Nananana Nananana HeyHeyHey Goodbye...

Wow. It's getting really difficult to stay calm.
We have just waved off three of 'the Clan' (with a 'C' as Ariel specified) and now it's just Nina and I left. She's leaving tomorrow morning and I'm leaving tonight at 6pm. There is something strange about this fact.
I remember Da telling me once [probably after the reunion] that there is no greater bond than one where you live with people. Though we've been living together for only four weeks, it is really hard to say goodbye. Amy was crying, Stephen singing, and Julie... she was just herself.
I wish I had something else to talk about, and I probably do, but all I can think about is the awesome times that we've had here and that I really don't want to leave - although I guess there's no point in holing up in an empty room filled with stripped mattresses and suitcases. I gotta think these things through sometimes.
*mental montage time*
Something that I've really realized though... today seems to be like saying goodbye to my closest friends in a one day period. I have had really great friends over the years who have left me [Heathy, Chels, Ka-chan, Kita...] and kept in touch, but there's always a span of time between leaving them. So now, on this huge day of saying goodbyes, I guess it's like recapping all of that. Hopefully with a stronger foundation.
I sound like a sappy girly teenager. And that's all I want to be.

Read more posts about my awesome Barnard pre-college experience.
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Loser

It's almost unfair.
I feel like my time here was full of awesomeness, a great group of new friends and artists, people who really understand me (and if they don't, it didn't matter because we got along anyway). Now so many people are talking about leaving and it is very depressing. So I just had to write one paragraph pertaining to how strange it will be not living with these girls [because now basically everyone but Stephen lives in our one room] and how horrid it will be to take classes in subjects that are unappealing, uninteresting.
That paragraph out of the way, I would much rather talk about our last few weeks here. We did soooo much stuff in the last week that it makes only sense to put it in bullet list form. And so, I go.

- Mister Softee frozen yogurt stands [and not the fake-y fruity 'fro-yo' but the REAL stuff]
- Getting lost and finding a Pokemon convention where the flea market was supposed to be
- Switching trains and stopping at Union Square where local people hawk their wares amongst huge department stores/boutiques
- Visiting a heavy metal paper store with long curly bearded men serving up delicate and elegant sheets from around the world
- Meeting many synaesthetic people [many]
- Times Square and the afternoon cluster, feet screaming out for rest, blacked from the dirt and earth below
- Halal and otherwise awesome hot dog stands
- Visiting The Strand and getting lost [ready to die] amongst the thousands upon thousands of volumes and volumes and volumes...
- Julie losing her wallet either to a mistake or pickpockets [I don't trust those people selling at the stand...]
- Walking around NY alone, hovering over the packages purchased on subways from afar
- Working on zines [yes! we learned how to make mini books in our fiction class! whoo final projects!] in a group of artistic/artistically challenged children
- Collage that didn't know what it was going to be until it became politicized and that was that
- The New Yorker expanding and retracting its Obama satire [conversely, Obama '08 pins for sale]
- Discussing religion in the wee hours of the morning
- More lessons [and games] on sex and drugs
- Gathering for a food-based poker night! [first time playing poker, whee!]
- Crazy sugar high Oreo bonanza that was done in 20 minutes - it's all over but the crying

And that's all I have to say for now [I know, you're cringing]. It gives me a hell of a lot of material for later though.

Read more posts about my awesome Barnard pre-college experience.
You may also be interested in reading about my life in NYC. 

I Love You

Heathy, you probably won't read this [until I tell you to on Facebook], but I love you. You made my day with your post about love and so I wanted to return the favor with a tribute post.
I really want to be a little more free. And that's sort of what I've been doing here - becoming more independent and free. Getting lost in the heat and squalor, the New York sunsets and the Globesonic dance music... Dancing till the break of dawn, laughing loudly and talking about awkward subjects, going to Dark Knight premieres and living with girls who are carefree and beautiful. I'm totally making it sound glorious, but it seems a lot like normalcy now. Like it's part of our lives. And I really don't want to leave.
I love this life. The ability to pick and choose and feel beautiful about myself in some reasonable manners. It tests me to be brave and also interesting. It makes my not-so-colorful life turn into something reasonably awesome.
So, I love you Heathy. I can't wait to see you because then I can share my adventures and love of life with you. I want to get to know myself and get out of senior year.
This is a short post, but at least I now have an inkling of consciousness to improve myself next year. [I sound so... transic. But it's not really that]

Read more posts about my awesome Barnard pre-college experience.
You may also be interested in reading more posts about my life in NYC.

Songs On Repeat

This place has gotten so comfortable that I'm playing music over and over again in my head and singing it out loud at random intervals. I think I've become slightly creepy.
I know that I always take the time to tout the merits of being here, but I've just realized that there is always something to do here - and to a person who has to be chronically busy, that's a good thing.
Anyway, enough about the merits of Barnard, I am going to write a series of Snapshots of New York in order to profess my happenings here in easily digestible bites. Yeah, that's my inner newscaster.
1. My all-time favorite. We were buying dresses at a local stand and there was a Muslim black woman speaking with a black man; she was outfitted in traditional garb but her voice was definitely characteristic of the American black person. They were discussing women's rights - peacefully! I always hear things about conflict between people: Christians don't understand Muslims, they are automatically targeting each other's faults, making everything seem horrible when it's just different... But they were just talking about how people don't understand that women choose to be under the hijab and that there is respect, not oppression, in that culture. It just made me smile and feel as if there is hope for the world.
2. When we were lost in Harlem (or Washington Heights - we got on a train and went uptown and I don't know from there) it was very scary and there were mobs of shady people and trash [a real 'experience' from a suburban girl who hasn't really met the inner-city (thank God for brown skin!)] However, amidst it all, as Amy and I were walking down we overheard a conversation with a guy and his daughter. He was telling her a story about autistic children and how they have problems; the girl was very small, and so she asked questions. He said that there were people in the world who just didn't give up on them and they improved: his last line was "Don't ever give up on anybody."
3. Walking around Time Square, there are throngs of people. Hawkers selling things on the street, vendors selling halal hot dogs and other tidbits for reasonable prices, Indian-run souvenir shops with long lines of tourists. I think that the bright lights get to you sometimes; you watch up and not down and that's where you get your purse stolen. But I think that the nightlife is what really appeals to me - a short subway ride away there is an all-night party and no one can stop it.
4. These same subway rides, every once in a while, produce something else entirely. From the most innocuous (such as a man singing gospel songs in order to gain a little spare cash) to the most saddening (a one-eyed beggar who could barely speak asking for donations), it is always a different ride. There were kids selling candy for a dollar each so that they could get some money; there were pierced people and cut people just laughing along as they rode downtown... Our friend even got trapped outside the train as we laughed and waited for him at the next stop. It really is a 'snapshot' to take any subway train.

Now that I've gone on way too long, I just wanted to note that there is something different everywhere you turn. No matter where you're going or what you're doing, it's the experience that you're living for - and there's an experience every minute.
We are going to jam-pack our last two weeks here.

Read more posts about my awesome Barnard pre-college experience.
You may also be interested in reading about what happened when I started attending Barnard for college. 

Taking A Moment...

I am going to take a moment to appreciate diversity among people at length [not just in the racial sense, but from what I've seen just living here].

I have met...
- A dark skinned Guiana girl who is of Indian descent with the last name 'Singh' (indicating Sikh) who is really Hindu but her family has a lot of inter-religious marriages and she is by far an American teenager living on Long Island and basically taking in the life that a lot of people have - suburban next to a city.
- A Taiwanese/German girl with no residency in China; thus, she hops from German soil to China in a 2, then 5 year movement - who speaks a few languages and is enrolled in an American style school in China and voices her opinions about life much more than the average young Chinese girl.
- A New Mexican (yes, a Hispanic race from that area when it belonged to Mexico) who appears very white but whose family speaks mostly Spanish and lives a life of accidents and interest in a land full of gangsters and farmers.
- A white boy from California who is conservative and sheltered, yet likes to write of worlds he has never seen (and probably will never see). A straight-laced Christian kid with a gate on his community who just cannot pick up the references.
- Myself.

Those are the five [yes, I include myself] people that I hang out with the most here. They all have distinct personalities and are wonderful to hang out with - we just clicked automatically and sometimes I hope that college works like this all the time. But we'll see later.

Read more posts about my awesome Barnard pre-college experience.
You may also be interested to read about what happened when I started college at Barnard. 

Somehow, Someway

I know.
Sometimes it's completely wonderful to spend a weekend away from yourself. Away from all the little opinion pieces floating around in your head, narrating your life as if you were some sort of child and needed to be directed at every turn. Eat this, don't touch that, be careful! Things aren't so much different when you're on your own and trying to make it.
So sometimes, even though it's not really advisable, there's a period of time when I don't really care about the tiny so-not-gonna-happen crushes, the crusades towards victory over psychology homework and scholarship work. I let it all go.
Now, don't believe I go all crazy and start jumping into fires or something stupid like that. I'm a "party girl" without the booze or the cheap thrills. I like staying up late at night and talking to my roommate about things that will never happen to me. Sharing stories that aren't really mine - they just bounce around in my head and I put them to paper (kind of like I am now). Somewhere, in the world of fiction, a girl who is the complete opposite of me can run free and take over me. Mind, body and soul.
Dia hasn't come back for a while, she hasn't littered my texts with her boy-crazy, overly-hot insanity, but she is always lurking there. At the edge of my mind where people wouldn't expect a girl like me to reside. The brink where people often jump off. The clouded forest. The silent grey trees.
Here is where I stand today: a more serious vacation than I'd planned, taking time from the world of letters making up my worth and people telling me that I'm not really there. I have to learn to be original, and sometimes... that just won't work out. And so here, where I'm forced to be whoever I need to be, I have chosen.
I like myself enough to keep things rolling. And, so it seems, other people do too.
P.S. I'm revising my thoughts on fiction classes; if they're done right, they're fantastic.

The Fourth

The Fourth of July is not really my favorite holiday. Mainly because we don't do much in our house to celebrate that type of thing. But this Fourth of July is even worse.
My debit card expired about a month ago (and apparently the new card came in but NO ONE TOLD ME). So now I have to hope and pray that it's going to come in with FedEx tomorrow so that I don't die [no meal plans on Sat. or Sun.]
New York is awesome. Being cashless is not.

Read more posts about my awesome Barnard pre-college experience.
You may also be interested in reading about what happened when I started attending Barnard for college. 

Pride

I have printed my first assignment, gone on my first excursion, attended my first production meeting, and done my first load of laundry at Barnard College! [mostly in one day]
I don't know why, but these little milestones like moving in and sleeping my first night with a roommate and working out in the Columbia fitness center just make me feel great. The little things make independence seem so alluring [though I probably won't be singing that tune when I've done this for more than a few weeks...]
Even just the fact that I am able to go wherever I want without anyone is wonderful. I am working now on a few photography projects for the Barnard Bulletin and I am ready to just explore the city without restraint. The excursion to Spamalot yesterday was extremely funny, but viewing the New York night life was the truly amazing part. The fact that there are so many different people makes you feel a lot of different ways - sometimes dangerous, sometimes included, sometimes lonely... I think that breaking the monotony of my summers is a trend that I really could get into.
On a side note, the Columbia campus is beautiful. Barnard is a wonderful place to live, but right now they ripped out their courtyard and are doing some crazy construction (which will be finished by the time I graduate and [hopefully] arrive here) so they are less glamorous than I saw last summer. Columbia, on the other hand, is a sprawling piece of green in the tall and cramped city (ex. the two-inch wide hallways of the supermarket). I have not yet been to the parks, such as Central and Bryant, but for now Columbia is my oasis of grandeur.
Anyway.
As you may have already noticed, I'm having a fantastic time here. Despite all the little challenges of being a 'freshman' [ex. not knowing where to buy a laundry card and having to run around worrying about the load of clothes you left in the machine...] there is so much reward in getting to be here.
Also, if I do become a freshman here, I will take those lessons wisely.

Read more posts about my awesome Barnard pre-college experience.
You may also be interested to read about what happened when I started college at Barnard.