Talk about your occupational hazards.

So far I've enjoyed my new job at the Echo. All the other people who work there are fun, and free shows are always sweet. Last night it was the Monolators, a husband-and-wife duo (he's on guitar, she drums) who don't really sound like the White Stripes. It seems that in the age of 15-minute celebrity marriages and a 50%-plus divorce rate, indie husband-and-wife duos have become all the rage--a week ago we had the Submarines, who are really a threesome once you count the laptop.
The Monolators' set had ended and 8-Bit was about to go on when the manager took me off wristbanding duty and told me to go guard the stage entrance at Dub Club, which was happening in the club room downstairs.
I'd been at the Echo last Wednesday when Dub Club was going on, but hadn't spent too much time there. As its name suggests, it's a reggae dance party that attracts mostly guys in dreadlocks and, this being LA, your standard complement of scantily clad girls who wear too much lip liner. I don't really get reggae, or at least the kind they play at Dub Club: it's too repetitive, the melodies don't go anywhere and the unnecessarily loud bass verges on brown note territory. As I sat there turning away the occasional non-VIP, I wondered who in their right mind would actually pay to subject themselves to this; then, as I breathed in the thick air, I was reminded that most of these people weren't in their right minds. Someone singing onstage referred to marijuana, ganja and sensemilla in the same verse. An ancient Bob Marley lookalike stood at a corner table selling red, yellow and green smoking paraphernalia. And I had, I realized, been uncommonly focused on the same light fixture for a good ten minutes now.
Oh, fuck.
I'd last been familiar with the particular state of mind in question some three years ago; now, not surprisingly, I was woefully unprepared to deal with it. I made my way over to the nearest security guard to tell him I was leaving my post, but forgot what I was trying to say mid-sentence. Mortified, I ran up the stairs to the outside. The Southern California air had never seemed so crystal clear.
After standing there for a while and downing a bottle of water, I sobered up enough to tell the manager what had happened. He looked amused, then told me he wouldn't station me down there again. Thank god--or Jah, if you're into that kind of thing. I've got enough to worry about in LA without the threat of becoming an accidental pothead.
Next week, though, I head for the relative calm of Pasadena. Wish me luck.

Where to start?

You know, when they show college graduation in movies or on TV, they always show everyone throwing their big square hats up in the air, but they never show what happens after the hats come down. I'm hoping the bruise on my arm goes away sometime soon.
I'm writing this from a public library about a block away from my temporary apartment in Koreatown. I am feeling very white. Tomorrow I'm going to check out an apartment in Pasadena, and if that works out I'll be moving sometime next week. I think Pasadena's a better fit for me than smack dab in the center of LA--it's smaller and more manageable, but it has a pretty happening downtown and it's still within a short drive of all the resources the city has to offer. It's also expensive as all hell, but hopefully I'll be able to swing it.
I bought a car, a 1994 Camry that has seen better days but runs great and has AC that could give a witch's teat some serious competition. Within 24 hours of buying my first car in LA, I got my first parking ticket. I'm contesting it.
I got a part-time job taking tickets at The Echo, a nightclub in Echo Park that showcases indie bands. I emailed the guys at NWE about it, and Omar told me I'd be receiving my first hipster merit badge in the mail shortly. I'm hoping the free shows will be worth the not-so-great pay and the ridiculous hours.
So overall, I'm adapting. I'm still not thrilled about living in Southern California, but I'm finding myself more and more excited about exploring the area from the inside. The beach, the mountains and the desert are all relatively close by, and I have easy access to basically every kind of cuisine imaginable, assuming I'm able to afford it. I have friends in Pasadena and Claremont and Orange County and Encino, and hopefully they will want to hang out with me. And (as I keep reminding myself) I don't have to stay here forever.
For now, though, there's internet at the library and Wilshire Boulevard to walk around and the Section Quartet playing at the Echo tonight. LA, let's do this.

The end of the end? Or the beginning of the beginning?

I graduate college tomorrow, and despite everything I've been saying and thinking for the past year and a half or so, I don't know if I'm ready.
I don't know if I'm ready to live outside the safety net of home or college. I don't know if I'm ready to deal with rent, student loans, car insurance, gas and groceries every single month from now until who knows when. I don't know if I'm ready to give up free food or free music studio use or free gym access. I don't know if I'm ready to stop getting student discounts on things (although my Pomona ID doesn't have an expiration date on it, so I'm probably good for at least another year.)
Yes, I've wanted to leave this place for ages. Now that I've actually gotten my wish, though, I can't stop thinking about all the things and people I'll miss. Maybe if I had any time between finishing my thesis and going to San Diego for Senior Week, or any time between San Diego and graduation, I'd have had time to come to my senses.
Or maybe if I'd allowed myself just a wee bit more time between graduating from college and moving to LA, so that I wouldn't have to make the transition from "ridiculously coddled liberal arts student" to "twentysomething trying to make it on my own in a city that doesn't give a damn about me" in a matter of hours. Yeah. That might've been smart of me.
I don't have time to write anything else tonight, but consider this a "to be continued"...

Life is the longest death in California...

Maybe it's fitting that I'm going to work for an entertainment company--my life has the tendency to resemble a bad sitcom. To wit:

SCENE: Junior year, second semester. RACHEL is talking to a friend in the dining hall.
RACHEL: I'll say this much: there is absolutely, positively, one hundred percent NO WAY I'm going to live in LA.
HARD CUT to RACHEL, a year older and a year wiser, surrounded by stacks of boxes in front of a couple of palm trees and the Hollywood sign. Music sting.
RACHEL: I can't believe I'm going to live in LA.
Canned laughter.

Seriously, folks. If there's one thing I learned in college, it's that Southern California is not the place for me. I like the weather, the music scene and the Mexican food, but all the sun and indie bands and tacos in the world can't make up for the traffic, the urban sprawl and the fake boobs. Mostly, I can't stand the thought of buying a car--one of my friends got into a pretty serious car accident the other day, so now in addition to worrying about high gas/insurance costs, endless traffic jams and the toll on the environment, I've been worrying about getting killed.
So why am I doing this? I'm doing it so I can learn as much as I can about music supervision and film scoring, gain that valuable industry experience, maybe even contribute to American pop culture in some positive way. I already know I like working at NWE, and I imagine being able to commute by car instead of dealing with unreliable public transit will only make things more enjoyable.
But will it last? Can I make it in the entertainment industry before the city beats me into submission? Or will I go broke and turn into one of those homeless crazy people who walk around Skid Row mumbling to themselves?

I can't believe I'm going to live in LA.

Dateline: Sunday, April 22.

One week from today, my thesis will be done and turned in. I'll have presented my thesis to my department, and I'll hopefully not have screwed it up. I'll have performed in what might be my last choir concert ever. My internship with NWE will be over, and I'll know whether I get to stay in LA and work an awesome entertainment industry job and keep my boyfriend or whether I'll have to start fresh, move back home, find a job in a city I actually like. And all that will stand between me and graduation will be a week in San Diego, a couple jazz gigs and a bitch of a Debussy prelude that I really should've started orchestrating a week ago but will only get around to this coming weekend.
Three weeks from today, I'll be a college graduate. Well, no, I'll probably be in the middle of sitting though an endless barrage of speeches about how far we've all come and and how I am responsible for using my just-acquired liberal arts education to benefit the greater community (Right. Maybe I'll go teach Russian Formalist theory to inner-city schoolchildren.) But several long hours after that, I'll be a college graduate.
Four weeks from today...well, who knows?
You'd think I'd be feeling something--anything--but mostly I'm just tired. Maybe I'll get all nostalgic after the fact, but for now I want to get everything over with as soon as humanly possible. Three weeks is not short enough.

Ah, stress...

Like any feeling worth having, it takes different forms in different people. For me it's an imaginary claw digging into the exact center of my upper back and an an uncontrollable urge to check Facebook every five minutes. It also results in such I-am-so-going-to-hell thoughts as when I was working at the Motley a little while ago and they started showing a film about African kids with AIDS and all I could think was All right! I get it! You have AIDS! Now could you possibly not talk so much?
To be fair, the film was by a Fulbright grant winner with an obviously inflated sense of self-importance trying to not so much tug on as yank out the audience's heartstrings (sample question: "What is your biggest wish?" not to mention that the film's last sentence was "Most of these children will die needlessly.") And then there was the music: sort of acoustic and emo, but with vaguely African-sounding percussion (Death Cab for Djibouti?)
Incoherent blog rants. That'd be another symptom of stress.
At any rate, my to-do list isn't getting much shorter, but at least it isn't getting any longer. I found an outside thesis reader and ordered the jazz band shirts, and the Russian Special Dinner problem got worked out. The problem is that the twin spectres of Thesis and Will I Get Hired are constantly hanging over my head, and while I can do something about that first one, I have no control over the second.
Once I do find out about it, though, that claw in my back is going to either politely remove itself or tighten up to the point that the Vulcan Death Grip will seem like a soothing massage by comparison...so stay tuned, folks.

Various "happy places" to which I have gone in the past week or so:

The Getty Center:Yes, there are some things LA does right. It's all high art and gardens and panoramic views (LA doesn't look so bad from high up in the hills) and pretty much my favorite architecture ever. If it wasn't so far away from everything, and if it weren't for all that pesky security, I would live there.

The Meadows, in Edinburgh, right around sunset:
(I couldn't find a picture of it at sunset, or during the festival, but you get the idea.)
The Meadows is an enormous quad-type-thing located between the city center and my former flat. I had to walk across it just about every day, and it always made me happy. You could see Arthur's Seat and Edinburgh University, and if it was a nice day there would be lots of people lounging about. During the festival around sunset there would be fire jugglers, not to mention the huge complex with the Ladyboys tent, the Moscow State Circus tent and a fun fair that played cheesy '80s music all the time.

Nevsky Prospect, in St. Petersburg, at night:
Nevsky Prospekt dominates St. Petersburg. At night--or when it gets dark, rather--the buildings, cathedrals and monuments lining the street light up and the city's strange blend of Russian onion domes, Western European grandeur, Soviet bombast and crass American capitalism suddenly somehow makes sense.

A small apartment somewhere just on the outskirts of central Pest:
This should be self explanatory. Hard to believe I took that picture three weeks ago--it feels like something that happened in another lifetime.

Just a few of the places I visit during moments like these, when I'm stressing out about getting my thesis draft done in the next week, finding a reader for the thesis outside the department, finishing the music part of my thesis, which may instead turn out to be the final project for my film music class, passing my orchestration class, convincing the Oldenborg staff to let us do the Russian Special Dinner skit in English instead of Russian (it's a bigger deal than it sounds, trust me), actually working on and performing in the Russian Special Dinner, dealing with that dinner, three jazz gigs and two choir concerts all in the space of about a week, designing and ordering the T-shirts for jazz band, figuring out what the hell I'm going to do if it turns out my internship place doesn't hire me (my boss said "probably," but the final decision has to wait until some guy who's on vacation comes back from vacation), figuring out what the hell I'm going to do if my internship place does hire me (I'll need to find an apartment, a car and another job...since if I get hired it'll probably only be for three days a week or so), and wondering when the loud party two floors above me will stop so I can get some sleep so I can spend all day tomorrow on my thesis.

Oh yes. Thank god for happy places.

Time flies...

I saw my former advisor with her kid on my way back from work today. It struck me that, during my four years at Pomona, Gabe--that's his name--went from complete and utter nonexistence to a living, breathing human being who can think, walk, and talk (albeit with a limited vocabulary.)
As for me, I started out my freshman year here as a small, cynical, slightly awkward musician type with a long-distance quasi-boyfriend and no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And now, four years and thousands of tuition dollars later, I'm...a small, cynical, slightly awkward musician type with a long-distance quasi-boyfriend and no idea what I want to do with my life.
Right.

I feel dirty.

I wish America had more bath houses.Um, no, not that kind of bath house, this kind of bath house...
...where, for relatively little money, you get to hang out in a palace filled with pools, hot tubs, saunas, steam rooms and Hungarian masseuses with dubious credentials. The baths in Budapest weren't as intimate/intense/culturally fortifying as the banyas in Russia, but they were still pretty therapeutic and a lot of fun.
Americans don't bathe; we shower. The rich among us pay exorbitant prices to go to spas, where they get wrapped in seaweed so they can look thinner or have smaller pores or something. And I'm guessing that even the fine gentlemen at the top of this entry don't go to bath houses to take baths. (By the way, what an amazing picture. Google Image Search rocks.)
I realize I'm being a bit unfair--baths are more of an Eastern European thing, not an everywhere-but-America thing--but, well, this country just has a tendency to piss me off. Like today, when I was riding on the Metrolink and the conductor woman told me my 10-trip pass wasn't valid for travel past Union Station (I hadn't known that) and wrote me a citation. That action in and of itself was fine--it's her job and all that. However, as she was writing me up, a group of LA County sheriffs seated next to and across from me (one of whom looked disturbingly like this guy) started laughing and saying things like "I knew she was trouble right when I saw her!" and "Want us to get her fingerprints for your records?"
And then the conductor started laughing right along with them.
First off: damn do I need a car.
Second: Yes, I could see that same situation happening in, say, France, but in that case the bystanders' remarks would've been a lot more witty and the laughter closer to malevolent snickering than big-throated guffawing. I wouldn't have minded that so much.

Well, back to work...

I wish spring break had been just a little less awesome. That way I'd be feeling at least a little more motivated to re-start work on my thesis. I was at my most productive in the weeks leading up to the trip; now that I know I won't be going anywhere exciting until Senior Week, I just can't get back into the swing of things.
I was getting a bit frustrated with the damn thing even before break. When I started a couple months ago it felt like I was embarking on a meaningful intellectual journey, at the end of which I would discover the meaning of Art and Life and such. These days it just feels like I'm stuck in an academic version of Space Invaders. Try as I might, I will never be able to shoot all those little fuckers down before they land on my head and I die.
(Large mass of enemy ships=my thesis. Tiny green ship trying to destroy all the enemy ships in time to prevent their ever-quickening inevitable descent=me.)

The Hungary post.

Maybe I over-romanticize Europe, and maybe that's harmful--I mean, it has its share of problems, just like the US--but can I help it if every time I've gone there I've had the time of my young life?
My spring break in Budapest last week was my first trip to Europe in a strictly tourist capacity, and while I didn't have time or local connections enough to bond with the city in the same way I did with St. Petersburg and Edinburgh, I was still damn impressed. It's definitely my kind of city: small enough to be easily navigable, large enough to be vibrant and full of things to do. Public transport is easy to use, inexpensive and efficient, and there are tons of chill coffee shops and bars to hang out in. Not to mention that it's gorgeous, especially when it's warm and sunny (which it was for almost the entire duration of my trip--I only saw clouds right when I got there and right before I left.)
And of course there was the boy--Austen--my ersatz tour guide and provider of shelter, among other things. We covered all the sightseeing bases, had some really nice dinners, went to the opera, took an afternoon trip to a nearby village...all the usual touristy stuff. We also got to check out some speeches and demonstrations on March 15th, the anniversary of Hungary's 1848 revolution. At the time neither of us were particularly sure what was going on--damn Hungarian--but apparently a lot of it had to do with Hungary's right-wing party calling for the resignation of the Prime Minister. Thankfully we missed this riot, which happened a couple streets over from Austen's apartment. We did get to see a crowd of protesters throw water balloons and eggs at...um, some government person...but he was protected by a couple of Secret Service types wielding black umbrellas.
I'm so incredibly happy to have gone, but now I'm a bit depressed. I mean, I finally got to be with the guy I adore in the continent I adore, only to have to return to writing my thesis, contemplating my future and dealing with LA public transport after just one all-too-brief week. And I had literally no time to decompress--I got into LA Sunday night, only to have to go to my internship yesterday and classes today. I'd think the whole trip was some impossibly euphoric fever dream if I didn't have photographic proof.
I'm not saying LA doesn't have any pretty sights, but honestly, when it comes to sheer eye-melting gorgeousness per square foot, you can't beat a European capital. Going from that to Burbank's Media District kind of makes me want to swear off America for a good long while.

But then again...

This evening, I was on the Metrolink from LA back to Claremont. It was the end of a long day; I had even darker circles under my eyes than usual and my makeup was doing nothing to cover up my most recent breakout. As the train neared the Claremont stop and I made my way to the doors, I passed by an elderly gentleman who smiled at me and said, in a pleasant Southern drawl, "I sure do like the beauty in your face, lady."
He said it in such a sincere, non-creepy way that I couldn't help but have a huge grin on my (ostensibly beautiful) face for the entire walk back to my dorm room. It kind of made my night.
So yeah, score one for public transport, and one for humanity while we're at it.
I should add, though, that this doesn't give all old guys a free pass to hit on me. This was a special circumstance, and every other time I've been propositioned by the elderly it's seriously creeped me out. Yes, I mean you, Mr. Scottish Golfer from the Bank Hotel bar. And you, Mr. Sweaty European Man who tried to dance with me at a ceilidh and thought "My shirt's all wet, it's like I just washed it!" was a valid pick-up line. And you, Mr. Anonymous Russian Guy who came at me out of nowhere, patted my chest through about five layers of clothing, then ran away. And...well, you get the idea.

A Metrolink moment.

Generally I see taking public transportation as a life-affirming experience: I mean, here are all these people with all these different backgrounds and heritages, thrown together on a train going to the big city. The 50-minute Metrolink commute into LA is long enough that you can, if so motivated, get to know the person across from you pretty well by the end of the ride. And hey-everyone's saving the environment! Yay for humanity!
The other day, though, I had to sit next to what could euphemistically be called a racially charged dispute between a Latino graphic designer and a black guy with half of Fort Knox in his mouth, spurred by the former accidentally putting his bag down on the latter's foot. I had to drown out the onslaught of epithets with my iPod so that my PC reflex, so carefully calibrated in Amherst and Claremont, wouldn't compel me to gasp out loud or start lecturing.
Moments after the affair had been settled, we were joined by a pair of cherubic-looking 8-year-old schoolkids, one of which piped up, "My dad has a gun but the police said that if they find it one more time he'll go to jail so he's hiding it in my closet."
Oh dear God. Humanity has a ways to go yet.

Jack Bauer or Jon Stewart?

For various reasons I've been feeling like absolute crap for most of today. The nail in my depression coffin, though, was this, an interview with Joel Surnow in the New Yorker. Joel Surnow is the man behind 24, the show that makes my Mondays surviveable. He is also, as is revealed in the article, a huge fucking conservative asshole.
To make matters worse, his new show, meant as a Daily Show alternative for the oh-so-oppressed conservative faction, is so unfunny it's...well, not funny.



I'm not saying liberals are immune to satire, or that Obama fever isn't just a little bit ridiculous (although I do like the guy.) But dear God, the worst torture method Jack Bauer could possibly imagine isn't as painful as that show. "BO Magazine"? "An all-time low of 99.9 percent"? They'd do a better job if they plagiarized from their enemies at The Daily Show:



So in conclusion, while I don't want to make assholes like Surnow any richer, I can't give up my Monday night endorphin rush. So I've decided that maybe I'll just illegally download new episodes off the network from now on. As a liberal, it's my moral obligation.

Stupid Rachel, stupid.

I'm at the Motley working on my thesis, and less than 15 minutes ago freaking John Cameron Mitchell, director of Hedwig and the Angry Inch (one of my favorite movies ever), was sitting at the table next to mine. He's here for a screening of Shortbus (his infamous non-pornographic movie in which all the actors and actresses nonetheless have actual sex on camera), and he was talking to a couple of students from the organization sponsoring the screening...not that I was trying to listen in or anything.
So anyway, I introduced myself during a gap in the conversation, and while this encounter managed to go a little better than my last encounter with a famous gay guy, I still managed to come off sounding like a tongue-tied, starstruck idiot. I guess for all my cynicism, I get just as caught up in the whole celebrities-as-demigods mythos as everyone else. Or maybe I was just so afraid of saying something stupid in front of the artistic genius that I couldn't say anything substantial at all. Argh.

California, California...

I have no car.
Today, however, I had an internship interview in Burbank at 3.
To get there, I had to catch the 11:30 Metrolink out of Claremont, hang around Union Station for about 40 minutes, catch the 1:10 Metrolink to Burbank, wander around looking for a bus station for some time, wait at the bus station (conveniently located just downwind of a couple of guys painting a streetlight...mmm, fumes) for about 20 minutes, take the bus to a stop located a couple of blocks away from the internship place, then walk those couple of blocks.
This would have been trying even at the best of times. Today, I was PMSing. By the time I reached my destination, I was ready to go all Carrie on the ass of the next person who crossed my path. But then, noticing that I still had 20 minutes left before my interview, I decided to get some tacos from the stand across the street.
This was actually the best decision I could have made at the time. Not only did the act of eating calm me down, they were the kind of tacos that make Tuesday "Burrito" nights at Frary seem like an exercise in futility. The kind of tacos that make you realize Amherst's vaunted Bueno y Sano is nothing but an impostor. I hadn't had Mexican food that good since...well, Mexico.
After that, everything went wonderfully. I got the internship--that was pretty much a given before the interview--and it's just what I'd hoped it would be. I'm going to be working for the music division of New Wave Entertainment, a smallish production company. The division's called Zoo Street Music, and they deal with music supervision, licensing and composition. Currently they're trying to expand their enterprise, but they only have about five people on their staff...which means that a) I'll get to do actual work as an intern, rather than just filing or whatever, and b) I stand a chance of getting hired once the internship is over.
As if responding to the karmic inertia built up by lunch and the interview, public transportation worked the second time around--it only took about an hour and a half to get back to Claremont, about the same as by car.
So anyway, here are the three simple thoughts I took away from today's adventure:
Tacos are good.
Internships are good.
But would the job of my dreams really be worth living in the city of my nightmares?

On the bright side...

One of the weirder things that happened to me last semester: During dinner, I got a call from a guy who graduated last year and who happened to be back in town for a little while. Now, I kinda knew this guy--he was friends with my freshman year sponsor--but the two of us had never had an actual conversation. So when he asked me if I wanted to accompany him to a Joanna Newsom concert in LA that same night, I was understandably a little taken aback. (My first response: "How did you get my number?" His reply: "Uh, Facebook." Bad sign.)
I turned him down as respectfully as I could ("I've got this huge essay due tomorrow...") but now that I've listened to Ys I sort of wish I'd gone. I fully expected to hate Joanna Newsom---I mean, she's a "psych-folk" harpist who sings about magic animals, for God's sake--but her music is evocative and gorgeously orchestrated and totally unlike anything else out there.

Other sources of excitement in my life: the thing with cheaptickets.com got straightened out, and now I'm going to Hungary--yes, Hungary--over spring break. Am hoping to God I'll have enough of my thesis finished by then that I won't have to pass up sightseeing/the opera/etc. in favor of staying in and writing.

Speaking of which, my thesis might be kicking my ass/destroying my social life, but I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Yes, it's a little ridiculous that Little Miss I Hate Academia is throwing herself into a project involving avant-garde Soviet cinema from the 1920s, but I figure it's got to give me at least a little hipster cred. Did I mention the guy I'm researching has 200-odd MySpace friends?

I also got started on the film scoring process for the creative component of the thesis. No composition quite yet, just blocking out cues and hit points on Digital Performer, but it's going to rock. I hadn't been in the music studio in about seven months, so I'd almost forgotten that Zen feeling I get when I'm figuring out the shortcuts and idiosyncrasies of music technology, that state where even the most bewildering of technical difficulties is somehow manageable. I think this theory explains it best.

Now if I could only get into that same state while writing my thesis abstract, I wouldn't feel the need to distract myself with things like this blog.

Stuff that has happened in the past few days:

--I decide it would be nice to go visit the boy in Europe over spring break. After carefully comparing prices on dozens of sites, I settle for an American Airlines flight offered on cheaptickets.com. The booking goes well until I hit "Purchase" and get a message saying the transaction didn't go through, try again. I try again, same message. The third time, it works. About an hour later, I get an e-mail telling me my flight is canceled. My card will not be charged, they say. Hmm, I think. I check my bank account online, and not only did they charge my debit card, they charged it--you guessed it--three fucking times. Their customer service people reassure me things will be straightened out by Wednesday, but until then I don't have enough money in my bank account to buy a ticket from another, more legitimate source.

--I meet with my advisor. She informs me, once again, that she thinks I should go to grad school. In fact, I'm the first person in ten years whom she has actively encouraged to study Russian in grad school. No pressure or anything.

--I go to get a key to the music building from the department secretary (I've got an opening shift this semester). A professor enters as I am leaving. I am barely a few steps out the door when he starts talking smack about me. I overhear a few snarky comments to the effect that the last semester I had an opening shift, I was late to work a couple of times. Which is true, but...fucker couldn't even wait till I was out of earshot?

So aside from finding out I'm the bane of the music department, having the ante upped on the whole future thing to an unwelcome degree, and possibly being scammed out of most of my savings, life's just wonderful, thank you.

Ain't no other man...

I'm back at school, and although the boy next door is next door no more, there is still a man in my life. For the last five years, I've counted on him to cheer me up when I've been feeling down. I cherish every precious hour we spend together (four so far, and the semester hasn't even started yet). He's strong, honest, talented and reliable--well, except for those times when the bastards at Fox replace him with an extended episode of American Idol.

Jack Bauer, you complete me.

My stepmother has some interesting friends.

So now that a 106-year-old Comanche medicine chief called Spirit Eagle has waved a plateful of burning sage around me, I think I'm about ready to start this next and final semester of college off right.
You know, a while ago I would've been a lot more jaded about that experience, but I just haven't been feeling the cynicism these days. Maybe it's because of all the traveling; maybe it's because I've met a few people who genuinely believe it's possible to change the world (or at least believe that believing you can change the world is a necessary thing). Whatever it is, I think I've become a lot more open-minded and a lot less prone to ironic detachment. And that's good. Probably.
Also, before I learned how old he really was I'd have guessed Spirit Eagle was around 80, tops, so he's got to be doing something right.