God damnit! Why does it feel like I have these patterns of thoughts and feelings and relationships taht I haven't ever, ever been able to shake? Why is it that no matter how many resolutions I make, the bottom of my closet is always an unintelligible pile of shit, and my subconscious feels about the same? I just sat down to my guitar to try and write something that doesn't sound exactly like something I would write and I got so frustrated I ahd to run to my computer. Not helping. A little while ago I was sort of feeling as though I'd achieved some sort of harmony in life, composed of good friends, sunshiney bike rides to the farmers market, appropriate and successful attempts to get the school to divest from Sudan, satisfying classes. It always feels like not enough and too much at the same time

Maybe this bad henna hair dye job can help convince me that I've managed to evolve as a person since I was sixteen.

These stagnant periods waiting for people to show up here at my apartment on Saturday nights are very dangerous times indeed.

Some sleezy guy yesterday was sizing me up, and attempting to tell me everything about myself. He figured that I had an older borther and a younger brother and that my dad was divorced right off the bat, and then from the fact that I was from Macalester and doing an all-women's alley cat race told him that I had a desire to break free of my confining and shameful bourgeoisie past, but I was unfortunately good girl at heart and there was nothing I could do about it. Fuck him.

Saturday around five I thundered down Summit Avenue in a cycle taxi, awash in sunshine, fall leaves, and purpose. Thank God the light at the bottom of Ramsey hill was green; I would have ploughed right through those SUVs and they'd never know what hit them. My chariot of fire, that's what. The other day we decided that our bike group would borrow a cycle taxi from a shop downtown and trundle visiting parents around campus to raise money for the aforementioned friend who is going on a tour across South America. Mark and I trudged it up it up Minnesota's one and only Big Ass Hill in its lowest gear, inciting honks of approval from passing cars and hoots and hollers from children in school buses. A guy in a motorcycle told me that I was "illegal." Is that true? I made a point of attaching balloons to the back (...actually, the balloons were he whole reason I wanted to do it in the first place). We didn't manage to raise a fortune, but it was exactly the kind of interaction with other human beings I desire in life.

Lately I've been so googley-eyed about the worthy things that people do with their lives. I've been very fortunate to be so surrounded by positive and enthusiastic folks. There is still so much to be admired; I haven't had such a profound and sustained sense of wonder in a long time. What I've been finding, too, is that often the things we do don't match up with our theoretical priorities. You just have to go with your gut reactions to the resources and issues laid before you and do whatever it is you can muster up the motivation to do. Rational and moral conviction behind these things are always nice, but when it comes down to it, you will never do anything that your gumption doesn't agree with.

I've been having those old familiar feelings of heaviness and exasperation as I scowl at my stupid planner; it always seems like every I know exactly where I'll be for every minute of the next two weeks. Even though the things I"m doing feel good, it gets to be kind of suffocating when i can't even scrounge up the time to yell at myself to do laundry. But what I have learned in the past year is that it's silly to feel anxious about plans, because plans never hold up in the first place--the planner is an illusion! All you have is the present! Fate still manages to defeat even the most resolute agenda addicts. School, I think, can take up an infinite amount of time. You have to beat it back with a stick, or preferably a frisbee. My youth will not be spent indoors. No magna cum laude here, I've got plenty of my own laude, thank you very much.

[T]here is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny. Indeed, one of the most striking proofs of the cultural invention of wilderness is its thoroughgoing erasure of the history from which it sprang. In virtually all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history. [...] No matter what the angle from which we regard it, wilderness offers us the illusion that we can escape the cares and troubles of the world in which our past has ensnared us.

This escape from history is one reason why the language we use to talk about wilderness is often permeated with spiritual and religious values that reflect human ideals far more than the material world of physical nature. [...] Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism's most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. [...] Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity [...] the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are--or ought to be.

But the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean slate from our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living--urban folk for whom food comes from a restaurant instead of a field, and for whom the wooden houses in which they live and work apparently have no meaningful connection to the forests in which trees grow and die. Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land.

William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature"