adolf hitler, mostly

I had a wonderful conversation with T. tonight. We hadn't really talked in a while, so it felt nice. Also, it's been a while since I've really talk-talked to anyone, so that was really nice.

I'm in a weird space right now. I don't feel guilty about it, or think that my feelings are unwarranted--it's just what happens when the people around you make choices. It's weird to get the creeping feeling you're a supporting character in your own life, it's weird to feel less than optimistic about your romantic future, and it's especially weird to lose security in friendships. You can't rely on connections and promises and constructed trust, you just have to hope for the best, find people you can have fun with, find people you can drink tea with, and periodically check in to see who's beside you.

It's a terribly unromantic way to approach a bond with someone, but the romantic alternative has been a let-down for me. Idealism doesn't favor me.

That's life, man.

Anyway, in other news, I actually really like this quarter. I've lost last quarter's rampant self-consciousness and now I'm not only oddly vocal in my classes, but unusually motivated. I've kept up with my IS readings, even if it means staying up later and foregoing precious sleep (a notion I somehow couldn't bear in the fall). I've been weirdly accurate in class--I've managed to both illustrate my existence to my professors (fall found me mostly staring into the void, analyzing my disturbing act of staring into the void) and offer responses that please them.

I've become accepting of my pace in Hindi, realizing that perhaps being one of the few people in the class with no direct connections to India meant I was a little slower for a reason. Astonishingly, deciding to accept this has relaxed me in the class and consequently improved my attention and comprehension of the language.

I've also been feverishly attending to a bazillion applications (or like, 5), at least one of which should be my ticket to India before the year is out. The hardest part of this has been to definitively swallow my lack of feeling of entitlement and request a number of recommendations from teachers by which I somehow felt unworthy of being recommended. Stepping out of that comfort zone has made me feel somehow more confident--it's obvious that it's all related, point being that I am becoming more comfortable trusting my own strict belief in my right to be here.

I have, in the past--and I'm sure I'll continue to do, to my frustration--too readily bought into the image of things, instead of trusting the individual. That might be too vague. What I mean is: you hear a lot of talk here, of Harvard, of the World Bank, of Nobel Laureates. This is the image--not the individual. The individual is the person who was educated at Harvard and went on to write policy protecting the whole of the Great Lakes from pollution from corporations. Or the individual is the person who went to Harvard and ended up working at a public library in a small town. The University of Chicago is image. I (you, him, them, Bill Gates, Adolf [Adolf or Adolph, whichever Hitler wasn't, my Opa was] Hitler) am individual.

At least, that's how it made sense to me to articulate it at this moment.