my door's always open, come anytime you want

this was supposed to be a post about how crazy academia makes me. i think it's hilarious; i'm not complaining. it took an hour and a half for this academic to establish that interracial friendships can be the site of important learning experiences. um, yeah. i can sum up the talk in a sentence: when you're friends with someone whose experience differs from yours, you can learn valuable things from them; in the context of race, you can learn things about racism and their experience of it in contrast to your own. now, how long did that take? 8.2 seconds?

whatever, i'm most upset by the fact that she has to write a book to convince academia of this. this is the part that bugs me - that academics need a damn book to explain that which is blindingly obvious. but then, i was never one for subtlety, so maybe i'm missing something.

(more specifically social sciences: "the technology of the self" and "matrix" are just some of the academic words that bug me. likewise the discussion of not neutering academia of emotion and having to make the argument that emotion can indeed have real value in an academic setting. like, duh. yet i can totally understand why supreme court justices need to argue about the right to burn the flag for pages and pages. whatever.)

anyway. i'd also like to say my spanish teacher can't pronounce "doubt" - she says it "douth", as though it rhymes with mouth. i have no idea why; otherwise her english is practically flawless. it's strange and somewhat jarring.

but now i'm all upset again about something else: i may not see jeana and carre for an entire year. i KNEW this already but it just re-hit me in a very literal way because in ONE MONTH it will be bacchanalia and my SECOND YEAR OF COLLEGE will be over. and if i go abroad and they go abroad like we're all planning to, i won't see them for SOOOOO LONG!!!!! a whole year!! and jeana, i'm not as worried, because we have a more solid friendship, we'll still be able to talk to each other over distance, and we'll be back senior year. carre i am just starting to really feel solid with and we need to be in one another's physical presence but instead we will be half a world apart and he is threatening to stay there forever. and i can't afford the damn airfare. so who knows when we'll both be at SLC again, if ever? a very scary, sad thought. how am i supposed to keep you in my life for the next ten years if our first two in close proximity didn't establish a solid friendship and we never live in the same place again? goddamnit i don't wanna lose this one, and even a year apart might do us in.