HORROR STORY

This is what the walk up to the top floor, where the English department is located, looks like. Abandoned mental institution standard of creepy, if you ask me. You rarely bump into anyone, climbing or descending. Later, when you reach the top floor you find yourself in a maze of narrow hallways that stretch on into several doors you have to walk through while wearing a confused expression. I walked around the entire floor twice in a full circle looking for a professor's office, poking my head into another room to ask someone for directions in a moment of desperation after I twice passed by an old rickety professor wheeling his bike toward his office and it got awkward for both of us, turning a corner to have to walk down the long, quiet hallway toward each other.

...You again. I dislike those repeated instances.

I would've taken more photographic proof of the ridiculous layout of the place, but it was quite simply impossible. There are walls overlapping walls, and passageways fit for a single body. Interesting word choice, I guess, using "body" instead of something like, "person." I was just thinking about it being a suitable set for a horror film, where people get lost in the English department, and end up dead. Panic attack? Claustrophobia? Psycho professor mad about plagiarizing students?

Can you tell I don't hang out at the English department much? That was my second time there in two years.

That little adventure ended the semester for me. I can now get back to a bunch of exciting things waiting for my full, undivided attention.

Life has moved on, as it does, since the bombings. A city shut down for an entire day as authorities hunted a nineteen year old. It was as insane as it sounds. I have a lot of thoughts on the issue, the brothers, and the city, but it's a real downer to get into. I've refrained from reading news sites for a few days now, because some of the headlines still scream of the whole horrible ordeal. Dzokhar's young face stares back at me through the screen on some of those sites, and I feel a deep sadness rise within me as I wonder many things.

The backlash has returned, or become more pronounced, since it's always been there. Muslims on a universal scale are being held responsible for radical Islamists (this is not news, obviously). Some of the dialogue going on over here right now is both frightening and amusing, to say the least. Suggestions of eradicating all Muslims from America to guarantee safety from terrorism and violence against Americans. But ignorance breeds arrogance. How about the US stop breaking international laws in their continuous bloodlust in foreign lands? Maybe stop massacring people on a whim in their own nations, and perhaps don't torture people, because that sort of thing can break a person.

The other morning I was walking home when a white man paused at his doorstep to glare at me in a way that might intimidate me, before stepping into his house.

It's strange now, to have to wonder why a white person stares at you when you walk down the street, and if the reason is what you think it is. Because the color of your skin represents what they detest. You are not like them, they want to remind or inform you. That's fine with me, though. I know who I am and continue to be that person with dignity, in ways that a flag can't define.

IN SEARCH OF MEANING

Tonight I would've been on a plane to Athens, where I would stay within sight of the Parthenon, in a city watched over by the ancient gods like Apollo and Zeus, where philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle pondered the meaning of life.

Four days and three nights would be spent in Santorini, in a hilltop hotel by Fira overlooking the Aegean Sea, where an undeserving woman's face once launched a thousand Spartan ships towards Troy, according to Homer and Marlowe.

This is Santorini.

Grief should be felt for a sight so beautiful and peaceful, because they are only "holiday getaways." Why then do we choose to live in the corrupt, clamorous, disorderly city when the opposite exists? 

Do we yearn to be relevant by association, simply by trying to adjust and conform to urban expectations? What does being a city person have to do with being tenacious and enviable, when it is just a jungle of concrete and superstructures and everybody is killing everybody else for greed and power?

As unfortunate as it is, I know Greece and all its history will be there when I finally feel right about visiting. It depends on what sort of experience you're looking for, I guess. There are some places that are perfect for seeing alone, and there are places that I believe are more worthwhile to experience with the right person.

STANDING UP TO GIANTS

1) Arts appreciation two Sundays ago. A free ticket came my way and so I went.

2) The walk back from the theater. A passage through time (wishful thinking).

My dad was right when he informed me once in my teenage years, "you have an attitude problem." I figured he based this on the fact that I was an angsty, alienated teenager and didn't argue with him. I wasn't rude, I simply disliked most people and norms and was straightforward in my indifference. I'm a lion, from the family of big wild cats, I pounce when I have to with no restraints, I am protective, I kill with my bite which really means I commit pain with words because that is the only weapon I am not afraid of, that I can master, the pen is mightier than the sword after all - but when I really have to, pounce that is, when I am provoked, pushed over the edge.

A few weeks ago Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog paid a visit to our class and spoke and took questions for an hour and 45 minutes. An affable, aggressive man he pointed to each one of us in the large lecture theater and asked for our names at the start of the class, which I thought was a nice gesture, considering he was only visiting for an hour and 45 minutes.

While talking about his writing process toward the end of the class, seated sideways on the table in the front of the room, he looked right at me in the sea of students and asked, "what's your name again?" I told him, and he repeated it, and then asked, "Have you ever written something you normally wouldn't, it just didn't reflect the person you are, but you completely believed it anyway?" I waited for him to explain a little further what he meant, not wanting to nod eagerly and immediately say yes like a naive person trying to gain acceptance by heavyweights without really understanding. Besides, here was a great writer standing before me, I wanted nothing more than to hear him speak and explain things while I listened.

I thought about his question long after the class ended. I thought of something recent I had written, if I had believed what I had written. I had supported a black man, a character in one of the novels I'd read for a different class, and the violence he had unleashed as retaliation for being treated like a second-rate citizen by some white people. What causes a stand up guy like Coalhouse Walker, a ragtime piano player, to abandon his principles and calm and go on a rampage of terrorism toward some white people, why, by being provoked of course, and being denied his right to justice by the police, lawyers and city officials one after the other. We're all human after all. Some white girl (although every student in the class is white, except me) retorted, "He's essentially a terrorist." Yet most of American history is rooted in terrorism, I wanted to say, and following that horrific history of slavery, lynching, slaveowners raping their slaves, Coalhouse Walker trying to gain justice for himself when a crime was commited against him in the first place, pales in comparison to all of that history.

It is hard for self important people like her to grasp the anger and despair endured by minorities. I understood violence in that context, and why it had to happen, what led to it, and why it didn't make Coalhouse Walker a bad person. It's about self respect and sticking up for yourself. It's about the lengths people will go to in order to make a point, to make people listen, finally. And I believed it,with all my heart, when I said, "I wouldn't go down without a fight either."