Crazy times

stairs between squash courts and art museum (whoops)

Given the human condition, the title of this post is a rank exaggeration, but yes.

Today I slept in for the first time since ... spring break, probably. I think I needed it far more than I'd realised. I also think that I said here a long time ago that this semester I'd aim to go to bed earlier and wake up early, and I managed the latter without the former, haha but not. I also believe I said a while ago that this semester I'd also aim to stay awake in all my classes, and I think I did, though I have no idea how. Anyway.

I've been done with college work for about 7.5 days, most of which I spent at Christian camp, which was wonderful and challenging and refreshing. Graduation is in about ... 7.75 days, and I'm flying home that evening. I don't know whether I'm more weirded out by the prospect of ending the Williams chapter of my life, or of leaving the country.

Besides the physical exertion (which I'm all too accustomed to, hence two months without sleeping in), the emotional exertion of intense conversations and goodbyes has been exhausting, hence bouts of doing antisocial work (hurhur, although really I mean packing and praying and administrative stuff) in my room. And blogging. Because writing and documenting are more important to my functioning than I sometimes remember.

On Thursday, after saying goodbye to a number of very dear friends at the retreat and a number of newspaper friends in one of my former dorms, I was walking home in the breezy dusk and marveling at the lovely campus when I came across this:

immortality take it it's yours (logic is not)

I was not expecting to see the bleachers ready for Commencement events. So I did two things that made no sense: taking that picture, and lying on the grass in the middle of it all.

For the last month or so, every time someone asks me how I feel about graduating, I've said that there's so much I'll miss here, but I have so much to be excited about. Which makes me incredibly fortunate, on both counts. And which is still thoroughly true, even if it feels so odd.

On a very unrelated note, squirrels have always used the screen door between my room and our upper deck as an expressway to the roof. Today I had the inner door open because it's kindof hot and humid (I will be contending with real tropical weather in a few days haha I am a wimp), so this one squirrel wandered into my room a few times! I was tickled. Err. Figuratively.

collages are cool like children (obviously)

On another mostly unrelated note, this is a quite that I typed into a draft blog post while working on a paper on Aristotle and the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, whom I'd never heard of before my ancient political thought class, but who was a fascinating guy who had his beginnings in philosophy before he'd been freed from slavery.

On no occasion call yourself a philosopher, and do not speak much among the uninstructed about theorems (philosophical rules, precepts): but that which follows from them. ... For even sheep do not vomit up their grass to show the shepherds how much they have eaten; but when they have internally digested the pasture, they produce externally wool and milk. [Enchiridion, XLVI]

And they lived happily ever after.