2002-09-05 - 7:11 p.m.
I haven't updated in a while, and the reason is unprecedented. Previous reasons included soul-crushing depression, which I seem to have successfully passed to another person through physical proximity, like in that movie with Denzel Washington that used "Time is on my Side." Hers began just as mine broke, and hers overloaded just as mine was receding into the distance. But my reason for not updating is also not that I'm composing some grand manifesto.
Actually, thinking about it, the subjects I'm interested in writing about are off-limits. Interpersonal dynamics of interest as of late include my housemates, who have been great so far, but I still don't want to anthropologize them in a forum that might get back to them. Also of interest is the Catalyst, where anything I write could get out of its internet box and used in the vicious politicking already beginning to direct itself against me.
Actually, I composed one medium-lenght entry, and on the brink of finishing it I said 'I have just a few sentences or maybe paragraphs to go. I'll finish it later.'
Of course, I never did, and I think the reason was something that bothered me while writing it: It was primarily about nature, and in writing about nature I'm still insecure. I think a good description of the trees or the rain or sun shining on them can set up another topic quite well, but when the subject of the entry is the trees and the rain and the sun shining on them both, then I think the potential for hokieness is great. The natural environment has stimulated me tremendously as of late. I remember being unsure of the course I would take, and at a wall, raging drunk, I stumbled to the back of third court, the end of the twisted rectangular labyrinth of I.M. Pei, and sat on the wall listening to frogs croak at an incredible volume from the standing water. A haunting line from an old American History book haunted me, written by Bernard Bailyn, next to juxtaposed images of a elegant, austere colonial dining room and a slice of woods that look like the Blair Witch Project: "Young men like Jefferson grew up in a borderland world, looking out from Queen Anne rooms of sparse elegance on to a wild, uncultivated land."
Or, in the case of the I-75 rest stops of southwest Florida, where I once stopped and observed this, the square curb of a McDonald's parking lot a few yards from the uncultivated jungle hacked out to build it.
Behind Third Court I decided to take Ecological Anthropology, and to devote my new critical focus to how humans manage to live in Florida. Of course, like with other new anthropological perspectives, it will be difficult to incorporate that into wry observations -- doubly difficult if it also involves cliched nature scenes.
Despite all these issues, I want to keep this diary going, and to update frequently, if for no other reason than it gives me some idea of where I've been. April and May of this year don't exist for me -- I have no entries, although I have no entries because I was extremely depressed and avoided leaving my room whenever possible -- possible because I had roommates who brought alcohol and social opportunities into the room. I may have written or article or something for the paper. I know for a fact that I wrote not a single academic paper in the second mod of last semester. Actually, I just got the evaluation for a paper I finished over the summer, and it was the worst evaluation I've ever gotten from Uzi Baram -- I wasn't prepared to hear my 20-page paper lacked follow-through in its interpretation.
Anyway, hopefully in the future I'll get some stuff out here. Wish me luck.
