7.59pm.
Probably somewhere over Virginia or so; on my way to see bo bo bo bo bo
The sky out on the horizon is gorgeous. The sun is setting and there's a ribbon of juicy glimmering RED left (just the merest sliver) and the rest of the sky, the ground beneath us is dark.
I had a fucking uplifting day: the kind where the air seems in love with your neck but you want to wear your hair down and have the wind rustling through it, so you go back and forth and back and forth with the messy chignon.
It was the kind of day wherein everyone I saw seemed to be interesting and interested (and I can think of nothing I appreciate as much as this). I walked through Washington Square Park, NYU's equivalent to a quad or a courtyard or a campanile (the shaft), finished with my two hours and nine pages of linear algebra notes, and it befell upon me the recognition that almost every single student, every hipster girl in leggings and flats, every tattooed spiky-haired skinny guy illegally bicycling through, every grey-templed philosophy student ranting to his friends about Marxism and the principles of overthrowing governmental structures, every quiet long-haired girl with a stroller and a heavy bag of graduate biology textbooks is there because they chose to be here, is here because they really want to be learning about something that they think is interesting enough to make a huge part of their life about it, that is important enough to enter into thousands of dollars of debt in order for them to be able to do it. By and large, they are not there because they think engineering is respectable and will make them rich and their father, their mother, their grandfather thought (almost mandated) it would be a responsible thing to do, a fitting and worthwhile profession with which to support a family, and they couldn't think of anything better.
Georgia Tech is just so full of painful weaknesses, it seems to me.
Sure, there are some tiny children here intermingled with the NYU learners radically possessed; there are 17-year-olds who may or may not have any financial obligation for their education, or for their Fendi handbags, or for their iPods. I spent the last minute trying to come up with a way to justify their existence in some way, but I'll just say that I don't think about them much, I rarely see them in the math and CS building, and they v. rarely dirty their designer shoes with the grime of the subway. They do not oppress me the way I felt oppressed at Tech, by the sense of antisocialization and antiaesthetics and antiappreciation of anything beautiful beyond a mathematical formula.
I knew I would be before I got to NY, but it is a day like this that really proves that I can be ecstatic about life here, even though I'm about to cry in anticipation of getting to see that boy, even though I feel a little like I'm suffocating sometimes and don't even realize it until I am suddenly in a neighborhood that has lots of trees and grass, even though I feel lonely in a way I hadn't really anticipated: not that I don't have people to talk to, friends, even, already-- but that I don't have the specific goddamn friends and people that I love and there's a big gap in my throat about it often.
I wrote a list when I was first really trying to get used to the idea that I would be moving to NY, of all the people that I really like in this world, and I bolded the ones that were not living in Atlanta at the time. It was supposed to make me realize how close I am to people that are far away, and I did have about 50% of the list in other geographical places, though a chunk of them were but a quick trip away, in Athens. But in the months after I composed it, Elena moved in with me in Atlanta, I found Beth S. in Athens, Bo and I realized that there was no way we were going to give up on our thing--the best thing in my life, to be truthful.
So I would be lying if I said it hasn't been hard on me. And I'd be ignoring my emotions if I didn't admit that I've been beaten down every now and then with second thoughts and doubts about whether what I'm doing is a painful, expensive waste of time.
It's because of this that days like today (weeks like this entire stinking fabulous 3-day week!: that I loved my classes, that I really realized how much I am going to like and appreciate my new job, that I got a big box from my mom, that I finally got my lips on that mood-altering chemical in gin and tonics and in red wine (I didn't quite make my goal of a month of abstinance though, am concerned this means that I will have to do it again), that will end with my boyfriend kissing me and ends with getting to see EVERYONE and getting to see Dave and Becky do something amazing) are really valuable and make me radiate so much with love for the world, and for goddamn Manhattan, that some random YM street photographer comes up to me on my way to the subway, on the far end of Washington Sq. Park (where I was giggling with the observation that the NW corner is so full of crazy old men; --that that would be the place to study to avoid the girls with long flat hair and long red fingernails talking on their cell phones) and he asks me whether he could take a picture of me, that I've got just the look. I'm not wearing make-up, I've got on a shirt from the Salvation Army and my (almost eight year old, for chrissakes) Doc Martens that I wear every day, and he takes a picture just of them as I sign the consent form.
(I guess cross your fingers for me that I'm not a "fashion don't" or something.)
I browsed the bookstore at the airport, the magazine stands that I normally ignore, but I've come to really love a good magazine, a New Yorker or a Harper's, that allows me to read something of real quality in the amount of time it takes to ride the subway to class, and is light in my bag, and I skimmed the most pleasing article in Newsweek of all places, about the power and influence of women, twenty in particular, including one of the VPs of Google, Danica the girl racecar driver, and a NASA scientist, and I almost bought it, but I'm not going to pay $4.50 for Newsweek, good grief.
But it made me happy.
And so I was in just the right mindset to love this incredibly interesting article on the nature of spirituality and the brain, and to contemplate the crazy and awesome mysteries of how our brains work, and to begin to work on my plan for replicating the human brain into computers that can experience religion AND take over the world.