By all rights I should either be asleep or trying to sleep right now. I’m getting up at 3:40 AM so that I can get to Milwaukee in time for my 7 AM flight to DC tomorrow. I tried to sleep for what felt like a long time (but, now looking at a clock, I realize was only a half hour). I’m awake because there’s a thunderstorm off in the distance enticing my consciousness and because I have a flight tomorrow and I always get a little anxious before travel.

But the real reason I’m awake is because this trip feels especially important. You see, this, by some metrics, is the last night of what was. And tomorrow is the first day of what will be. Having graduated from college, I haven chosen a city (or really a district) to make my home. I came back to Wisconsin and lallygagged about for a month, spending time with my family and sleeping as much as possible. But that’s all over. Schooling for me is really over. It was technically over a month ago, but not until tomorrow will I begin the real search for a job, a place to live, and a life to have.

I feel as though I’m off to “suck the marrow”. I’m off to carpe diem and noctem and all the other times of the day. I’m not sure that this is because I want to be doing these big, poetic things, but more because I have to. Forward motion is all I’ve got.

Recently, I’ve found myself slightly nostalgic for days when I was younger and the things I faced were a bit simpler. I’m not nostalgic for these times because I really wish to be younger, but because I never realized that I was, say, 12, and that my world was composed of 12 year-old things. I lacked awareness. I wish I could go back not so as to be 12 again, but to be 12 and know that I am 12.

So that is my resolution. To remember that there will come a day when I will look back at 22 and this flight to DC and think, “Wow, I had so much in front of me then. I had so many opportunities and ways that I could engage the world because I was 22 that I can no longer access. I can no longer befriend other 22 year-olds in the same way. That way of life and mode of conduct no longer suits my interests or experience. But it sure was great when I had it.”

I don’t want to miss anything. I don’t want to mess anything up. I don’t live in fear that I will, but I do live aware that I’ve only got one chance to do it right. The distance in my mind between the realm of possibility, those paths that I could take, and the realm of actuality, the choices that I did make, are so far apart that I often forget actuality exists. I find myself riding up and down my sister’s driveway with my niece and nephew, a possibility at the forefront of my thoughts whenever I’m in Madison, and have to remind myself that this possibility is actually happening and that is exactly what I want to be doing with my time. Make possibilities actual always seems like something I can do tomorrow. I forget that possibilities are happening all the time.

I put the below quote in my high school year book, along with another silly quote by Douglas Adams about deadlines and missing them. It was true then because I was leaving high school and home in a big way, off to the state of Maine and a college of my choosing. But high school was never all that emotionally significant to me. High school was simply a part of life, whereas Bowdoin was a path less traveled; it was a choice. I’m sure the quote will feel true again one day, maybe before I go to off to grad school or law school. Before I have get married or have kids or change careers or move to a new town. But it feels especially true today, in a way that I don’t think it’s felt like before and in a way I don’t think it will feel like again. And that is really exciting.

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” -Winston Churchill

I did a circle around campus on my way back to the Tower and I could feel Bowdoin slipping away. I’ve knew this was happening. It reminded me of taking baths when I was young. At the end of a bath, I would open the drain and watch the slow drain of water. At first the loss of water from the tub was almost imperceptible except for the soft grown of the water down the pipe (freshman year). Eventually, I started to notice the water level depreciate slowly, uncovering my knees and shoulders (sophomore year). I would always pay careful attention to watch the little typhoon that formed, swirling and spinning around as the water seemed to empty faster and faster (junior year). By the time the bath tub was almost empty, the water would slosh around much easier and the typhoon would grow bigger. In the final moments, there would be a rush of water and a big, heavy sigh from the pipe as the last rivulets escaped into the pipes below (senior year).

I felt like I could hear the beginnings of that big, heavy sigh as I walked around Bowdoin in the night and watched other students casually wander under irregularly placed lamps on the quad. The typhoon has disappeared and its all washing away.

Regardless of the depressing imagery, its hard not to feel a poignant loss coming on. College ending is more than just about losing contact with friends and finding a job in the “real world”. It’s about growing up and making a compact with oneself that, henceforth, every time you wake up you decide what your life is and what you’re doing and where you’re going and you have few people to blame for any shortcomings but yourself. It’s been very easy for me to ride high school and Bowdoin for meaning, not having to worry about ensuring my own success since I could use the institutions I accepted as my metric of achievement. But my greatest fear, beyond finding a job that I like, maintaining contact with my current friends, finding new friends, finding a place to live, so on and so forth, is creating my own compact, my own metric by which to judge myself and my choices.

It’s scary–terrifying really. Don’t worry about me though. I knew this, as I’m sure you know it. I’m just thinking out loud here. I would say that I’m going to go study some more, but I don’t think that’s going to happen quite yet. I’ll probably see if I can find someone to go for a walk with me, see if I can hear anymore of that impending big, heavy sigh.

I’ll let it speak for itself. It’s not perfect and I feel like I could have written a hundred different iterations of it, but it’s there. I hope you enjoy.

Second to last article for the year! I had a hard time getting this one out, mostly because sometimes I think the arguments I want to make are too obvious and perhaps too idealistic. I can’t imagine anyone thinking about the Supreme Court nomination process for more than a few minutes and not reaching, or at least considering, some of the conclusions that I make here. (This might just be the limits of my own imagination though.) I also don’t know that anyone, including myself to some extent, takes my criticisms seriously or thinks there is a real way to reform the process. This makes me hesitate whether it’s even worth talking about.

I have one last article two weeks from now and it should be a whopper. I’ve been thinking about it abstractly for a couple of months now, and my editor has given me some extra space so the article will be longer than anything else I’ve written. I’m very proud of the fact that I think if one were to take everything I’ve written so far this year, there would be a common thread to it all. That is to say, I’ve been relatively consistent in my criticisms and worries and I’ve applied somewhat of the same philosophy to a number of different topics. My goal in my final piece is to articulate to some extent what that broader theory or philosophy is.

I want to keep it more interesting or relevant than a boring “Treatise on Government”, but I also feel like this is a great opportunity for me to try and articulate my larger criticisms of the way things work right now. Since one of my big complaints is that arguments and conversations stay way too surface and never delve into the deep questions that we face as a society when it comes to our government, this is an ideal opportunity to do just that.

That being said, it’s going to be tough to write. I really have been thinking about it for months and know mostly what I want to say. But as I’ve discovered over the course of the school year, the hard part for me is not knowing what to say but how best to say it. My writing, I think, has improved leaps and bounds in the context of writing an op-ed and probably in other ways too since I started this process. But I know that sometimes how you say something is a lot more important, or at least equally important, to what you are saying. So the important moments in my next two weeks will be devoted to finding the “right” way to say this all.

I’m really excited though, .

I’m worried about this one. Mostly because I go to a school that has a polar bear floating on a lone piece of ice in the middle of an ocean on it’s front website this week. I had to rewrite this piece more significantly than I have most of the stuff I’ve done this year. I’ve probably said this before, but I always wish that everyone could read the shitty first draft followed by the final draft. Then, if they weren’t impressed with my final, they still might be impressed at how far it came along.

I’m really worried that this piece is going to get misconstrued by those that read it. My writing is not nearly as good as my thinking (in most things) and, while I feel confident that I could sit down any rational person and get them to either agree or acknowledge the point that I’m making, I fear those that will read “skeptical of global warming” and want to call me a right wing looney.

In case it’s not obvious, I was trying to simply raise the point that most of us have pretty firm beliefs about global warming yet I don’t think most of us have really done the research on the issue. This goes for skeptics and proponents of global warming alike. And then I want to argue that that is bad because we should be scientific, and not political, about scientific questions. I hope that comes through. Let me know what you think (or if you disagree with me).

I had a moment this week where I remembered that the way to be a better writer is to write a lot. Usually, I stress a little bit about what I’m going to write about, and most of the time I’m not totally happy with what I settle on. I think that’s mostly because I have no clear sense of what is interesting for other people to read (i.e. my student body) and receive almost no feedback, so it’s impossible for me to tell if I’m making any dent whatsoever.

This week’s article was inspired by the TIME article that I mention in my article. If you actually go and read the TIME article, you might find some similarities between what they said and what I had to say. It’s hard, especially when there is so much political commentary out there, to make your work something other than derivative. I do better with that some weeks than others. What I did try and do, and what Mark Thompson of TIME did not, was convince someone more conservative that reducing military spending was okay. I find I’d much rather convince someone that would usually be unconvinced to move five feet than convince those sympathetic to me to move a mile. If anyone of a conservative bent read my piece and though, “Hey, maybe not a horrible idea,” then I think I win.

http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/article.php?date=2010-02-19&section=2&id=6

For supplemental and related reading, you might be interested in:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/opinion/21bayh.html?pagewanted=1&hp

It’s by Senator Bayh from Indiana who recently announced his retirement because of partisanship in Congress.

I started a new book!

http://www.amazon.com/Missing-Peace-Inside-Story-Middle/dp/0374529809/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266766172&sr=8-1

I was attempting to read a book a week which has utterly failed, but I have a least started the sort of thing that I want to be reading. I blame the Olympics. I’ve watched A LOT of Olympics over the last week. Well worth it though.

http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/article.php?date=2010-02-05&section=2&id=2

Once again, I wish earlier drafts of the article were posted right along side the final draft (along with perhaps all of the various articles and books that I read doing research) so that, regardless of the final product, I seemed very determined if not actually articulate.

Benefit of the Doubt is the title of my column. What it lacks in creativity I think it makes up for in sincerity. The one thing I am really happy with is that, besides one other article on politics for the week, I’m the only person writing about something substantive rather than just the weekly horse race of which party is up and down and why things are that way. I don’t know what I’ll be writing about in two weeks yet, but my classes are finally settled so that I can focus on some extra-curricular reading. Au revoir!

I have a radio show again this semester! There was a bit of a scheduling snafu so we only have an hour (rather than an hour and a half like last semester) and the time is a little inconvenient, but all is well. Lindsey and I will be hosting “The Patchwork Philharmonic” every Monday from 1-2 PM EST. The format and content should be about the same.

Also, I’m writing again for the Orient this semester. My first article will be out this Friday. I also have an actual column now. All that really means is that I get to name the column (and the column name appears every time I write) and I get my picture printed at the top of my column. It’s a minor thing to be a columnist (rather than a contributor, which is what I was before) but it will help, I think, give my column a little continuity for readers and give my opinions a bit more status perhaps. I have a big piece of paper on my door with a whole bunch of potential column titles that I’m still trying to select from/add to.

I’ll be writing bi-weekly again. I’m pretty excited about this week’s column, but I haven’t actually written it yet, so I’m going to go do that now. Typically, I write so that a solid first draft exists by either Sunday or Monday night during a week that I’m writing. Then I send it over to my editor and we edit it together. (In general, my ideas are a lot stronger than my writing, but I think my writing has gotten/is getting better.) I revise the edits we talked about, do some of my own editing, and then send the polished and final draft out Wednesday night by about 9 PM. The whole paper gets edited and put together Thursday night and printed so that most students read it at lunch on Friday. Just for a little FYI into the column writing process.

Anyway, off to writing and the second week of school. Hope everyone is doing well.