I am now the proud owner of a 12″ PowerBook. I love it beyond belief. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever owned.

I was originally planning to get an iBook, either the 12″ or 14″. When I visited the Apple Store yesterday, I liked the 12″ model much better than the 14″. The 14″ looked big and clunky andd ugly, but the 12″ was cute and perfect. I initially dismissed the PowerBook because of cost, but the 12″ isn’t actually very expensive. It ended up costing less than the 14″ iBook would have, mostly because I wanted to add more RAM and disk space to the iBook, but the PowerBook’s standard configuration was good enough. And with my student discount, it only cost an additional $100 to upgrade to the superdrive (which gives one the ability to burn DVD’s) and get an extra 20 GB of space.

Here is it, because it gives me joy to type it out:
12″ PowerBook
1.5 GHz G4 Processor
SuperDrive (DVD-RW, CD-RW)
80 GB hard drive
512 Mb RAM

This is the first time I’ve had my own computer. It’s very exciting.

I saw Hotel Rwanda last night, and it made me think about how I’m living this luxurious, fairly meaningless life while people are suffering. I don’t want to be a person who ignores the rest of the world and is content with her SUV and her TiVo. It’s actually fairly easy for me to put the blinders on and become completely absorbed in my own little life. But on a fairly regular basis, I read a book or see a movie that really makes me reevaluate my lifestyle. I think that’s real art- stuff that makes you reconsider who you are and where you’re going.

I am very comfortable and incredibly rich compared to most of the world. I’m a middle-class white girl with good SAT scores and college educated parents who value education. Not only am I going to a fancy private college next year, my sister is going to a fancy private high school. We’ll both be on financial aid, yes, but we’re not getting anything close to free rides. Because I have so much, I feel like I need to give something back to the world. I can’t just accept that I’m better off than everyone else, and ignore their pain. I can’t be one of the people standing by and not doing anything.

And that’s why I’ve decided to join the Peace Corps when I graduate from college.

This relates, but I’m having a hard time explaining why:
One of my goals is to live consciously. I don’t want to go through the motions of life. I want to perform every task, make every decision, with knowledge of the meaning and consequences of my actions. I want to do everything on purpose. I think that that’s my path to spiritual fulfillment.

I swore I was going to start updating more often, but something got in my way: weschat.

It’s the (unsponsored by the University) chatroom for Wesleyan’s class of 09. All of us prefrosh have been hanging out in there for a little over a week, getting to know each other. It’s incredibly addicting. Almost all of my internet time since it started has been spent in there. It has consumed my life, but I love it.

All those terrifying fears about showing up on campus and not knowing anyone, never making any friends? 90% gone. Every single one of us has those fears, and is eager to make friends. No one wants to be snobby or judgemental or stupid, because we’re trying to make good impressions. That makes for a very warm, welcoming atmosphere. I can already name at least five people that I would feel comfortable sitting with uninvited at meals, and that’s a wonderful feeling - and a pretty big deal for me. I don’t usually feel like that about people. It’s wonderul. And it will be even better after we all meet up at Wesfest, Wesleyan’s weekend-long party for prefrosh. The next four years are looking pretty good.

So that’s my excuse for not updating very much lately. I think it’s an excellent one.

My modem is broken! So no Internet for me until Friday. Sorry, I will be unreachable until then.

I guess my DSL likes to play dead. Back online, but it could fail again.

The picture frame that contains my most recent school picture also houses every one of my old pictures, stretching all the way back to kindergarten. Every year, when a new picture comes in, my family lays them all out in order on the table and looks them over. One of the most interesting things to see is the evolution of my hair. When I was young, it was bone-straight and brown. Over the years, it gradually reddened and waved, then frizzed, then started curling.

What I ended up with was a large amount of frizzy, sort of curly hair that I didn’t really know what to do with. So I put it back in a ponytail most of the time and didn’t think much about it, because my appearence doesn’t have a lot to do with how I feel about myself. I liked my hair, but I wished it would curl more and frizz less so that I could let it dry from a shower without constraining it in some way and then being tied to that style until my next shower. I’ve gone through years without being able to wear my hair down.

Then the other day I got this book that told me to stop using shampoo, and scrunch a little with gel.

And my hair started curling more than it was frizzing. And now I can wear it down. And it’s awesome.

I still have tons of hair, and it still looks kind of weird because there’s so much of it, but I like it. It’s so freeing, and I love how it looks. A lot of people probably won’t, but I don’t really care. I have hair ribbons, and they don’t. So there.

Sometimes I feel like my life is a constant struggle between practicality and idealism. It seems like everyone else favors one thing or the other, but I’m constantly embroiled in mental battles between the two. I’ve been trying and trying to write something long and thoughtful about this, but it’s so hard to think of examples.

There is one bad thing about being accepted early to college. You go out of your mind with anticipation. And, unlike most other people, you have months and months of high school left.

I don’t really mind going to school, but I have no work ethic. Homework, studying… not so much. I don’t really care anymore. I can tell that I’m working short term. I’m just functioning on a day-to-day basis, not really learning anything. I don’t need to worry about finals, so there’s no point in taking notes or paying attention in biology if I can just read the book the night before a test and do really well. There’s no point in really learning the physics because all our tests are take-home and open book. I should do calculus homework, but he never checks it and barely mentions it in class. My grades aren’t really going down yet, though - and, let’s be honest, I would start doing more work if I dropped to a B+ in more than one or two subjects. I guess I like to pretend I’m a slacker, but I’m really not. I can get away with not studying very much and doing only required assignments, but I would never hand anything in late.

Then there’s The Laptop. I have been dying for my own laptop since I was about seven. It’s always been the understanding that my parents would buy me one for college as a high school graduation present. The day of acquisition is near. Near enough that I can start researching (and I have, more than you can imagine), but not near enough for it to be really soon. It’s far enough away that all the research is torture. I’ve decided on the Apple iBook, 14 inches, with the Combo Drive. I know the exact configuration I want, and which mouse and printer I’m going to buy. I know which iPod I’ll get if they have a $200-off-an-iPod-when-you-buy-a-PowerBook-or-iBook deal this summer like they did last summer. I’m not sure why this whole laptop thing matters to me as much as it does. I think about it as much as I think about actually going to college.

And I think about going to college a lot. Where I’m going to live, which courses I’m going to take, what my major will be, exactly what I’ll bring. I won’t bore you with the specifics, except for the fact that I’m planning to major in Neuroscience & Behavior. It’s going to drive me crazy because I have so long to wait. Can’t I just skip the next few months?

Oh, Wesleyan. You drive me crazy.

I like to make New Year’s resolutions, though I barely think about them afterwards. I typically have the same goals year-round, but I guess it’s helpful to lay them out once in a while and look them over. So here we go. In 2005 I’d like to . . .

• Be healthier. Some people are probably going to think this is ridiculous, but I want to lose at least five or ten pounds. My BMI is hovering right at the upper limit of “Healthy,” and I’d like it to be lower. Plus, I feel better when I eat well and exercise. Unfortunately, this rarely translates into me actually wanting to do those things.
• Be less of a recluse. This is more for college than it is for now. I’m okay with my life right now, but in college I want to spend less time sitting around by myself and more time out with my friends. This means being more open and less afraid of both other people and rejection.
• Take more pictures of people. I take a lot of pictures of things, but very few of people outside my family. I want a lot of pictures of people from school to take with me to college.
• Be more invested in things. I tend to float through life without ever really trying very hard at anything, or caring much at all. I’d like to stop that. It will not serve me well later in life.

Can you tell I’m obsessed with going to college?

I feel like there should be more, and there probably is, but I can’t think of it right now.

When I was a kid, I read constantly. It was more quantity than quality - lots of Babysitter’s Club, Nancy Drew, things like that. But still, I was reading. Around the time I started high school, though, I discovered fanfiction. It gave me instant gratification and more romance and mush and mental candy than I could ask for. I started spending all my time on the computer. I stopped reading books. My attention span was gone - why sit through an entire book that was written to make me think or give an accurate portrayal of a life when I could read fanfiction, which was full of delicious unresolved sexual tension and beautiful people and thrilling drama? It was equivalent to reading romance novels, except that the style was usually completely different. There was really no substance to it.

I spent years reading fanfiction. I still do, but I’ve been reading less and less lately. My mind is finally sick of all the sugar that I’ve been feeding it. Lately I’ve been impatient with light, fluffy reads. I want something that feels true. I started reading Kushiel’s Dart, and it was enjoyable, but it wasn’t enough. I felt like I was wasting my time. I want books about real people, real ideas, real knowledge. I want books that will make me think about the way I live my life. I want books that will teach me something new. I want books that will make me a better person.

I drove by a graveyard on my way out of Boston today, and it started me thinking about human burial rituals, and what they meant to me. I’ve always said that I want my body donated to science after I die, but I would consider other options.

I really like the idea that after we die, our energy and body matter are recycled and become part of nature. If I was going to be buried, I would want my body to decompose and become one with the soil, not rot in isolation in a sealed casket. The idea is almost perverse. It seems selfish, like holding yourself back from the universe, clinging to the idea that you are far above the rest of the matter in existance. I would feel so lonely if I was buried in a fancy casket lined with silk and designed to keep out everything except the same dead air I was buried in. I don’t understand why people wouldn’t want to be buried right in the ground, to become a part of life again.

This is a strange thing to write about on my eighteenth birthday.