There was going to be a longer, more good-natured blog here tonight, but my mood lacks the vigor to deliver it thus. So, to summarize:

1) Immediately upon entering the common room of an HC dorm, one is vulnerable to attack from seven separate locations: the four room entrances, the bathroom, the shower, and the entrance itself. Six of these can be seen only in peripheral vision, one cannot be seen at all, and three are behind him. Thus, upon ascertaining the occupants of the suite, the wise ninja will immediately retreat into shadows.

2) Despite residual defensiveness from a girl called Y and the canonizing of bits of Honors College mythology in Elisabeth, I have not yet invested Allison's breasts with such emotional significance as to become objects of fear. Meg had this kind of power; so far, no one else has pulled it off. After all, and pay attention, because this will be on the test, people only have the power we give them.

Tonight has been hard, probably the hardest night since I got back here. If any of you have ever wanted to know what depression and anxiety feel like, this is a pretty textbook example, although an excessively inconsequential one. It's endlessly revisiting skeletons of dialogues long dead, flagellating over the results, whether tiny missteps and embarrassments could have been avoided. Because tiny missteps are never tiny, especially to those who understand that, with the exception of our most treasured friendships, most of our relationships consist of absolutely nothing more than the superficial words and gestures that make up the great pageantry of our social fabric. There are no jokes when you're depressed. There are no ironies. There is only judgment, and criticism, and your only concern is to finish out the day without annoying, disappointing, angering or offending anyone, so you can get back to your hole and resume hiding from the world.

So you measure every word spoken, maybe for months, maybe for years, gauging and re-gauging the audience to avoid conflicts or to stimulate appreciation, acceptance or goodwill. But it takes a hell of a lot out of you...

So you stop. And it feels great.

But oh, what a price.

I'm remembering the last week, and it's bothering me. I'm remembering things I said, and it's bothering me. Although, for a nice change of pace, what's bothering me stands firmly enough in the recent past.

"Am I still glowing?"

The first time the word "glow" was ever applied to me was in the fall of 1999; the beginning of the end of the Meg episode. Yes, maybe that's wishful thinking...after all, it's been almost two years since it ended with such a resounding crash, Jon is cleaning his guns for a long-awaited conversation that will hopefully not be necessary, the link is gone, but here I am still talking about her. The glow came from Meg, and it is perhaps appropriate that what's left of my memories of her remains to suck what little glow remains from my new life here.

After several days of general disgust with all my writings, I started back on Elisabeth. And I love that story, maybe because it's the most real thing I've ever written, and it makes me feel dizzy and uncomfortable the way Meg's stories used to, and the way Allison's blog has done once or twice, maybe for far less noble reasons...I love it all the same, and there are parts that read like a dream, but slogging through it line for line makes me want to jump out a fucking window.

So, if my glow is gone, blame Elisabeth. It's always best to shift blame to a nominally fictional character. If I seem different, blame a year and a half of holding my breath. And now, at an hour far later than I had intended to go to sleep, having completed almost none of the work I so desperately needed to get done, I sit hunched over my computer, I can feel my entire body shaking ever-so-subtly, and I feel a little like crying.

My problems don't matter. We all know that. But my life does, to me anyway.

You find a new foundation, I guess. Or, better yet, get used to not having one.

Pray for the survivors, if you believe in such things. Pray for the innocents that will be caught in our nation's vengeance. Pray that most fragile, ethereal of things, our essential humanity, survives the system that created this monstrosity.

And, if you're like me, pray for a new day. Pray that the human species is capable of better things than we've yet seen; that "nature, though dominated by darkness, has always contained seeds of light, seeds of intellect and love, which over the ages grow until they transcend their base embodiment."

- Tara Reid, as quoted in Rolling Stone magazine and re-quoted on AIM's shiny new pop-up page.

I thought this was interesting, despite my initial reluctance to pay attention to someone who has voluntarily put Carson Daly's dick in their mouth. I don't much care about knowing calculus either, which makes it decidedly inconvenient that we're having a quiz tomorrow. But the idea that civilian life could be stranger and scarier than college life intrigues me. I probably would have said the same thing, in a more eloquently-structured and grammatically correct sentence, if you had asked me about college two years ago. Lately it's hard to imagine life without this place.

In other news...well, there's been a lot of other news lately, hasn't there? Most of it dealing with parts of my life not discussed here on INRI. What's important: Duessa is alive, and safe, for the time being. What's less important: Lucifer has found more important things to worry about.

Be. Someone. Else.

The enlightened among us, which is to say all of us, whether we realize it or not, exist in a state of constant flux. Our knowledge of ourselves, being based on our experience, is worthless; it's our past.

But that's not exactly true, is it? Because part of our sense of self exists outside the natural flow of time. This is the part that provides us the small measure of focus we can achieve in these frail little bodies: a series of random events circling a constant. The images and themes that define us repeat themselves endlessly throughout our lives, seemingly in defiance of the choices we make. It stands squarely against the notion of self-determination, but the actual experience of living makes it nearly impossible not to believe: it is what the storytellers call destiny.

So. The question for tonight is:

At precisely what point does self-creation become a lie? Does consciously manipulating our capacity to change constitute a crime against the essential soul?

Earlier tonight, our merry little band went out to see the new Kevin Smith (yes, my second viewing), collectively laughed ourselves sick. Spirits were high; the night, after all, is a synthesis of the day that came before, which is derived from the night before that...and so on. We'll cover the previous stuff in a more well-rested entry. We talk about hair bands and just who the fuck sang Angie (for those keeping score, the correct answer is the Rolling Stones, although Tori Amos' cover is arguably the superior version, despite opposition from certain frizzy-haired Philistines), and, walking through the parking lot, to writing, moving from that to Barrett's prospectus once we're back in the suite. From there it evolves into a fairly long and complex discussion of the strengths and purposes of science fiction, Simmons, Dick, Bradbury and Tolkien (none of whom I know all that much about, but of whom I can seem to converse rather knowledgeably without feeling like a fraud), the craft of writing, concepts for tying short stories together, and the possibility of skipping that route altogether and just going for a novel.

Having thus satisfied the feeling that we should be doing some work for class, we then hung around in my room and traded smartass comments while Ben played Counter-Strike.

I count three blogs in the last six days. What the hell do you people want from me?!

Kidding, yeh wee bastards. It's nice to have an audience.

Today was move-in day, which always seems to traumatic for reasons that are never quite apparent. We're going to skip that, though, including all the little frustrations and blows to my still-fragile sense of vanity, and focus on a couple of choice moments.

Earlier this afternoon, until my excessive use of metaphor called for a rather heavy rainstorm (not by Florida standards, mind you; any storm that destroys less than $100,000 of property here is considered a drizzle), the powers that be within the Priory of Orientors, a secret society with roots in the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission and the Presbyterian Church, believed to be responsible for the Kennedy assassination and the teen sex comedy American Pie, opted to welcome the returning returnees with a pool party.

Note to readers: do not attempt to read the previous sentence if you are on medication that causes drowsiness.

Having rendered my spiffy new (black) clothes utterly filthy with the sweat one accumulates moving things in and out of a dormitory at noon, in Florida, in August, I needed a break, and decided to check it out. What I found was a lot of freshmen and a few returns lounging around, forming little cliques, everyone generally being cool. Compared to previous, similar parties the previous year, it's worth noting that, for whatever reason, the overwhelmingly female freshmen class seems comfortable wearing a lot less clothing than their predecessors, and somehow manage to look less attractive to boot.

Aaaaanyway. I find a quiet corner of the pool and try to knead some of the tension from my muscles as I observe. Blink 182 is playing, most people are singing, because the horrifically banal nature of the relentlessly teeny-bopper subject matter (I mean, let's face it...I've bought three Blink 182 CD's, but they're basically Primus crossbred with the Backstreet Boys), because, as it's so easy to forget, we're all still basically kids. This is our genre. We like to think we're a little smarter than the rest, but it's a matter of degree, not of kind.

There are maybe twenty, thirty people there, out of 130-some new arrivals. And in three months I'll know almost every one of them in some slight capacity. Most of them superficial, maybe five or ten social, and, god willing, three or four genuine friends. It seems a bit odd to trek through all this shit to meet three or four people, until you remember that your life can be changed forever by meeting one person.

But, I won't know most of them all that well. There are no Duessas here, probably, hopefully no Megs, and almost certainly no Marisas. Back to day one, infatuation generally begins with whoever deigns themselves to talk to me. That thread runs thorugh all three Defcon-3's and at least a couple of less critical situations, and the idea, at its heart, is so profoundly silly that I can't help but smile.

Which is when I come to realize two things about my return to the college experience: the gender politics, the clique politics, the gossip, the fights, the idiot fucking lust...where the hell else am I going to get this kind of entertainment? Watching the inhabitants of the pool, I realize that, as much as I may hold them in awe, or pity, depending on my mood, it is still all too easy, given the right moment, to fall into line and believe as they do that I am one of them; if it is easy, it is probably because it is true.

The second thing has to do with the vast stretches of time which lack these fleeting moments of grace; even the bad times have a certain sick thrill to them here. Life isn't any fun if you're not afraid of something, and as much as I may hate it here, I can't imagine myself anywhere else right now.