Not a soul wanted to comment about our year's anniversary in exile? Anne is in China, Lynnea's a Crown professor, and Josh Mann's getting married! I mean, some things we knew were coming, but what happened? I didn't even know there was a blog a year ago. There have been babies and puppies (Janke would have liked that if there were any such thing anymore), new jobs and a whole year's worth of blathering on this thing, and for what? I feel I'm the worst mix of sentimental and jaded right now, and the only thing I can think to do is keep writing something until the important stuff comes out. Oh, sorry about the posted picture from the other day. I finally figured out how to do that stuff, and everybody else was posting pictures, so I had to join in. I've been generally quiet on the blog in recent days. To some of you I apologize for my absence, to others I apologize for not letting my absence linger just a bit longer. I've been trying to get some reading done in my days off. Robbie is leaving me tomorrow for his new house, and all will be quiet around here once again. Then we'll all wish I was so busy and distracted that I didn't blog for some weeks. For some reason, after I finished Ovid's Metamorpheses, I felt like 18th century British Lit, so I've been running around reading some George Herbert, John Donne, and some Alexander Pope. I found the quotation from the movie: "How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sun-shine of the spotless mind!
Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned;"
The movie is even more powerful after reading the poem from whence came its title. "Eloisa to Abelard" is the poem. Power with words - it's something we might know a little more about thanks to this thing. All this to say that I think of all that has transpired in the year since our lives all diverged from our collegiate path. I mean, things must have gone crazy if I had a girlfriend, even if it was for a short time. Years will keep coming, since nothing is more swift than time. I've been pondering the thought that if I could say something to that youthful me a year ago, what would it be, if anything. I actually do have an answer, but I can't say it here for fear of being misunderstood, maybe even by myself. Soon enough this, and that, will be the world forgot. I doubt any of you wish to be so grotesquely sentimental as me, but maybe some of you have been letting these annual'd days remind you... well, I guess I don't know what you have taken from our years together. Maybe this is all just a waste - a few fingers stuck in the dam that's holding back the waters of apathy - a place for the lonely and the verbose to pour out what little has been poured into them, maybe hoping that even a shadow of Crown would pass over us, and we would be healed. I don't know why this darkness seems so easy to type tonight. Summer's not yet here, I'm losing my last college roommate, I have to put in my two weeks at work the day after tomorrow... it's the deep breath before the plunge, and my lungs ache from the strain. Well, all that to say, I do miss you, probably all of you, even Kurbis, and the last year has been just that much more dim without you around. I guess feeling the darkness is as important as basking in the light. I'll leave you with one last quote from "Eloisa to Abelard."
"For thee the fates, severely kind, ordain
A cool suspense from pleasure and from pain;
Thy life a long dead calm of fixed repose;
No pulse that riots, and no blood that glows."
Hopefully not, for any of us. I guess I should welcome the next year with its pleasures and pains.