Your soul like a message in a bottle to me

Dear Emma Goldman,

Even though I wish you hadn't spent quite so much time advocating assassination as a method of social change, I think you're super.

Julia

(Why are my best fan letters always to dead people?)

All-female education 4, Julia 0.

Bryn Mawr has all kinds of curses - if you go up certain stairs or between certain trees you won't graduate, if you kiss someone on the Moon bench you'll break up. (If you kiss someone under Rock Arch you'll supposedly be together forever, which could well be a curse depending on who it is.) Tonight I discovered one they don't tell you about - walking down Senior Row alone realizing that you're likely to never have to worry about either of those later curses.

In my greatest act of cowardice in years, today I didn't talk to him again. I may be a fish, but do I ever want that bicycle.

A split knish in Philadelphia

O irony:
Opening night of Vagina Monologues
and mine spends the first act
awkwardly perched on the arm of a sofa
stage right
Complaining bitterly.

Connections

I'm reading Heat Wave, about the deaths in Chicago in the summer of 1995. The argument is that people didn't die just because of the heat, but because they were old and isolated and living alone in stifling one-room flats without any friends or relatives for the morgue to even call after the bodies were found. More and more people are living alone now, and more are dying alone.

Last weekend one of my housemates slipped on the ice and broke her leg. Someone else was walking with her at the time, and her swim coach and I stayed with her all day in the hospital until she was out of surgery. Later her mother flew up from Florida. It scared me to think of what would have happened if she hadn't had those connections - how long might she have lain on the icy parking lot? After the surgery, how would she have gotten home from the hospital? How would she function for the months until she gets her cast off?

It's not just for disasters that it's nice to live with other people. It's a luxury to be able to walk into the kitchen and find Katharine making muffins, to walk into the living room and find Kristy and Kyla watching movies. Sissi's drinking hot chocolate and telling Evie about the time she almost got arrested in Germany, Jenny's riding her bike through the hallway. You can always find someone to drink or talk or eat popcorn with. There are other people in Philadelphia and around the world living this way, and I want to keep being one of them.

Valentine, anyone?

You may remember that I am a big fan of Valentine's Day as it is celebrated in elementary school - construction-paper cards for everyone. Having got my hands on an excess of red ribbon and other delightful things, I'm all set up to make some. If you'd like me to make you a valentine, email me your mailingaddress and I'll send it to you. jdwise@brynmawr.edu

Voyages

It's really sinking in now that in six months I'll be leaving, that my life here is ending soon. Two years on the other side of the world might as well be forever. It didn't take me long to figure out that the Peace Corps accomplishes much more in the way of transforming people personally than it does in improving third-world economies or quality of life, and I expect to come back significantly changed. Probably most of the things I own now I won't want anymore after two years without them. I'll move to the city and get a job. Everyone else I know will have spent those two years going to grad school or working or getting married or something, and we'll all be scattered from each other.

I'm looking forward to the changes, though. I'm longing for my own kitchen table, to live in a place for years at a time so I can plant a garden and join a Quaker meeting. In between here and there, though, is this big blurred gap labeled "Central Asia". For a person who loves planning, it's kind of exciting to have this blur ahead of me.