Contrary to what I'm supposed to be feeling, I've been ecstatic to be here at Macalester, and it's hard to believe that I was back in Baltimore just a week ago. I guess I was getting kind of tired of extending olive branches that didn't really need to be extended in the first place to people who weren't there anymore. Somehow whenever I go home I'm so happy to be with my family, but always so restless, so frustrated that I need a car and a premeditated plan to see anyone I know that it is a relief to leave. It hurts that I just wrote that. If I were to re-start in Baltimore on a clean slate, to manage to meet the same kinds of people I met at the bike coop instead of re-kindling half-assed relationships with the ranks of Towson graduates, it is indeed possible that I could be happy there. After this summer, and realizing that certain parts of Baltimore are the US's version of the third world, and that internationalism is just a bunch of ego and exoticism all bundled up with a bunch of otherwise useless crap...I don't know, it would be pretty gratifying to go back there, be satisfied with life, and make a little change. Something about that kind of hits the spot. Then again, the west coast calls. Bus something always calls, I guess. I've been writing yet another stupid guitar song to that effect. I may regret it in a few weeks. As I often do. It seems like my more honest portrayals of my loser-dome are my more popular songs. My latest rebellion has involved a protest against alienating language. I am convinced that any concept can be conveyed in simple language, eventualy...good vocabulary is just a shortcut. When I was nine I tried to learn Esperanto (I really thought that it would save the world someday), and the only phrase I remember is "you are an ugly camel."

They made the work study position I created! After our short-lived triumph over Coca-Cola and the community banking towards the end of sophomore year, I was worried that it would all go to shit after I left. And I had thought it did, until I discovered that they did indeed creat the jobs (not one, but two!) and they have moved half a million dollars to a community bank. I am excited, to the point that I mutter it to people who obviously don't care or don't understand what I'm talking about. That's the way life is. Most of the time, people don't care--and--most of the time, you don't really care either. Maybe not caring and not understanding things are one and the same. We're doomed. In any case the social responsibility stuff is back, I have a seat on the committee, and the piece of my life here that had been missing has returned with a vengeance. Around this time of the week I am always debating about whether or not to go to Quaker meeting. I guess I better. Right now I'm craving whatever routine I might concievably cling to, and am even more clingy to the people that might come to represent consistent companionship here...there are plenty of people to meet, but I've lost my willingness to cast my nets far and wide. I'd rather go ice fishing.