Short remarks as the semester begins

It’s 10 o’clock the night before classes begin; I’m feeling pretty good. Tomorrow I have Order and Planning in the History of Economic Thought, as well as Politics and Piety in Early Christianities. Tommy pointed out that the Christianities class is a discussion-based course with only twenty students. ::Gulp:: I need to work on that whole in-class participation thing. I guess I had better dive in this semester.

I arrived here again Friday night, after what amounted to an incredible Winter Break. I feel like friendships that may have been unintentionally and unfortunately drifting apart, were solidified into something stronger than they were before. Without the burden of driving into Boston everyday, I got a lot of stuff done: personal organization, cleaning, yardwork, some time with parents and my brother; gaming and some (backbreaking) carpentry work; and most prominently, a lot of fun with friends I hadn’t seen in a while.

Truth be told, as much as I love Wesleyan, having to leave everyone at home after this break was even more difficult than usual. A lot of positive things happened at home: Chris and I realized everything was good and things returned to normal, Eve and Chris completed their reconciliation, Matt found a new course in life (even if it was joining the Navy), Josh found a cute girl, and Chris and Drew reestablished their friendship. I saw people I hadn’t seen in a year, and shared some fantastically fun times with them, and with others I don’t get to see often. There were so many late nights and early mornings, so many parties and spending the night on recliners. So much money spent on beverages. So many good times.

But yet I’m back, and though I miss everyone at home very much, it’s good to see everyone here, too, after a month away. A day in the house to myself was pretty sweet. It gave me some time to unwind, unpack, and run some errands around town. Mad came over Saturday night, before anyone else was in the house yet, and I showed her around and we watched some TV. It’s good to finally see her again, after eight months of her being abroad.

Sunday and Monday and today were filled with returning friends and dinners at Usdan. I’ve been running a bunch of errands and trying to get things in order before classes start, and I’ve been pretty successful. I’ve also been running again, which I hope to make into a regular habit (how many times have I said that before?). I’m back on my old route over the bridge, into Portland, and back; it’s just under four miles. I ran Sunday and Monday, and I plan on running tomorrow and Thursday and Friday. Surprisingly, I felt pretty good after my first run in months; no bad muscle aches or anything. Though, the cold wind (it was around 18º yesterday morning) is drying out my face and lips. No good.

My goal is to get about 6-7 hours of sleep a night, and wake up at 8:30 every morning to go running, shower, maybe eat a bagel, and go to class. We’ll see how faithful I can be to that plan once the crush of reading comes on. And there will be a crush. The stack of books I had to buy is just about 23 inches tall. That’s nearly two feet of pages I have to read. ::Eyes go wide::

We had some people over last night and we all ended up watching the Democratic debate on CNN. Along with his policy proposals and wider platform, John Edwards’ performance pretty much solidified my inclination to vote for him. I’m sending in my application for an absentee ballot first thing tomorrow. I hope it’s not too late to vote by mail in the primary!

Oh, so over break, I worked a few days with my dad. We were in Milton, in a pretty nice neighborhood. I got to rip out a fireplace hearth with a big hammer-drill, which is really like a smaller jackhammer. That was fun, but carrying all the bricks and cinder blocks out to the dumpster was not. After that I was working over the garage, taking out insulation and installing backing for the heaters. Then I had to insulate a garage. In so doing, I may have developed a slight fear of being high up on ladders.

Overall, it was not fun work. Pluses included getting to throw big things out a second-story window, and getting to work with my dad. Negatives included getting crusted over with dust and Fiberglas insulation, being itchy pretty much everywhere (including my eyes, ugh), and having large amounts of crap in my nose and throat for a day or two. Oh, and did I mention hauling hundreds of pounds of brick?

I really don’t know how my dad does that stuff. I really don’t know how he’s been doing it for over 30 years, either. I used to tell him that I wanted to do what he does when I grow up, but only recently has it been fully clear to me why he always said that that would be fine—as long as I got my college education first.

Whoever said that labor was noble clearly was not a laborer.

Shifting gears to Wesleying: what the hell? Claire agreed with me earlier tonight, that I really get no love on that blog. I’m posting probably 75% of the content there now, and all I get is abuse. Or worse, nothing. Of the past dozen articles I’ve posted, I’ve gotten basically no significant response (and mind you, this is stuff that is directly applicable to Wesleyan students). And then Heath Ledger dies and someone makes an entry about it, and boom! Comments everywhere. WTF, Wesleyan? I give you my blood and sweat and you give me nothing! Argh!

I have been meaning to write a lot of stuff on here, but various impediments to clear thinking (imagine what you will) have prevented me from doing so. As has a general cloudiness of thought. Or maybe lack of drive. There were a lot of memories formed over break that I wanted to permanently enshrine with appropriate entries on ASD, and I have failed to record them. Now they are left only in my memory, and I don’t know how stable that is when it comes to the particulars of certain events. But I guess in the end, the thing that matters is not whether I wrote about it, but that I experienced it—whether I explicitly remember it or not. Right? I hope so.

I need to get back to reading Potter’s The Impending Crisis (only about 610 pages to go before Thursday, eek), so I will need to cut this short. I do want to mention that since I went home for break, though, I’ve been having some pretty disquieting nightmares. Many involve people I didn’t particularly like in high school being students at Wesleyan, and things spiraling out of control. I remember one nightmare I had while at home, where I was having rocks thrown at me running down Wyllys Avenue. And in that same dream, there was a tornado. Which coincides with several other nightmares I’ve had involving tornadoes (not just recently, but they are much more prevalent lately), including one last night where my family was forced into the basement while giant tornadoes swirled outside.

We were in the back corner near the pool table and there is a window in the foundation that was blown open. The tornado was right outside. We survived, but eventually rain started to pour in the window, threatening to flood the basement. And then lightning would come in the window and hit the vapor barrier on the exposed insulation (the walls are plastered, in actuality) and would spark and catch it on fire. So basically we had tornadoes, flooding, electrocution, and fire to worry about.

The dreams always involve me and someone else at the front door, looking to the west, and it’ll get really dark and my parents will be there with us (I think it may be my brother with me at the door), and then the tornado will start and we’ll run downstairs, but my dad will stay upstairs to shut the door and stuff, and we’ll yell at him to hurry. Then we run downstairs and find cover, which usually involves us starting in the boiler room and covering ourselves with sofa cushions. We’ll find a flashlight, but no radio, which for some reason is always a big deal in the dream. After we realize that the furnace is probably not the safest thing to be next to, we’ll go into the office or into the corner. Sometimes I will flip the emergency shutoff switch for the furnace on the way down, which always sticks out—for some unknown reason—in the dream.

Sometimes there is a sort of tunnel-like cavity or cave in the basement in which we’ll hide. In other nightmares, such as the one mentioned earlier where I was at Wesleyan, it’ll just be me alone with the tornado. I faintly recall another nightmare in which I was downtown in Middletown and the tornado came. There were people from high school there, and I was trying to find a basement in a building that had been ruined in a prior tornado, and others kept trying to kick me out. And it may have been the original dream I mentioned, but I also recall a nightmare where I was living in a house at Wesleyan—all white, with a half-basement—but I couldn’t get it unlocked or something, as the tornado came bearing down.

I can’t remember ever dying from one of these tornadoes in the nightmares. I think it’s more that they keep coming and coming until I wake up, or maybe I switch to another dream. I don’t know if these nightmares have any connection to my childhood viewing of Twister or my pretty serious fright in the case of that downburst in ’96 (of which I can find few details online):

A downburst is an exceptionally strong downdraft of air in a thunderstorm that spreads out violently at the ground—typically in a straight-line path. Speeds as high as 175 mph have been recorded from a downburst. In May 1996, 104 mph was recorded in a downburst in the Brockton/Whitman/Abington area of Eastern MA, causing 60 injuries.

But either way, the two most prominent dreams I’ve been having revolve around unwanted high school people appearing at Wesleyan, and unwanted tornadoes appearing everywhere. Hmm.