It's been a long, long time since I've written in this...I'm trying to think of a starting sentence, but every one that I come up with sounds rather dumb to me...

It's also been a long time since I've sat down and really thought about things. I'm sure you guys know how we can get so caught up in all the thousands of things that we do and not have time to really think about things. It feels like I've been in autopilot for a long long time, and I'm finally starting to take stock of where I am and where I'm going from here.

I just got back from the crew's spring break trip to South Carolina. It was awesome, but not really because we did a ton of stuff...pretty much every day for two weeks was wake up at six, row, eat, sleep, watch TV, row, eat, watch TV, sleep, repeat. We did visit a shooting range (which was mad sketch) and we set off fireworks on the beach, but besides those two diversions from the norm most of our days were much the same. It was nice after a hectic first half of the semester to switch to such a simple routine and be content with it.

Williams has been great. I couldn't imagine myself anywhere else. The classes are fun even though I'm getting abysmal grades, I'm slated to lead outdoor orientation trips for next year's freshmen, and I just applied to be a tour guide. I quit Symphonic Winds, to the indignation of Mr. D, but I still play in the Jazz Band as the 20th member of the standard 19-piece band (I double the second alto). I'm starting to enjoy crew a great deal; the freshman eight (eight people in a boat) has a lot of potential and I think we can do very well. Next week we finally begin our season, which I'm really excited for. Apparently, there's a tradition where crews bet their shirts on the outcome of a race. In other words, the winning crew gets the losing crew's shirts. If you manage to win, say, New England Championships, for example, you end up with about thirty or forty shirts from other crews. I think I've become a bit more antisocial. I love the people I live with, but I'm very attached to my room and I can spend hours and hours in it and be perfectly content. I guess that's a good thing to be able to do though.

I was planning on spending the summer in Williamstown working for this outdoor trips company in town. I was really excited about it, but...now that I think about it more and more, the more I realize that I want to go back home and see my family and see all of you guys again. I'm scared though...I think in my time at Williams I've been so absorbed in life here that I've ended up doing exactly what i told myself I wouldn't. I'm afraid I haven't been putting enough effort in to keeping touch with all of you, and I'm afraid that the Concord I come home too will be different than the one I left in September.

Lately I've been having vivid memories of experiences back home. I couldn't make it home for Evita, but hearing about it triggered a flood of memories of baking cookies in the pit (and subsequently shorting out the stage), marching down the aisles wearing a goofy hat for Barnum, the pre-tech-week ski trip that remains one of my favorite memories of all time, the glory that was West Side...and then I began to think of all the teachers I became close with at school, and all the lunch blocks that we'd sit in the courtyard and eat Sorrento's or New London's. The poker nights at Max's, the night we all got to the school at 4:30 AM to leave for Japan, the time we played Duck Duck Goose before our BC Calc exam...memories of being completely at home, completely in my element, completely content with absolutely everything. And I think that this is at least in part my failure as a person that all of these things that I very sincerely miss about home are becoming ever distant and are becoming...just memories, I guess. This will sound very corny, but I've become so wrapped up in what I've been doing that I've forgotten where I come from. I've forgotten the fact that even though I love the people I live with and interact with day by day here, they will probably never know me as well as all of you who grew up with me and have been with me through the good times and bad.

So here I am, midnight on April 3rd, 2007. I think about the ways I've changed. I'm a little tanner...a little more in shape. Much shorter hair (the varsity guys shaved it a day before spring break). I can now look at an organic molecule and tell you its IUPAC nomenclature. I could tell you about the history and politics of environmentalism in contemporary America. I can now arrange music satisfactorily. Chris Daniels told me over coffee one day that since nobody really knows you when you get to college, you can be surrounded by people you can call friends yet still be lonely. Yeah...maybe I'm a little lonelier, even though I have good friends here. I kick myself sometimes for not trying to keep in touch with you all. There are things that I wish I had done differently. There are things I'm not sure how to make better. There's ice I know I need to break.

I visited Mr. Atlas two months ago, and he said "Chris, you can never tell you've changed until someone tells you." I think I've changed, and even though nine times out of ten I'm sure I haven't, sometimes I'm afraid that I've changed for the worse. I don't really know why or in what ways, but sometimes I just feel that I'm doing something wrong, and I can't put my finger on it.

Most importantly, though, I miss you all very much. I hope that you'll all be home during the summer and Concord will feel like we never left.

Yesterday, our entry challenged an entry across the way to a capture the flag game. After we won we went on a victory lap through other peoples' common rooms.

I have all these stories from everything from serious debates with the resident football player about Soren Kierkegaard to ransacking the Frosh Quad entries for banners (we have a competition about who can hoard the most banners)...I can definitely get used to this, but I still get confused when I wake up in the morning and look around the six-sided room that I'm living in. It's strange to have to manage my own stuff all of the time. It's strange to have all these friends here that don't know me at all outside of our shared experiences here. It's hard for me to sleep; thus, the 2:30-in-the-morning entry.

Better get back to bed; my backpacking trip is tomorrow. Miss you all

So I'm sitting in the Dennett 3 common room chilling out with everyone. Laguna Beach is on in the background, and we've got couches and tables and bouncy balls and all sorts of stuff. Good times good times. Everything's going really well, the room's great, my entry is great, everyone here is really, really nice. Crazy. Awesome. We're about to leave for a class photo and meetings up the wazoo, but it should be cool. Miss you guys, hope things are going all right for all of you

This is what happens when you start selling supermarket products on the web. Read the reviews.

Tuscan Whole Milk

7/14/06

I'm sitting and squinting at the North Bridge. The sun's close to setting; it'll only be a while until it falls under the trees and out of my eyes. If you cross the street at the Monument Street parking lot and walk past the historical displays and the grave of unknown British soldiers, and you turn around until you're looking at the back of the North Bridge monument, you'll find me with Becky, leaning against the stone, watching men fish and a Hispanic family meandering across the bridge. It's the first time I've ever really stopped to look at the bridge, and I confess I had a...patriotic moment.

No, I didn't hear the echoes of the men and the shouts of the soldiers. I could not feel the hooves of 18th century cavalry around me. I didn't feel the fierce patriotism at the thought of my revolutionaries gunned down in a blaze of glory. Rather, I imagined the nervousness of the men as they ran up to their positions on the bridge, waiting for the British to come. I imagine them shaking at the thought that they might not live to see lunchtime. I wonder how many wished that they'd never answered the call and hoped desperately to go back home. Even though it may not be historically accurate, I imagine them quietly cleaning and loading their muskets in the morning fog that still rolls across Concord's fields and streams at dawn.

I imagined what would motivate someone with a family, a home, and whole lot else to lose to fight an army that hopelessly outclassed them, outmanned them, and outgunned them. Coming from a generation accustomed to annihilating entire armies and leveling cities with the click of a mouse and a tap of the keyboard, the thought of actual combat is still quite foreign.

I've seen the Iraq war on TV, all of us have. I've watched war movies, heck, I've even fired guns. Now, as I look at this bridge and I think about what happened here, I'm finally beginning to appreciate the gravity of what these minutemen faced.

I heard somewhere that the North Bridge was rebuilt several times and relocated. It's funny to think that here we are, admiring a spot of no real importance at all, when perhaps just a few meters away, out of sight and out of mind thanks to the impeccably restored bridge and the imposing monuments, lie stray musket bullets and the souls of long-forgotten soldiers.

This is going to be a rather short entry unfortunately; I am...exhausted.

So today was my 18th birthday, and for those of you who don't know, I haven't really celebrated my birthday for a long, long time. I went out to dinner with Becky, and imagine my surprise as we walk right past the counter of the Cheesecake Factory and I see a whole gaggle of my friends waiting for me. People made me cards, Dave and Bec made me a poster, and they even gave me pirate garb (we were going to see Pirates, but it fell through). And yes, the Cheesecake Factory people sung me happy birthday.

I'm not doing this justice at all, but...thank you, everyone, you made it quite a memorable birthday. Everyone who wished me happy birthday (including the 30 or so that used facebook to do it :-P), everyone who gave me a hug, everyone who sang for me at 2:30 in the morning, everyone who left nice messages on my phone...thanks. I won't forget it.

Now, it is time to go to bedddd....:-)

Okay so, like Laura, I confess I don't have much time/patience for this anymore. Work is going just fine, although, as I have described to some people, the field the archery range is set up on is waterlogged (it's next to the river), and we constantly have to trek into it to find arrows, and walking through it feels like walking through a vat of lukewarm lasagna. There are things growing in the water now, things that are alive and wriggle around, and on the places that we don't usually step there is this oily film that looks vaguely like solidified bacon grease.

Went to Symphony Hall today to hear the Boston Pops and Rockapella. Pretty sweet. Becky came along too, and, in case you weren't aware of it, I love her. So nyah. :-P

Now, to bed!

I only spoke to Abdirauf once during high school. It was at Salisbury Beach, and we needed an extra person for two-hand-touch football, and Abdirauf asked if he could play. We said yes, and he went on to practically win the game for us.

Rest in peace, I'm sorry I didn't get to know you better.

I went to get a haircut at the West Concord Barber Shop. It was the first time I had been there in a long time; since seventh grade or so, I had been going to a family friend's in Wayland to get my hair cut. As I walked in, my old barber, Dave, said hi. He has this talent of making it seem like he remembers everyone, no matter how long it's been or how different you look. It's sometimes unsettling, because he looks at you with familiar eyes but you can't for a second believe that he actually remembers you.

So I sat down, he wrapped the sheets around me, and went to work. After some snipping, he asks me, "so you've just graduated, huh?" I answer yes. He asks me where I'm going. Williams. What am I going to study. I don't know, maybe environmental science, maybe English, maybe economics. That's great. Silence.

"...What did you study in college?" He gives me a look, and as matter-of-factly as if he had said "physics" or "literature" or "political science," he replied, "cutting hair." Oops, misstep. I worked quickly to save myself, muttering "oh yeah, of course." Still focusing on his work while periodically poking my head left and right, he explained that he was one of the lucky ones, who knew what he wanted to do from a very early age. So right out of high school he went into barber school (there's a better name for it that I can't remember) and he'd been doing it ever since.

Silence. Snip snip, snip snip.

I looked at the things cluttering his stand. A framed certificate on the wall declared that David Hamelin was an accredited Master Barber by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Two pictures, which stood in the dusty corner behind the rack of scissors just like they had been five years ago, depicted a younger Dave, a woman who I assume is his mom, and another man. I always wondered who that guy was, but I never had the guts to ask. I watched Dave juggle knives, razors, and those buzzy hair-cutting things (love the word choice, Chris) in doggedly practiced, now routine movements.

I wondered how long Dave had been a barber. He was one of those old men that you hoped you could grow up to be like, instead of being an old fogey like many of us will turn out to be. You could tell that he had seen many years from the wisps of hair that remain and his wrinkled skin, but as you looked at him and you watched him work you knew that he never missed a beat, and never tired of the snip snip snipping that he'd been doing for God knows how long. I looked back at the photo of him in younger years, in the sharp grey suit and the million dollar smile. If you looked at this picture and you looked back at him, you would see that same young man.

I paid for my haircut, gave him a 4 dollar tip. "Thank you sir, have a good day," he said to me as I walked out the door. I should really be calling him sir, I think.

Well. Graduation's come and gone, and I have nothing to say. I'm an adult (?) I guess, but I don't feel any different. I'm now a high school graduate and I'm a full-blown college student (sort of), but I still wake up every day at seven and feel like I should be sitting in S-12 come 7:35.

Prom was excellent. Of course, there was the quintessential pre-prom restlessness and apprehension, but it turned out to be really, really fun. Went to Dave's afterwards, watched some Incredibles, and then went over to Max's to sleep, which was nice except for his cat kept trying to sleep on my face.

Had Becky over for a little bit afterwards and we sat and talked while wrapped in blankets (it was cold this morning!). That was...magical :-P After wandering around Concord for a while after that, going to a graduation party, I finally came home...the transition between loud and crazy suddenly to absolute silence and solitude (actually, my family just came home so I'm on the receiving end of a nagging to end all naggings) is very unsettling.

Things are really great these days. Of course, I feel a little lost now that school is over and that I have all of this time that I'm not sure how I want to spend, but thanks to certain people in my life things aren't as hackneyed as I was afraid they would be. Feeling very sleepy and...well, not emotional, but my mind's wandering a lot and feeling mildly needy. Oh well, I've got Spongebob, video games, music, and many good books to lose myself in.

Everything's going to be just fine :-)

Whoa...crazy night. The beach was pretty chill, except I was in kind of an unexplainable funk for some of it. It passed after I took several naps during the day, though.

Went to my last high school saxophone recital, played a fifteen minute concerto. I guess I played it pretty well (Dave: "Oh Chris that was so GOOD have my body"). Went back to Becky's with some people and we watched Kill Bill...good end-of-the-school-year movie :-P

After that, Becky drove me home, and it was nice. She's kind of a big deal to me ( = I love her)

Now, to bed for kickass graduation rehearsal tomorrow.

Current Status: Still Alive

I realized I hadn't updated for a while, and even though I don't really have too much to say besides countless professions of love for Becky, I felt like I had to write something. It's muy caliente right now. Ow ow.

Mmmm...pretty good day. Was very tired and everything, and I am thoroughly sick of rain, but life's been good to me these days. Starting to lose motivation like mad, and I'm rather incensed at a certain teacher for assigning us two papers and a test to study for over the weekend, and then suddenly springing a "oh haha omglol by the way you need a rough draft of your project due thursday." Great. Thanks.

Calling ma copine, and then going right to bed.

Two Marxism essays, four speeches, and finding the wavelength of a pitch produced by a recorder. Happy Mother's Day

So I just came back from running and I suspect that I pushed myself too hard (for a good mile or so I was convinced that I was being chased by bees)...I'm all wheezy and everything.

My last AP was today, and I have to admit I don't feel too much different now that it's done with. We've been telling ourselves "oh, you just wait, once [xyz] is done, things will be so chill" since about December. But we all know the truth; it hasn't happened yet, and even though there's less work these days, it's not the paradisiacal happy-go-luckiness that we wanted it to be. But you know...once you think of it, nobody ever really gets a break. You'll go to college and you'll have just as much work there (although hopefully more meaningful), and then once you get to senior year you apply to grad school or find a job or both. You go to grad school, you work even harder, you find someone, you start a family, you provide for your kids, you go to work everyday. It would seem that all the time in our life set aside for relaxation occurred between 0-14 years of age.

It's not necessarily a bad thing; disillusioned as we are with the idea of "work," thanks to school, it does keep us on track. I feel like all of us these days are feeling a little lost what with the end of the year coming up so fast, leaving us wondering where this year went. I'm wearing a fencing T-shirt Becky gave me for Christmas right now, and that seemed like ages ago. Sometimes, I think back to junior year and first semester senior year, when I was so busy that I didn't have time to think about things and I was forced to take things one step at a time instead of being overwhelmed by a barrage of things that, at that moment, I could do nothing about. These days, I come home and I often feel very empty...on one hand, it's nice to be done with all of that work, but on the other hand, it's strange to think that it gave each day direction, y'know?

But the truth is, here I am, and I've lost too much of my life already reminiscing about the past or worrying about the future. In the face of everything, good and bad, I have faith that things will turn out the way they should for all of us. I think most of you will agree with me that they have so far.

"Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side." -- Alison Krauss

"Chris, the ant is still in my room!"
"Okay Becky I'll get it out tomorrow"

:-P My girlfriend is awesome. And her hair looks great!

So yeah, BC calc was spiffy; got salted on the last essay, but I'm pretty sure I did well. Freeze-tag was awesome. Duck-duck-goose was similarly awesome; it was hilarious seeing Eisenstat dying to get picked but nobody ever picking him.

Watched Wallace and Grommit(t?) after school with Becky, which was hilarious! Went with her to drop Sam off at his guitar lesson (we made fun of her a lot :-P), had some sodas in West Concord, came home, watched Shaolin Soccer (awful dubbing)...worked on scholarship applications...and now I'm here.

Things are looking up :-) Or, rather, things are awesome. And looking to get better!

I was thinking back to all of those backpacking trips I've taken over the years. I remember leaving for all these trips and being so bummed out because I was leaving my friends and family behind for a week or two to go to some backwater location and walk around. I'd always leave with a bad attitude...but once I got there, I didn't have time to miss people or to think about the people back home. All your energy is focused on getting to where you have to go, making sure to stay dry and warm, not getting your ankles twisted, and making sure you had food everyday.

It's scary how fast the mind can change gears. One second you're caught up in schoolwork, grades, girls (or guys), college, whatever...and after only a day or two with a pack on your back and suddenly all you can think of is how much longer till the next campsite, or the packet of beef jerky that will serve as lunch, or the gatorade mix. And when you go to bed, you don't lie awake thinking about people you've left behind or the girl or the guy that's for all intents and purposes a world away. You're so exhausted that you fall asleep the second you hit the sack. And you never dream, too, which is really strange.

With the craziness these days and the uncertainty and the scariness...do I miss that feeling? Sort of. But I have a lot going for me right now, and it'd be a shame to leave it behind to go soul searching, hehe.

"Don't let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter"
--Oliver Goldsmith