Changes

Things are going all right up here. My classes are rolling along, I'm doing what I can to stay in touch with people - I don't think my phone's ever seen so much action. Even this weekend passed by pretty easily.

Last weekend was much better, of course. I went down to grab some stuff (just the essential: clothes, a guitar, a bass, and my speaker set) and to see Rachel. Over the next weekends that I go down I plan on diversifying my time so that I don't spend all of it with on person, but this weekend I spent what time I had with Rachel.

Unfortunately, Rachel was sick. I felt really bad for her, since I knew she would have cancelled in other circumstances. As it was, I has a good weekend. We went to the Adventure Aquarium, where I haven't been in many years, and we saw Mirrormask, which was good. It was really good to see her again. Too short a time later I had to go, but I did take something away with me: whatever mild seasonal illness it was that Rachel had.

A question I seem to get a lot is: What do I do up here? The answer is a little disappointing. It's just not that different. My weekends are pretty much the same as they were before I had a girlfriend. There's about as much happening in my neighborhood as there was where I moved from.

The loneliness does get to me, of course. After two full weeks of classes, I've had a total of three conversations. (I think here is where I give a shout-out to Katie, whom I had the longest and most quality of those conversations with). Here's the weird thing: A similar phenomenon seems to be happening to all of the people who I'm closest to.

All of my best friends have told me that this year is feeling really lonely. Obviously, there's a common thread in that for all of them, a good friend moved to Canada, but I think it's larger than that. Maybe part of it is thinking about college. This is the year before the biggest separation most people will know.

Given how senior year has been hyped up since as far back as I can remember, I don't know if people have been grossly misleading, or if things will get better, or if I'm just weird and have weird friends. I'm banking on the things will get better theory. Personally, of course, I am regretful that I'll probably not know what it's like to be a senior. Instead, I'll get to be a college freshman twice. That's not exactly a fair trade, to my mind.

One of the biggest things this has done is made me appreciate what I had and have. It's so very cliche, of course, but nevertheless. Even stranger, and one thing I certainly wasn't expecting, is the feelings of patriotism that have been awakened within me. Here's how that happened.

I'm taking Greek I. I didn't know this, but Greek is a completely insane language. I could rant about that for quite some time so just take me on my word. In one of the more introductory classes my professor was talking about how the accent of spoken Greek changed. He said that the same thing had happened in Canada, too; that if you go to the film archives and dig back a few decades, you'll find that the Canadian accent used to be much stronger. My professor said that it's been highly Americanized. And for the first time, I felt proud, really proud to be an American.

How sick is that?