i'm reading dom delillo and listening to janis joplin and it kind of made me want to go out there and get my heart broken. risk it, anyway. But then... i felt only panic and a sense of duty, so maybe not.

I wish to walk to argentina. i have a little posse here that would be fun to travel with. this school debt makes me feel so trapped and i wish it wasn't so expensive to be here; I love what i'm learning, but I'm not sure that I prefer it to walking to argentina.

I need to resolve this.

*

toronto for a weekend after living in new orleans was crisp and shiny, bright, active, vibrant.

within a day of being at home I'd completely forgotten my life here; the connections i've forged here, which seemed so strong, just paled in comparison to family and friends who have known me for years.

now that i'm back here it's going to take some effort to re-engage. I didn't do a bad job of it - out for beers until 3am last night, which made me pretty cranky all day... and yet today was the kind of day that makes me thrilled to be here:

I ran into a neighbor early this morning when I was super-frustrated by my trillionth flat tire and resigning myself to the long walk to school. Ten minutes into the walk (my efforts at hitchhiking were unsuccessful), she appeared in front of me, an angel in an old VW bus - she'd forgotten that she just bought a car, and she'd come to drive me to school.

my roommate brought me sushi for lunch and drove me back home so I could fix the damn flat. again. I ended up geeking out at the bike co-op and building up another bike, all on my own, so now i have a spare and won't get so trapped. i'm pretty proud of my bike skills.

ate beignets on the mississippi with my friend paul and then we found a great old diner and i tried to calm him down after mistakenly showing him the headlines of today's paper, which documents 5 shootings in the last week in our neighborhood.

i'm all right. i have three exams and two papers due next week. then i'm going to throw a party, i think.

1:17 a.m. - 2006-10-13