i’m going to school again. college, yo.

it’s okay but i’m (unsurprisingly) lazy already. i spend most of my time chatting, websurfing, and writing what may turn out to be a therapy session and/or/maybe a book.

amelie is back in a very big way. maybe not big how i think, but big. yep.

I feel a wrongness in doing this, but maybe i’m just being too cautious and weirded out by her proximity to Amelie. It’s absurd for me to be even thinking any of this because we’re so far.

So it goes.

working full-time. yep, i’m a stiff now. not for long as i hopelessly meander back to academia. or try.

saw t-pain a while back. she didn’t receive me quite as she did before. t.k. and i are going to friend-zone it forever. and amelie is, well, still the only person to whom i lack any demonstrable will to ignore. we in the relationship world call it, “moving on.” i can’t move on. something is ringing and bringing me home to her, and it’s not much to my liking in that it is my own struggle.

i’m being dragged kicking and screaming only because i’m too dispassionate and not enough naive to believe that a simple admission of feelings will darn our winnowed sock. and i’m too romantic to move on. someone told me to just put my nose to the grindstone and stop wasting my time. but what if ‘moving on’ turns out to be the greatest trifle of all? i’m not afraid that i will miss out or be alone–okay, yes i am–but those are tertiary fears. my greatest fear is that i will not be at the end end of the road to hand it off to the next in line. the next to carry water. to not fulfill that life mission.

too romantic. story of my life.

I was violently angry at her, jut very done with the back and forth of everything and I was just pushing her over and over again, and i was rushing down this long wall of doors. It was merely a wall in the middle of nowhere with doors going on forever and every time I got to the next door, I had to push her out. Shove her.

I woke up the next morning having this really vivid memory of the dream. I told Jay about the dream. A few days later, he was having dinner with Amelie who tells him she had this dream about me–that my dad died and I was very upset that she didn’t go to the funeral, let alone call me.

The day before I realized that she never called me anymore–that it was always me, and she only txted or facebooked me. Now, for the past week I’ve been going back and forth about confronting her and saying, “Look, this is really no coincidence.”

And then, yesterday happened.

At a Speech Tournament I was judging at, I was assigned to judge the final round of Novice Poetry Interpretation. Three poets had poems dealing with love, and I started thinking about her. I started crying. And this girl who was reading these poems was speaking directly to me. It was bone-shilling and upsetting.

For now, I’m just going to bottle it up. But it won’t be long before I fizz out.

One of the consequences of feminism is not simply redefining roles for women–an unquestioned good–but redefining roles for men. I think that will be a good in the long-term too, but right now a lot of us are in this space of trying to figure out who we are and what we should be. Bill Hendrickson is a guy inventing manhood in this new world–all of his wives want to work, for instance. He comes from a community where the existing definitions were untenable and repulsive. And yet even as he constructs new definitions, he can’t escape the root of the old, of the ancient and all its questions and conundrums.

For some of us, the ex-Cat Stevens represents a bit of nostalgia, or at the very least, something from the past. The guy wrote and sang a lot of music in the 60′s and since then. But he’s largely viewed as one of those from days past. This is partly because of his conversion to Islam, and partly because he walked away from the public light.

He’s found his place. In watching some newer videos of him performing and speaking, he emanates an aura of peacefulness. This is what I think about when I think about Islam. Not all that terrorist garble. That’s not about Islam, it’s about Islamism in the same way that Christianity is not about Christianism. Or the other way around. But it seems to me that Americans view themselves through the sort of “Christian” lens and we view the Arab world through an Islamist lens. But that isn’t fair is it? Let’s set aside the fact that we shouldn’t even be viewing ourselves through a religious or pseudo-religious lens and focus on the root of the problem: we see the best in ourselves, but the worst in others.

It’s my opinion that this phenomena is merely a part of the exceptionalist agenda, and most of us are mere sheep in the ideological crossfire. And by ideological, of course I mean economic. To the powers that be on ‘our’ side, anyhow, the only reason to have values and beliefs is to shore up our dominance and wealth.

Like lambs to the slaughter.

A lot of the stuff on the poster I was unaware of or vaguely remember reading about. So, what happens next?