I've been home since sunday. Coming home is weird. Everyone says I look so good and so happy. Sounds great. I'm happy, but I also feel ... alienated? I don't know. I'm not going to play the regret game, even the thought of it is rediculous in light of the lunacy that I've been privledged to take part in at Deep Springs.

But I sure have missed a lot. It felt weird having jordan give me a speech on how I don't know Jay like he is now, and how people are changing, and how I missed erik soften up. (haha, softie). I hear jen complain about how much she misses erik and I get pains in my chest from missing all awesomeness that must have been had this summer.

This has been a very sobering experience...learning that you can't be everywhere at once. And perhaps you can't be friends with everyone at the same time. As much as I'd like too, I see danger in spreading to thin. I love my Deep Springs peeps already, but there is so much more that I share with my NJ peeps that goes deeper then even love.

Maybe it's that we found each other instead of being shown each other. I dunno.

Like I said, I don't want this to seem like I am in any way coming down on Deep Springs. It's awesome, beyond a lot of things. But I've been so caught up in it (and rightfully so) that I've missed a very big part of me slide away.

And I sit here, realizing I won't see erik until months down the line (april? gosh, i don't know). That's a long time to not see someone you've shot thousands of hours of breeze with.

I feel like I made amends with the people's who are here, and the one's I'm going to see. But seeing how tight things were over the summer, I wonder if my early departure cost me a place in some people's minds.

Lamentation is a dangerous thing. I'm going to go rob erik's bookshelf. heh heh heh.

[note: taken from an email I wrote to cameron, so it covers some already covered stuff.]

Class is in full swing, in the form of 'Individual and Community: Problems of Membership and Belonging'. Hobbes, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Rousseau so far. Stendahl, Marx n Engles, and Ellison to come. Whole lot a learning goin on. I got an A- on my Shakespeare paper (on Antony and Cleopatra, relating to Antony's tragic flaw, a consequence of his reluctance to devote himself to a private or public life, leaving himself exposed to be torn apart by passion and reason...right.) The teacher hasn't given any A's yet, so that said, things are going good.

Labor is also in full swing. I've been tarring and repairing roofs suspending by a harness swung over the roofs apex and attached to the winch of a truck on the other side. I've been weeding the potato field. I've been digging irrigation ditches. I've been slaughtering chickens. All sorts of crazy.

Last week, there was a fire in the Sequoia Forest on the other side of the Sierra Nevada's, and consequently the valley here was covered in smoke, which caused an orange/red full moon. We took a Student Body trip to the Eureka Valley Sand Dunes and went sliding down the Dunes (680ft high, and steep) on our naked bellies and backs and all combinations thereof. In an experience completely void of homoerotica (promise!), I had some experiences I can't say I will ever have again even if I try. Doing the backstroke down a sand dune, completely naked, under an orange full moon, will 20 someodd other naked companions casting neanderthal like shadows over the void of the sand, . . wow.

The pace of things here is feverish. The night before my birthday, the fire patrol caught me off guard and sprayed me with the fire engine, a tradition set aside for birthdays. The bastards cheated, and I was unable to enact my plan to wear everyone else's clothing on my bday so they would be wetting their own clothes. Oh well. The best plan yet was when someone ran out in the Alfalfa fields and lied down at night. Smart alek.

I'm in the process of updateing the Deep Springs website, to include the new calandar and the new email list, along with an editable PDF application for future generations of Deep Springers to use. Right now we're working on publicity and stuff, pulling media strings, trying to get into US News and World Report.

There's a cut out page from Cosmopolitan or something on the main Student Body bulletin board of a Calvin Klien underwear ad, with this model with long blond hair, with the caption "Johan's pre-DS modeling career", and the speech bubble "Jag taller Amerikaner." that a classmate of mine put up. Straight humor, I promise, and I can't help but feel like I'm hot shit when people do things like that. Not having girls around gets frustrating. The mildest pre-DS interest now appear in my mind like the finest Queen. Oh well, such is isolation.

I've been growing a beard, working on my shaggy cowboy air. It's starting to look not-so-scrappy, but I'm no erik "I grow a beard in 2 days" linsalata.

Aright, time to sleep some, it's 1:30 in the desert, do you know where your kids are? right. And as for the mail thing, well, hmm. I don't have that many friends. tear. I'm adding a week of amnesty. peace to my peeps.