I wrote the following near the end of my freshman September, when my lucidity and general sense of well-being were about on par with where they are now:
"Somehow it feels like I haven't yet 'taken ownership' of my place here. I can't even speak of there being 'my' place yet, because no one place, social or locational, truly belongs to me yet. Perhaps it's because I don't 'own' anyone, per se, on campus yet. (Always with the 'yet'—what am I waiting for? But perhaps it's not so simple, even, as waiting for something—although I get the feeling that something, anything, some undefined event must happen before I can open myself up to this place, give myself to a location again like I did before.) There is no one's time that I can tug upon, no one's will that I can bend, however so slightly, to pull that person to my dimension, and that seems to bespeak a lack of importance here."

You notice how I suddenly got comfortable this year? That's important. I think I've finally found that niche I spoke of freshman year, and it's done wonders for my confidence. I held this place in abeyance for so long...

But yeah. I have the paper now. I have good friends.

I have a place here.

It feels good.

Oh, the power of "Let's have a drink." This exhortation reminds the 21+ crowd of the burgeoning new avenue of social interaction that lies before them.

Mundane stints at "hanging out" have been supplanted by the prospect of intoxicated relaxation. This provides an exciting new take on the [formerly] ordinary act of consuming liquids.

As far as we know, this is what constitutes adult interaction. This phrase will open doors for the rest of your life, because even adults want to be cool.

Use the advertisers' tricks to your own advantage, friends—take the allure of alcohol and make it all yours.

(That was a snippet I wrote a while back after an old friend agreed to hang out upon my saying, "Hey, let's have a drink sometime." It's that little status reminder—"Hey, we're adults!"—that does it, I think. I've really been impressed by the power of that phrase in recent months.)

Oo—there's a girl named "Ann Ng" moving in downstairs.

That's cool.

(I know, right? I post about this but I don't post about what I've been doing. But eh—this isn't a chronicle of events. It's a chronicle of ideas and emotions. "Ana Ng" is still well within the realm of ideas, even if she's turned out to be a flesh-and-blood person.)

"Make a hole with a gun perpendicular to the name of this town in a desktop globe...exit wound in a foreign nation, showing the home of the one this was written for. My apartment looks upside down from there, water spirals the wrong way out the sink. And her voice is a backwards record—it's like a whirlpool and it never ends.

Ana Ng and I are getting old, but we still haven't walked in the glow of each other's majestic presence. Listen, Ana, hear my words—they're the ones you would think I would say if there was a me for you..."

I have voice!

I always forget that that's what distinguishes my writing.

I may not know much, but I sure do write pretty.

(A professor's comment on today's editorial: "This really does read well.")

Drunk: a version of me about 25 percent ditzier and 15 percent more outgoing than usual. I try harder, but I'm definitely dumber.

This plays out interestingly in conversation. It means I miss a lot of openings and connections, 'cause I'm already a bit slow on the uptake, and the alcohol doesn't help. I remember the conversation the next day and think, Oh, so that's what s/he was talking about. My enthusiasm carries me right past a lot of subtlety.

Talk comes more easily, as my self-censoring undercurrents of thought shut up for once—but the quality of thought may be somewhat diminished. I say a little more than usual, and understand a little less.

I write this not because I think you'll be interested, but because I'm working to tease apart the intricacies of my interest in alcohol.

It occurs to me that I'd rather have one drink with good friends than 10 with random strangers.

You could say that's just simple math. In the battle of one drink vs. 10 drinks, a lot of people around here would choose one, 'cause they can't handle 10—and they certainly don't want to try to handle 10 around strangers. But let's stop deconstructing this particular cliché. Assuming that you're like me, and assuming that drunkenness is your goal on the night in question, the state you're in after 10 drinks may be preferable to the state you're in after one drink.

The numbers are just a side issue, anyway.

I'm thinking, you know, drinking with strangers probably sharpens one's social skills—as would any activity one undertakes with strangers. And hey, if you continue to drink with a particular set of strangers, they may well become friends, or at least drinking buddies. Having a few of those around is good. But continual drinking with strangers still seems a little shallow to me.

The upshot: I enjoy having a few drinks either way, but rejoice, 'cause I enjoy drinking with you all much more than I enjoy drinking with random people I don't know.

Zamyatin on self-awareness:
"I was walking, keeping step with the others yet separated from them. I was still trembling from the emotion just felt, like a bridge over which a thundering ancient steel train has passed a moment before. I felt myself. To feel one's self, to be conscious of one's personality, is the lot of an eye inflamed by a cinder, or an infected finger, or a bad tooth. A healthy eye, or finger, or tooth is not felt; it is nonexistent, as it were. Is it not clear, then, that consciousness of oneself is a sickness?"

Dostoevsky on the denial of self-awareness:

"And try letting yourself be carried away by your feelings, blindly, without reflection, without a primary cause, repelling consciousness at least for a time; hate or love, if only not to sit and twiddle your thumbs. The day after tomorrow, at the latest, you will begin despising yourself for having knowingly deceived yourself. The result—a soap-bubble and inertia."

Sickness or necessity? Anomaly or norm? Self-consciousness could well be any of those things. It's everything and nothing. It's a blessing and a curse. It's—in a word—inevitable.

Oh, you tricky Russian boys...

I think I was better off when I wasn't blogging. My perceptions of things are almost always clearer the first time around—put them through the mill of the writing process and they're subtly altered to reflect the direction of the narrative, rather than real life.

That's dangerous. It puts distance between me and my life, blunting the sharp, direct experience of things as they happen. It leads me to put stock in a post-hoc version of events. It leads to these situations where someone asks how I'm doing and I refer them to the blog, as it has the most up-to-date rationale I've come up with. I begin to assume that everyone who matters reads the blog, so I stop telling people about my life. I mine conversations for kernels of thought that I can blog about. My blogging m.o. becomes "putting things down for the record" rather than "writing only because I must," and as such, I begin to shed the caution and skepticism that initially accompanied the endeavor.

The prospect of losing this canon of thought begins to make me panic, and the prospect of closing up shop begins to seem ridiculous.

Has anyone else experienced this?

So this blog...we're going to keep it casual and spontaneous. I'll post when an irresistable urge comes upon me. I'll post to clarify my thoughts. And I may post little enigmatic snippets of thought that most of you will be utterly lost reading. It'll be fun that way. Any other way and it becomes routine and obligation, which I don't relish. I've got enough of that to keep me busy.

Why the change of approach? Well, a lot of things have changed. I realized just how much had changed when I was back-posting entries from my original blog. I got to November 2003 and had to go back and delete everything, 'cause those posts made me ill-at-ease and sick at heart. I'm not ready to revisit all of that.

So I'm shaking off the dust of the road. Forget the past. This is a fresh start.

Ha—WILD is getting rained out for the third time since we've been here—and there've only been four of these during that time. The consensus among the people drinking in the common room is that the only one it didn't rain heavily at so far was the fall 2003 WILD. Drinking people are always authorities, so that must be true.