biannual posting?

ok, i'm bad at this. I have a journal somewhere which reads about the same as this 'weblog'. Someday, my autobiography will be printed on a post-card. The picture will have to be very big.

Ok, the Oberlin college reunion was freaking fantastic. Once again I'm reminded of what an amazing place it is, and how it really is something I'll carry around for the rest of my days. It's funny - I had anticipated much more schmoozing with people who I would otherwise never see (unless I actually took the subway to williamsburg - yuck). But really, the whole experience is much like college originally was - i wanted to spend time with the people who i deeply care about, rather than trying to find common ground with casual acquaintences. There was certainly some good conversation with people I knew in passing, and some good, clean drunken idiocy with complete strangers. But mainly, it was just nice to have so many good friends back together 'in context'.

The whole experience made me think alot about the relationship of place, time, and people. Any place that holds a profound feeling for a person isn't really just a place. It's a time and place together, and no matter how much we wish it would, simply visiting the place doesn't resurrect the time. It's still physically the same place, but your emotions belie any feeling of sameness. I've been back to Oberlin a handful of times since graduating, and that has always been my experience.

This time, on the other hand, there was time travel involved.

The combination of the physical place, the familiar faces of both good friends and anonymous classmates, and the abundance of unstructured, unemcumbered free time added up to more than the sum of the parts (I'm sure the beer also helped (whiskey counts as beer)). The similarities were especially remarkable to those classless times like orientation/disorientation and post-finals revelry.

Anyhow, my time travel was so significant, that I got a little bit lost. I sat down to mapquest my ass back home [can i get a 'boo-yeah' for the use of mapquest as a verb?], and it took me a good thirty seconds to remember my zip code and address in New York. It must be even more dramatic for folks, like the esteemed Half-Jew Leav-Dog, who are in a transition state and don't have a day-to-day mundanity (well-dug rut?) to enforce the current time and place.

Speaking of the current time and place, I promised myself that this morning would be spent learning about neurological disorders. Joy!

Anyways, I offer a hearty shout-out to all of you who were in Oberlin during the 1997-2001 era. Much love to those life-long friends who have shaped me and given me so much, both those present and those MIA. You know who you are.

-Neil

"the more diseases we cure, the fewer we have to learn about"