Friday, May 24, 2002

As I walked to Julie's house tonight I noticed that the smell of Bridgewater in spring is much different than the smell of Colgate in spring. Perhaps that shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did. But I was used to dividing smells into different seasons and not different towns. I knew that different man-made places have different smells; I've known that since as a kid I became familiar with the smells of Julie and Anna's houses and the warm homelike feeling that came with them. But I guess for some reason I thought that outside was outside, or at least, city was city and town was town, and spring and summer and fall and winter smelled the same no matter where you were. But spring in Bridgewater is as distinct as the smell inside my house, and as I walked down the street I tried to figure out whether it was a combination of different types of vegetation or the temperature of the pavement that gave it that smell. Most likely both. And I was surprised to realize that the smell was more similar to the smell of Cambridge in the summer than the smell of Colgate in the spring.

I wish I could tune my nose to pick out one smell from another, to detect what combination of odors combines to make this overall smell that harbors so many memories, like a gourmet chef might detect the spices in a soup. Then perhaps I could sniff my way around the world like a bloodhound long after my vision was gone.

Amanda Hope -- 11:32 PM (linkme)

Thursday, May 23, 2002

The key to getting through this summer, I think, is energy. Honestly, I've never experienced energy like I did first semester at Colgate. It was sensory overload, almost. Every new sight around me, every new experience, kept me going to the point where four hours of sleep a night seemed like plenty and even when I came back to my room at 3:30 in the morning I had to stay up another half an hour blogging just because everything was so exhilerating that I had to record it. I feel bad that this past semester I haven't done that as much, because looking through my archives floods me with so many memories that I wish I could write everything I do down in obsessive detail just so I can live it again later. There are so many things that I missed writing about this semester. But I digress.

I was thinking that that sort of energy only came with being in a new place for the first time. It's so easy to shift to complacency in a familiar setting. But ApL suggested that it's not just a new location, but change in general that can cause that, and I think she's right. Right now I'm pivoting on a change of sorts, and I think I'm gleaning the energy that I have from that. But it's a change that I'm feeling rather than one that's visible, so I feel like it's less rechargeable. It's more internal than external. At Colgate I had these currents of energy fed to me from the outside, one giant waterfall of beauty and excitement. Now I'm working with rivers flowing below the surface, rivers that are constantly being sapped and that may eventually run dry.

I don't quite know how to keep this energy flowing, but I know what will happen if I can't. Here in Bridgewater, things feel much like they did last spring and summer. The same people are here; we form the same groups and attempt to amuse ourselves in the same ways. I have the same job and the same activities. All the things that have happened this past year seem so insubstantial and faraway that it's hard to believe sometimes that they ever existed at all, that there was ever anything beyond this place. It seems so easy to slip into last year, into the angst and lethargy of too many years going nowhere. That's what I'm afraid of.

You know how it is, some summers, when you sleep later and later until the sun is on its way down before you open your eyes, and yet you never feel more rested, only more and more tired? I've done that, and now I'm trying for the reverse effect, and the only way I can think of to get that is the reverse action. Getting decent amounts of sleep, of course, but other than that I'm running around like a hamster on a wheel, doing things that I want to do, of course, but overloading myself so there's not a spare moment to lapse into that summer stupor. Forcing myself to look forward constantly so that I can't look back and freeze with that bizarre desire I get to turn time on its head and curl up in some warm corner of the past instead of moving ahead with my life. It's spastic. But I have to keep this summer going, and I have to keep my energy.

Energy. These wells inside me are only so deep, and when I count and realize that I've only been home four days I can't imagine how this can last the summer. I have to somehow keep feeling that change, that change that I knew would have to happen, keep feeling it and somehow keep using it to fuel me. I knew this change was going to have to happen, and I felt it more and more strongly towards the end of the semester, but I don't know if it will follow through and complete itself. In a way I wonder if all this activity is masking something. Masking that nothing has changed at all. Hiding that like a hamster on a wheel, after all this movement I've gone nowhere.

I hope that's not it. I hope that by expending energy I'll gain energy, that by running around doing all kinds of things I like to do I'll gain the inspiration to keep going. I hope that this summer I'll refuel myself and be ready to go back to Colgate, for a year that will be much different than last year but at the same time will have the potential to be as good if not better. I hope that I'll prove to be as strong as I keep dancing around saying I am. I hope ...

Amanda Hope -- 8:59 PM (linkme)

Monday, May 20, 2002

... and then I woke up in my own bed in my own room from the most wonderful dream I've ever had, and I felt terribly depressed.

But if it was just a dream, why do I have all these boxes to unpack?

< /first year at Colgate>

Amanda Hope -- 11:07 AM (linkme)

Sunday, May 19, 2002

Cushman is full of people I don't know, even as it's full of my best friends. People everywhere, friends of friends that I don't know, and parents. It's the parents that do it, I think. It's like last summer at Denison on the last day when everyone's families arrived to take them home, the way suddenly things are straightened up and everyone's attitudes are subtly altered. A certain busy-ness and a certain sense of ending. And the feeling that the presence of our parents somehow turns us all into children again, even at the moment when we're celebrating an entrance into the world of adults.

Amanda Hope -- 12:04 PM (linkme)