march 24-28 i recently realized that my life, which surrounds me daily is off these pages both in terms of daily minutia (daze) and overview. i propose the latter if only to inform you, my friends, about my swarthmore spring semester situation and provide some current context for these personal pages.
justin hall, hi.
i am a second-semester junior at swarthmore college in swarthmore, pennsylvania. it is located 25 minutes southwest of philadelphia. its a serious school, where people study plenty more than they party.i live in the main building of swarthmore, parrish hall, which has two or three floors of dormitories, separated by gender. i live with dozens of men, next door to the president of one of our two token fraternities, and his cronies, with foreign students and engineers and a few random freshmen. one of these, ethan is one of the four people with whom i spend most of my time. capricorn, a sly rock - he stands without being intolerable. he visits me often, I see a lot of him. we eat together. he is a disciplined passionate harmonica-playing pottery-slingin' irish muslim (I describe him like that too often). he chose his religion, it is not that of his family. that's rare enough, let alone his particular combination. he and i talk a lot about matters of the spirit, as they intersect with the lives of college students (anger, fidelity, respect, choice, indulgence, health). he inspires me to discipline; he sleeps at 10:30 most nights so that he may wake at 5:30 to begin his prayers. as well he will not accompany me to parties where alcohol is the primary concern - he wishes not to condone such behavior (makes it hard for him to be in a blues band). on the lighter side, he has exposed me to wonderful muzic and harmonica, he helps or toys with wilson and i during our weekly radio broadcasts.
i am as ever spending a lot of time with wilson kello, another sagittarius, more mellow since his last semester travelling in italy but still gruff and performative and always astounding if occasionally harsh. he causes me to erupt in paroxysms daily. we have a radio show apiece that we share wednesday mornings and saturday afternoons- wilson's blues and justin's jazz respectively. as well, we find the time to ocassionally carouse although wilson is disciplined as wilson is, often retreating to this room amidst a flurry of stressed syllables to study shakespeare for seminar. We endeavor to live off campus next semester, that we might cook more broccoli together.
carew and i, often perpetually yakking (though less so since she found her nedfriend). our interaction has always been characterized by a certain awareness of gender power and exchange. she is occasionally pissed off by my paternalism and perceived domination of discourse. i get pissed when she doesn't think. sometimes it seems she's more male than i, ie young male has a lot to prove. She pokes me like I poke her. anyways, she is having a seemingly successful semester; she won a national op-ed award for an article she wrote on pepsi in burma, she has an astonishing array of society saving internships to choose from for the summer. carew is the most activist of my friends (though ethan did start the campus muslim students association upon arrival his freshman year). she runs the campus campaign against toxic tampons, college investments in mcdonalds , and the rights of strawberry workers in southern california. we threw a party together earlier in the semester which allowed me to explore my imagination for concatination: we served natalia's sangria from a 20 gallon industrial janitor's sink propped up on 2 dressers with a pipe leading from the drain to the faucet (viola - sangria on tap).
I talk to Amy fairly regularly, considering how far apart we are. It's frustrating, talking on the phone too much - the voice triggers physical rememory and you're left holding plastic. One good sign - I have a wealth of hand crafted postcards from her, if nothing else a sign of artistic participation. I send her my radio shows. I love Amy, she is still a serious mood swinger. The word "still" creeps in to my speech cuz I see so little of her in my active eyesight (today was spring-feeling; hormones pumping, fewer clothes, mating in the air -
we, or I, had a pregnancy scare last week. Considering the gravity of a potential progeny, I wasn't as scared as I likely should have been:
I thought that my responsibility for having stupid sex, for inappropriate seminal sharing, was to follow through with being a father. I certainly didn't expect or respect to demand abortion, considering my friends abortion narratives, I wouldn't ask that of Amy. Somehow in my hyperactive mind, I saw more humanity in accepting fate, and besides, hasn't my life been a study in fatherhood? Suddenly childrearing seemed the best way to focus my coming decades. Amy always sez I'm going to sell out, I thought having to raise a family would be the perfect excuse to start writing screenplays.She dropped blood, it was clearly an exercise in mental preparation and hormonal backup. That night we had our worst mutual annoyance by phone. I may not see her until August. Sigh. This writing moment is a low point. So frustrating. No clear path
but this relief perhaps;
I received power secretary, I wrote the last half of this with my voice. If I don't wear out my larynx, I should be able to start updating my web site with some regularity. I might be able to start exploring my situation through writing again. Maybe not too regularly, my throat is beginning to hurt.it looks as though I will try to travel to central America for the summer; learn to speak Spanish for one hundred dollars a week somewhere where its warm and no one has heard of wired. I thought about joining Amy for the summer, seeing what cohabitation might create, but this seems an appropriate time to learn the / a language of the future. And I've done a lot of San Francisco.
I love places I'm not, women I'm not with, so what I do is most all of my homework. It seems the most Devine opportunity before me:
I'm taking two classes: Proust, Joyce, Faulkner (a motherfucking mind-load of modernist material) and design of everyday things, where I finally get a chance to study chairs. I'm also doing two directed readings, tutorials, one examining cultural studies, one explaining foundations of modern discourse.
i'm more offline, i think i'm more quietly a part of the community i'm in. people still write me about my web pages, reporters still ask me about the future of the web. and i thought this site was useless (read: not current) so rarely updated. so much of my autobiography needs to be amended, to be expanded, contextualized. so much homework to do. so many cool swatties. at least i don't really worry about finding love like i used to, i know where it is now, i just have to figure out new ways to get people to fly me to see her. otherwise, i'm pretty present. and i'm going to try this web stuff again. if only i could put my radio shows online
(you might likely have to endure bad layout/design, that's what takes time.)
now about this sheep cloning stuff...
justin hall | <justin at bud dot com>