who will get these with me?
Timothy Dalton is a swashbuckler, yall.
thinking about locking my door tmrw and settling down with all the TDalt movies I can scrounge up
The Living Daylights
License to Kill
Beautician and the Beast
Timeshare
Christianity is designed so that the least virtuous person can save your soul.
“
| — | Fr. James V. Schall, SJ |
once a friend told me a story about how she was cleaning out her car one day and lifted up her rear cushions to find a swarm of cockroaches.
cockroaches.
just chilling in her car, where I and many others have sat.
COCKROACHES.
well now I am pretty sure that my house has termites because these fat ants with wings are suddenly all over the place and oh my god my legs are itching and I’m pretty sure this couch that I’m always sitting on is probably infested but if you think for one second that I’m about to overturn this cushion just so an intrusion of cockroaches can overtake me and then haunt my mind forever, then you are fucking out of your mind.
the last time I saw a spider in my room I slept with cotton balls in my ears for a week so that they couldn’t burrow into my brain and lay their eggs all up in my medulla oblongata.
It’s so funny how your opinions can change so completely.
When I left campus last year, I thought I hated Dartmouth. Thinking about coming back would make my stomach turn and I would start having anxiety attacks. I would picture life in Hanover going on without me, and I was fine with it. And then I had a wonderful time at home and I booked a plane ticket to Hanover and I trekked back with dread—dread that I was going to be an outsider, that I was guaranteed unhappiness, that every interaction would be stilted and heightened with awkwardness.
And now things are fine, and nothing’s awkward, and I’m glad that I am here just like I was glad that I was there for a while.
And maybe I’m even starting to feel some of that senior spring nostalgia, even though I will be here for a little bit longer.
But I wonder if the change was me, or everything else. I really think I did need time away, but I don’t know if I remember ever being this comfortable here. I think I always felt transplanted—like I didn’t really belong here or even know how I got here but was just trying desperately not to be noticed too often. And maybe I tried to remedy those feelings by playing into what I thought I should be and should be doing.
And it’s funny because I pride myself on my judge of character and social perception, but really I knew almost nothing about myself.
For nearly a year I thought about what it was about this campus that made me so uncomfortable, so anxious, so worried all the time. I convinced myself that this wasn’t the place for me, that I had made the decision to come here too lightly—even contrarily to my initial feelings of apathy about my campus visit. And maybe it isn’t the perfect place for me, but I cannot discount what it’s taught me.
Maybe at another place more similar to what I was used to, I would have blended in too easily, kept on my path of sameishness, and not grown. The depths that I’ve been pushed to in my faith would have been unparalleled, perhaps, anywhere else. And I know that some of the friends that I’ve made here are for life. And even though it is often difficult to understand lives so different from my own, what better way to challenge my prejudices, humble my pride, and prepare me for the magnitude of life?
This isn’t really the post that I thought I would write when I began, but I guess I just want to say okay. I’m okay with things. I’m okay with myself. I’m okay with this place and this time and this experience and I’m okay with hoping for better and trying to make my way there.
