Ooh, class of.. that one time.

I'm having the sort of week you have after a really exhausting week. Which is to say, I'm being lazier than I should be.

Recent addictions: anything chocolate in sight, Google news, Barack Obama speeches.

Tonight I fell into a myspace hole. I started looking at friends of people's friends, and found a zillion people I went to high school with. Some of them have had babies. Lots of them have gone Greek. By all appearances, not a lot of them have changed much.

It's kind of funny. About half of the people closest to me I met in the past year; most of the rest are my family. Looking at the websites people have, and the statements they make about themselves, doesn't make me feel closer to them; it makes me feel even more distanced. At least before, when I've looked back without knowing, I could pretend to have gained some kind of solidarity with my class. I'm sure we're not all as wildly antithetical as I imagine.

Well, OK. I'm not sure. But it's not as if I want to go back and try to make relationships exist where they don't. I've grown accepting of the fact that while my best friends here look back on high school nostalgically, this is the first place I'm going to feel that way about.

It's just interesting that people can be so radically different. All because of what they're taught, what they read, what they get exposed to. Durkheim and Marx and DeBeauvoir should be required reading for every living, breathing, literate soul. If you don't understand the words, buy a dictionary. I did. The anthropologists and the linguists and the zealots and the historians and the environmentalists and those of the counterculture and the scientists and the poets--if you don't drink it in, open yourself up and give them a chance, how do you have any idea what you really believe? That's how things become bigger than your life. That's how you transcend your problems.

But I guess I'm not one to preach. I had an epiphany about a month ago and since then have felt like I exist in a different way. But I'm still shirking my homework to read the news every 10 minutes, and read fiction I shouldn't have time for, and "Stumble" the internet for gorgeous photographs and lots of random crap, and eat too much chocolate when other people are happy with just enough rice, and etc.

Wait, where am I going with this? I don't know.

But I should finish this chapter on AIDS, anyway.