand is close, metaphorically speaking. I sense a tone taking over the times. One of cynicism and disgust for the world at large but also of love and pride for those people and qualities we old dearly. That's the collective we of course... the collective we that somehow embraces each person to their own individuality and makes them feel as one, or at leaset as part, of something greater that is called community - in whatever form it may take. There's another one of those collectivist words agains - them. It seems that one cannot speak effectively without sounding heady or academic without somehow employing the collectivist ideal. The individual engaging the whole... something mundane that happens everyday, but what mst fail to ever realize. The connetions are everywhere. Life is just that, to reduce it to a theoretic model that somehow ma make it easier to understand. A human is an entity that somehow can take control of deciding its relationship to the rest of the phenomenon it sees around it. And where do the decisions enter? That, my kind readership, who for the moment are my two eyes that follow the lines of ink as they blend into the paper in their fleeting plight of somehow recording cognitive thought. For the ink, it apears effortless. If only cognition itself was such bliss.

And so I present a piece of me for public scrutiny. It is a piece of the past that for reasons of physical chemical properties became recorded in my journal, and seemed significant enough to me at the time that I made a point to present it for a more general audience. I will do better next time.

I found the terror...

Well, part of it anyway. The stress of a college senior is terrible. Reinsertion into American life has been interesting to be sure. I am not sure whether I am happy or sad, engaged or detached, barred or fluid... The best way to describe my emotion at this moment is melancholy. I always heard about reverse culture shock, now I know that it is real. I am suddenly having deja vu (that's French, for already seen) with the feelings of my semester abroad.

This is strange, this feeling. To save you all from my fall into sentimental reflection, let me try to describe briefly the chaotic adaptations that are going on inside of my mind, all of which I have no real control, and of which I am sub-consciously conscient... indeed, it is possible.

Observation is a big part of my life. It is probably the biggest part of my life in fact. I can think of little else that fills as much of my time in life as the time I spend observing it. In every situation I am observing, fully conscious of it or not. I am the biggest observer of myself, particularly of how I react in certain situations compared to others. That being said, I have observed a big change in the way I view my life, once leaving the United States, living in Europe and subsequently Africa, and then returning to the United States. Displays of grandeur have much smaller appeal to me than ever. And so it is in an environment where I am surrounded by such displays.

I am finding a strong conflict with the my person of 9 months ago, and my present identity. Redefinition is my work once again. Being an international is a multiple task commitment. Personal identity becomes central to just that... one person. I have made so many friends, seen so many things, left them all physically behind, and spiritually taken what I can. I am something different to each person, place, country... yet I carry around my own personal identity that I am left to understand... and can singularly watch it change as I travel along my journey.

Indeed, every single person experiences such changes, given enough time, regardless of physical displacement. Perhaps what I am experiencing at present is simply more pronounced because of the degree of change through which I have been taken.

Personal musisngs. I did find the terror, though. It goes by the name of FEAR.