phthalombrage | (no subject)

I'm no Destroyer of Worlds, but I still feel out of place here.

I don't know what planet I fell off before, but everyone is so nice here. I hope it's the real world and where I used to live was just Fucked-Up Parallel Shit Universe or something, because I'm already coming out of my shell. I may have almost let my guard down. I've been where I liked, dressed in what I liked... People I feared and felt were jeering at me were actually interested in my blue triangular Donner bag. I am not mocked, but in this marketplace, I cannot be bought... understood? This has been missed...

And I know I can sit down pretty much anywhere (I hear rooftops are off-limits), but I still don't want to. I'll opt for the empty table with a view of a window, wall or potted plant anytime. And so many congenial response e-mails from upperclassmen and staff! I'm branching out, but I hate when people offer "networking" like some kind of holy grail. It's such a relief when each random encounter ends well, but that doesn't make these connections any easier to forge. You do the vulgar snobbish thing, you flick your eyes over each other and avert them when they meet. I guess I'll live like my parents... but with professional connections, so much more convenient, like moist towelettes.

I applied for a job I would dearly like. I'll probably end up doing something else; Stan said he'd send me some things to do if I wish. In the adjacent atrium I struggled to gracefully eat noodles (merci, Stéphanie...) and I heard: a lively, animated discussion of computer programming that was all honeydew and milk of paradise. Not really, but somehow I don't feel like things are nerdy enough yet. I guess I haven't been hanging with the right crew. Ha... or at all, really. The same patterns unfold, solitary walks with a goal of finding some space of my own, hours of wandersome internet browsing (during which the meaning of the universe doesn't exactly make itself known), naps taken purely to lose time I will probably later seek... I am a fractal of randomized predictability.

So I guess I'm excited for clubs to start. I'll be in new places surrounded by strangers. It's exciting to be free, ambiguous, unrecognized, but good to have friends, comfort, freedom. Two kinds of freedom? In the interim, there is now. Awkwardness. Lovisa would say that's what I have to expect at my age.

I think I'm going for a round of random shit-buying at Entropy sometime in the next few days. I'm hesitant, but I'd better do it.

As always, I guess I will live for until
though the sun in his heaven
says Now

Impractical, really.