Thinkething

It's one of the most beautiful days I've seen all year, this green-soaked wonder of an outside, all the riot going on, taking over the highstone beautiful gothic buildings, and birds with goldflecked backs running up to the ancient swing hanging over a mudpuddle where I've been sitting with Dos Passos (who is totally influencing everything in my little demiuniverse right now). I can't sit still, even for lovely language; I keep staring out into this impossibly glowing green, I go walking, I try to continue work inside but my body is having none of it. There's a festival of some kind going on in the quads which I won't see the culmination of tonight because I will be working, but it makes me strangely sad. There's a giant jumpy castle, and a rockwall looking like a dinosaur turd at one end of the center square, and every student union known to man lining the quad, selling things. And a band at one corner, the base making the ground shake under my feet.

I'm thinking (oh dear) about communes.

I've been thinking about them a lot lately, about how the whole philosophy of how people treat each other is warped somehow, and based on this mutual acceptance of lies. How we only pay attention to the things that are wrapped in bright lettering. I started thinking in movie-mode (ever do this?) where I imagined a debate going on, flashing in and out to scenarios, imagined someone (okay, me) explaining why a commune works better, why the capitalist system is madness. It's not communism, exactly - it's just this attitude of knowing everyone, knowing where that thing you need is and who can help you to get it. Eliminating the unneccesary. This absurd addiction to excess. And, because I am secretly a romantic, how much prettier it is when you get rid of the excess.

And how you have to decide. You have to decide. You can't have a revolution, not the way we think of revolution, with guns firing and people rioting and lovers kissing passionately because this is the last day they get. You have to decide, to live differently, to find the others who believe the same, and then you have to abandon everything else and go off and start it again.

It's that part that's so terrifying. We all want to stay right where we are, to start it at home. Maybe it can be done. Revolution, to revolve, to evolve, to change, to turn into something else - maybe. Maybe maybe maybe. I'm hoping, girls. I'm hoping that when we're middle-aged we're all still leaning on each other hard, the way we do, I hope we've all got our hands underneath something that makes us happy, I hope we bring it home every night and serve it up for fucking supper. I hope there are more of us - not us, you understand, but that there are more people to rely on for other things, that we always know where to go. I don't mind being lonely but I've always hated feeling helpless.

It was a good movie. Maybe I'll write it sometime.

I miss you. I wish I were there, I wish we were talking out loud about this. I know I'm only making half-sense but that's because I'm missing you, you make me make sense, I need you to bounce off of, to keep me from turning into Dona Quixote right this second and having people laugh at my horse. My jealousy is crawling all over my skin because you get to see each other two weeks before I join the party. I'm thinking about what I want to do with my life and it's gotten so much bigger every time I turn to look at it. Writing, yes, but there are things I write about more than anything, and they have to do with relationships of every kind because I think that's the center of everything, everything I don't like about our little rock in the center right now.

In other news, I give a good haircut.

Love.