5/18/05 10:30am It was two good days for Patrick McWilliams, and for the rest of us as well, when we followed up one afternoon's barbecue rib pilgrimage with a huge platter of sushi at the Philosophy Club party on the next. It was a beautiful day for Derek Weibel when we piled into the Civic to buy more Nerf guns, and foam darts flew hot and heavy in The Basin that evening. It was a fine and powerful day for Byron Almekinder as he muscled through to level 49 with Mike, side-by-side in the common room, circadian rhythms out the window and far too much attention paid to the blue experience bars at the bottom of their screens. It was a Forceful day for Patrick Battista, well, it will be I'm sure, when he and his fellow-nerds stand in line for hours to get decent seats for Revenge of the Sith. For Maria Muhlbauer when she completed the tri-minor, for Jason Begy during the voyage to Guelph, for Betta Wierchowski when she met the Fairy King, for the remainder of the denizens of a Frisch 2 long since departed; it's funny how pure chance can lend itself to any form of lasting community whatsoever. A lot has changed over the past four years, and a lot of the bonds in that old community have eroded or broken away completely, but I realized not too long ago that the core of my life here at Canisius, the folks to whom I've come home after all of my adventures, and the individuals who I'll think of most immediately when I look back on the whole picture have come right from that freshman year floor. It sort of makes me wonder what would have happened if Residence Life had sliced things up differently, if I wasn't thrown onto the "science floor" against my will, if I hadn't come in with the biology major at all, how things would have differed. I'm pretty sure that I would have been much less satisfied with the whole thing, and so I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm really glad that things worked out like they did. In the past few years I've been gone (slaving away in the theatre probably) more than I've been home, but that doesn't change the importance of what "home" meant to me at the end of the day. It's been a blessing, plain and simple.
This is the middle of Senior Week, which is theoretically allocated so that the people graduating from this school can just relax and hang out, think about everything Canisius has meant to them, and what have you. Our first move was to put all of our computers in the common room and play World of Warcraft for about sixty hours straight. We hit Byron's haunts in Central New York for a fantastic rib experience (and an unplanned jaunt to the Heluva Good cheese factory store), and I've also had the opportunity to curl up with Jenn and watch movies, argue, and the like. I've come to terms with the fact that most of this week has been decidedly un-epic, as I indicated earlier, and it's not really bothering me that much. It's all just sort of slipping away quietly, and frankly, I'm just grateful for every last second, epic or not. As tough as it's going to be to say goodbye, the last few weeks have been pervaded by the feeling that it's just about that time. Life goes on.

5/8/05 8:30pm I don't know if I can do justice to the last couple of weeks, at least in any sort of verbal or written form. As great as things are right now, I can't seem to shake the feeling that my college career is ending with a tremendous anticlimax, and that feeling horrifies me. For whatever reason, the rally and exaltation that characterized my completion of high school are nowhere to be found. The thing that drives me crazy is that a lot of the same ingredients are here: I've spent four years at a school that I've enjoyed and grown up in, I'm still surrounded by a great group of friends, I'm doing even better academically and in terms of my community involvement than I was then, and just like back then I've gotten some nifty awards and recognition for the work that I've done, and hell, I'm even taking the graduation speaker to the big senior dance, just like in high school. On the surface, then, it seems like I should feel the exact same way as I did four years ago. Somehow, though, I don't. I think part of it is that I'm a lot more burned out on school now than I was four years ago. I was having fun with my courses in high school right up to the bitter end, between Humanities wars with Chris Paynter and actually learning things from Mr. Petersen and Mr. Lutzy. As it is now, I really don't care about whatever it is that's been going on in my classes. It really doesn't bother me at all that I'm going to be graduating in two weeks, because I'm thoroughly convinced that it's time for me to get the hell out of here. I'm tired of what this school has to offer me. Things have run their course. At this point, I'm just counting down the days.
I guess the only real solution is to focus on the people who have made the last four years so incredible. In the next two weeks, I'm really going to have to make it my mission to both make myself more accessible and track down some of these people so I can let them know how much they've meant to me. Really, it's the only way it can end. If I don't let everyone know what they've done for me, then my time at Canisius really will go out with a whimper. I can't sit here and allow that to happen.

5/5/05 11:37pm Home from the best Pano's milkshake I've ever had; I feel extremely blessed and loved and happy. I'm going to miss this damn place.

4/23/05 8:35pm It's been a decent week. I actually made it to all of my classes, I stumbled back into the Little Theatre clubroom from time to time, I'm roughly on top of my work and all that, and school is just sort of panning out lazily. On Thursday night I reprised my role as light board programmer for Little Theatre. I had sworn that I wasn't going to lift a finger for this show, but I was sitting in the clubroom and Dan Lance Dan mentioned something about hanging this week and I automatically said, "Hey, I can help out." It was a pretty low-key session compared to most, though, and we were out of there in the one o'clock hour. For his part, Chris Szefler did some impromptu actor stuff on stage, which was both really high-quality and fun to watch. Dan was hopping up and down the ladder with lighting instruments, focusing like he had been born on a lighting grid. I took a swig from my Gatorade and realized that everything is going to be just fine next year. On Friday, I spent most of the day walking around campus and talking to people. I wandered in and out of offices, across the quad five or six times, had a series of little lunches with various friends, and to top it all off, I played football for half an hour or so with the "usual crowd." Despite my appalling physical deficiencies and general incompetence in sports, I threw a touchdown reception and managed to remember all of the rules of football, so I guess it was a sound victory. Lauren and Bill came over in the late afternoon, read through The Prophet while I played World of Warcraft, we talked for a bit and then hit the road for the Phi Sigma Tau induction dinner with the Philosophy Department, which lasted for four hours. Apparently, when you get a bunch of thinking people together in a room, you can have all sorts of great conversations, and when amazingly good food is thrown into the mix, everyone is that much more inclined to just hang out and haggle over everything from proving Hume's deathblow to causality to the capabilities of the new pope to what constitutes the essence of J.S. Bach to the goddamn core curriculum. I had a frustratingly good time, and spent most of it talking with Bill, Dr. Zeis, and Dr. Kelly, but there were other good conversations with basically everyone there. Dr. Zeis and I divided our desserts according to a "rational man's bargain," and half a slice of cheesecake was more than enough for me anyway, so it all worked out in the end. Exhausted after hours of dialogue (and an end-of-the-night exposition of all the world's problems with Owen and Dr. Forest), I went back to campus, buried myself in bed for like twenty minutes, and headed on over to the Lasertron Lock-In with Jenn. The following seven hours or so proceeded in a weird sort of delirious spiral, since my brain had already been fried by our frontal assault on the ills of capitalism, and further since I was surrounded by a lot of great people who were all out to have a great time. And we did... it was probably the best five bucks I ever spent. The laser tag stuff was fun for the most part, I got schooled by my girlfriend in various arcade driving games, the Basin denizens were into getting arcade tickets to win a Batman basketball, I was too out of it to play Mrs. Pac-Man correctly, everyone but me was drinking soda like no tomorrow, I had had enough after a few hours and retreated to a corner of the loud, bright, crowded main room, finding very little in the way of comfort or rest. By the time we got back to school, the sun was up and we were all completely gone, excepting that Jenn still had to plow through a more-than-full day of work with Event Staff and her RA program, so I crawled into bed with a little bit of guilt, but there wasn't a whole lot that I could do about it. It was a cold and dreary sort of day today, I've spent most of it at home, and I've just about had it as I sit here punching out this entry... meh. My big hope for this week is that it knocks the fire back into me, because I want to take this semester out with a pretty fierce bang.

4/19/05 8:26pm Things are back to normal here in Buffalo, I suppose, but I've come out of a twenty-five hundred mile haze only to find myself in the final weeks of my last semester at Canisius. Today marked the last chemistry lab that I will ever help to teach here, and hitting that realization was actually rougher than I anticipated. The people in the Canisius Chemistry Department have been really good to me over the last four years, and I'm sort of lamenting my departure from the "hard sciences," and especially the distance from it all that I'll begin to experience next year. Life is tough. Meanwhile, professors are talking about final exams, club elections and award ceremonies are on the horizon, and it's all starting to slip away that much faster. I took the news that Jenn had been chosen as the commencement speaker (over and against me, mind you) with a combination of pride, excitement, and disappointment, but I've been able to joke about it with just about everyone who knew about the process, so everything's good in that department. With that last detail, graduation has begun to come into focus, we put up club officer nomination posters in the Little Theatre clubroom today, the lacrosse sticks and beach blankets were out in the quad in full force this afternoon, and I got another ridiculous grade back in my ethics class, lending further support to the idea that it's just about time to get the heck out of here. This past weekend was really great; I went with Jenn down to New Jersey for Eli Baum's wedding, which was something else. It was absolutely gorgeous outside that day, and the wedding took place in a garden... it was like something out of a movie. The reception was fun, too, I got to dance around and generally make a fool of myself, and the desserts were particularly well-played. That night, I went with my family down to Delaware to visit my aunt and uncle. Most of the trip was occupied with singing show tunes in the car, which is pretty much a mainstay of the Bard road trip experience. Jenn, in between comments about Philadelphia being the ugliest city in America, seemed to enjoy herself pretty thoroughly. She showed off her mad driving skills on the way back to Buffalo, and a good time was had by all. As things are now, I don't really want to do my work, the coming of facebook to my school has basically ripped my life apart, and on the whole, nobody here in The Basin is being really productive. Meh.

4/13/05 9:34pm I don't really know how to begin this one, other than by saying that I've made some pretty hefty decisions in the past couple of days, and that the process has been made all the more powerful by my thoughts during my time alone on (literally) the most important road in my life. Driving by myself (and especially without predictable music) for a really long time tends to puts me up against my own feelings... it's a dialectic, it's a duel. Most highway-inspired reflection, I think, is reasonably productive for me because I actually get time to myself to sit and think about what's important, to grumble over the stupid things that I've done recently, to smile about the good people in my life and the happier times in my past, and to really get a feel for how things are going overall. That all of this occurred on I-90 between Buffalo and Boston really magnified the whole experience; as I passed through my hometown, in between the cities of my relatives, over the Berkshires, past the I-495 interchange that carries us to the Cape every summer, from my present in Lake Erie's Queen City to my past in the Hudson Valley to my future in the cradle of the American Revolution, clear across the two states that are the nearest and dearest to my heart, it all came tumbling through my mind, an east-west torrent of memories and hopes and concerns and wishes. I understand my life, simply and personally, in geographic terms. This is a pretty important point, I think.
I was offered the chance of a lifetime by Weston Jesuit, in the form of a free master's degree and membership in a small, friendly community of people who would look out for me and thus enable me to move on in life with success. I was offered the chance of a lifetime by Harvard Divinity School, in the form of unrestricted access to a world-class education, complete with a world-class faculty and world-class libraries and world-class course offerings, along with the promise of opportunities with a breadth that I will probably never fully appreciate. It was, without question, the most difficult decision that I've ever had to make. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, had an opinion to share. Lord knows that I asked for them often enough. Everyone knew just exactly what I should do, and every answer seemed completely different, supported by different logic and different feelings and different values. I heard that taking out loans isn't so bad. I heard that taking out loans is "the dumbest f*&^ing thing" I could ever do. I was told that Weston would give me everything I need. I was told that, somehow, I "deserved" Harvard. They said that the course offerings were the most important thing. They said that the faculties were the most important thing. They said that financial aid was the most important thing. They told me to go on gut feeling, gut feeling, gut feeling. I was expected to "envision" myself somewhere, here, there, anywhere. The choice that I needed to make was going to hit me, sooner or later.
It didn't. It was Dan Lance Dan's advice that I took, I think, in the end. For the past year or so, whenever Dan got annoyed with me, and wanted to get me out the door sooner, he would say, plainly, "Bard... just go to Harvard."
Would that it were that simple, but the simplicity of it is what drove me to just end the damn seventy-eight miles-an-hour dialectic. Maybe it was the pointlessness of it all, maybe the epic properties, the challenge of reaching the unreachable stars in Adrienne's profile, the call to something greater... I honestly have no idea. The point is that I'm doing it. I'm not going to think about it anymore. I jumped up on a stone barrier, skipped around, and spread my wings as I departed from Divinity Hall on a windy New England afternoon. I slammed back across two states, stopping only for my mom's chicken cacciatore, and collapsed as I rambled it all back to my girlfriend. I found what I was looking for, I suppose, on that road, on that real life "hubris highway." My life is going to keep on rolling like it always does, but something is different now. Everything just got a little more real.

4/9/05 3:52pm Spring, I think, has finally staggered aimlessly into Western New York. The conference in West Virginia went pretty well. I met a lot of interesting people, and it was good to feel like one of the "big kids." Seriously, I'm twenty-two years old, but it seems like there are ALWAYS bigger kids. I'm not really sure, however, if I really want to be "just like them" when I grow up. Biblical studies is a ton of fun. I would be pretty contented with splitting hairs in the Hebrew Bible for the next several decades, but I'm already starting to feel like there's something more that I need to do. Hopefully I'll be able to key into that during the next two years, wherever I end up spending them. So anyway, the conference was fun, there were a lot of really cool papers, I talked to and got pointers from a lot of good people, and my presentation seemed to be pretty well-received. I have a lot to work on in terms of the actual presentation (I talked too fast, I continuously used my one hand for emphasis where I didn't need emphasis, and other sutff like that), but really, it was all good. I tore out of Wheeling, grabbed lunch at a truck stop in West Virginia, and drove the four hours back to Buffalo through a sunny Western Pennsylvania afternoon listening to bad Pittsburgh classic rock. Back in Buffalo it was still a beautiful day, I brought a little bit of spring back to my wonderful girlfriend, we ordered Chinese, I tried to figure out whether or not I was going to use the conference discount to buy any Bible-type books this time around. I slept long last night, it's a gorgeous day outside, I'm going to do a little bit of cleaning (maybe) and laundry (definitely) and start reading this book so I can write a term paper in between Boston and New Jersey this week. Things ain't getting any easier.

4/5/05 12:29am I have roughly forty-eight hours (and dwindling) to transform my thirty-page thesis into a ten-page paper for what will literally be the oral presentation of my "career" thus far. I don't know how or why I left it to sit for this long, but this is pretty much crunch time. Yeah. Crunch time. If I survive the next two weeks, it will be a miracle. This is, finally and absolutely, the last gauntlet of my undergrad years. I have to reschedule an ethics examination to accommodate my trip to West Virginia at the end of the week, I have a term paper due for Dr. Wadkins next week (I still need to obtain and read an entire novel in order to complete it), meanwhile I still don't know how the hell I'm going to get to Boston and back between Monday and Tuesday of next week, for all contractual purposes I should be failed out of Dr. Kelly's ethics class due to excessive absence come next week, between the West Virginia and Boston trips... and by April 15th, Tax Day, I need to decide where I'm going to spend the next two years of my life, and it's going to be a thirty thousand dollar decision either way. To cap it all off, I'm driving to New Jersey and back next weekend for Eli Baum's wedding. I'm going to miss four straight days of classes, which is enough for me to seriously lose my bearing in three different courses, so I'll have no idea what the hell is going on when I come back. Really, when I look at it all together, it doesn't sound that bad. I will be able to handle all of it, I'm sure. I always have. This might have sounded like a paragraph of me bitching about what I need to do in the next two weeks, but really, I'm pretty much waxing nostalgic in light of the fact that this is the last time I will ever have to come through a little series like this at this institution, the Canisius College of Buffalo, NY. Really, academically speaking, there's very little that can impact me at this point. An A- here or a B+ there is barely going to impact my QPA, I've gotten into grad school, I've locked down the awards that I wanted, and that's really all there is to it.
In the meantime, there are the people who basically make my life worth living. I went home this weekend to see Adrienne and Jono's show, and the last Coleman show at Albany High. It's the end of an era, really. I took Jenn along for the ride, and I was really happy that I did. As much as we drive each other crazy, there are moments when I just look at her and start grinning like an idiot in love, I realize that we're on the same wavelength, and everything just falls into place. Seriously, introducing her to my grandparents and other assorted random friends and family, sharing my home and so many of my memories with her, and hearing so much reflection and reminiscence from her, all of it together... nothing, and I mean nothing, could have made me happier. Seriously. I digress. Zonk and Jenn went off in the rain in search of Schuman, Sarah Dunn got us to Gateway, the Seussical was incredible, Aunt Terri woke us up with cinnamon buns from you-know-where in Utica, Mr. O'Connell yelled "HARVARD!" at me in the AHS auditorium, I held her hand and looked down at my valley from the Helderberg Escarpment, and it was all exactly what the doctor ordered. Didn't bother much with class today, spent most of the day in The Basin, sat around remembering things with Byron and Maria and Derek and Bill this evening, got back on the ball (more or less) with correspondence, looked back at my "to do" list and turned a whiter shade of pale, Procol Harum-style. I dunno how I'm gonna handle all of this, exactly, but here goes nothing.

3/29/05 11:53pm Half an hour, twenty frames. People weren't meant to bowl that fast. Really, it all had the opposite effect from what I was looking for. I wanted to get out of this apartment, maybe even throw in some human contact for good measure. Bowling by yourself is no good. It might seem like a good idea, or even just a dramatic idea, but really, it's stupid, especially if you're not good at bowling. I smell like smoke, at least. I haven't come home smelling like smoke since maybe the days before the ban took effect and Gateway was abandoned. Life is weighing really heavily on me at the moment. Hopefully a quick trip across the state will knock some life into me and help me draw some inspiration from my roots. If that doesn't work, I might be really screwed.

3/20/05 1:46pm The curtain fell. The set was struck, the stage is black. I handled it better than I thought I would, though that was, admittedly, mostly thanks to a really great girl who remained with me when I needed her the most. The closing show was incredible. Everyone was on their game, the house was packed. My parents came out, with Jon and Adrienne and Aunt Linda and Paulie. There was a standing ovation. There was cannoli from heaven. There was Lyndsy Kron whipping the shop into ship shape, Dan Lance Dan stealing Hasheen and I away through the vom after the curtain call, there were hearty handshakes with a few good men and women who will carry this torch long after I'm gone, there was a family surrounding me, and I remembered, finally and absolutely, why I joined Little Theatre in the first place. I love to act. I love to work hard on something with my friends and have it turn into something incredible, something we can share with everyone else around us. I love to feel the heat of the lights, I love taking the audience to a different place and time, and I love coming off of that stage feeling great about what I've done. I'm going to miss this group pretty terribly. I think that that much, if anything, was clear last night. I couldn't have planned a better send-off. Everyone really came through, there was an army at strike, they broke for Scatergories, I hid in costume land for much of it, Jenn and I stole away and "hid" in a blue garbage bin for Manhunt, by about four in the morning things were getting sort of loopy, Hasheen the jaguar was on the prowl, The Blur betrayed locations, Zac flailed about, Jon Bard beat us to the Firth of Forth, and it was all dismantled as quickly as the platforms on the stage, I threw some chairs around in the Jenga Jam but everything felt different. I was tired. I am tired. It's been a great four years, a great fourteen productions, and the people that I've shared it all with have meant everything to me. I was preoccupied last night, though, and I couldn't shake the thoughts that have been rolling around in my head... this whole future thing is headed toward me in a big, big way. The sun might be setting on this Canisius story, but it's going to rise in Cambridge very soon. I want to go there and just excel. I want to hold on to some of my strongest relationships, and one in particular. It's going to be a challenge. I'm trying to find a way to make sense of it all, to plot out a safe course of action, but really, and maybe for the first time in my life, I have some pretty crucial decisions to make, and there are no easy answers. This Harvard stuff is killing me. The prospects of trying to maintain a long-distance relationship are killing me. Leaving all of the friends I've made in Buffalo will kill me. Hell, leaving Pano's and Wegman's and Mighty Taco is going to kill me. I hope I can find what I need to make this work. I really, really do. It's not every day that life pounces on you something spectacular in this fashion. It really isn't every day.

3/17/05 3:41pm Yesterday was pretty major. It seemed like the proverbial Luck o' the Irish was in our corner... Jenn called all excited about her winning the All-College Honors Program's Leadership award, which is pretty tremendous, and Billy called from Boston to let me know that he made it into the program and he's going to the Marshall Islands next year to teach and serve and basically have the time of his life. These two accomplishments are really amazing, and I'm nothing but proud and happy for two of my best friends. I, in turn, had my own good fortune to share with them: I've been accepted to Harvard Divinity School. This is pretty big for me, and it's been enough to take the foregone conclusion that I'm going to Weston Jesuit a few steps back and onto the table for consideration. I was prepared to enter into this deliberation. What I wasn't prepared for, however, was the immediate chorus of imperatives from virtually everyone with whom I shared the news: "DO IT!" was the resounding message of the day. Quite frankly, I don't know how any of this is going to turn out. There are so many factors playing into this, I don't even know where to begin. Suffice it to say that I will be going to school in Cambridge, Massachusetts next year. I have an obvious personal need to get Boston out of my system. I'm feeling a ton of pressure right now, though, and I'm not sure that it's such a good thing. I'm excited, make no mistake about it. This is a great time to be Bard. I was sort of waltzing outside of Lyons today with Steve, who was in a pretty giddy mood, and he exclaimed that it was a great time to be Steve. I told him simply, "Steve, I know what you mean." I guess the whole point of this is that good things are going on, both for me and for a lot of the people around me, and that I've got a pretty serious decision to make in the next couple of weeks. Here's hoping I hurl myself in the right direction when everything's said and done.

3/15/05 8:38pm I totally just sat down and read a handful of verses in Hebrew. I actually read them. I understood what was going on, I hit a verb and I was like, "damn, that's a Qal imperfect first person singular." I checked the verses that I translated, and they were correct. It felt good. It's like... I just remembered how great it feels to learn things. I love that feeling.

3/12/05 3:28pm Woke up not too long ago, I had planned on catching up on one thing or another this Saturday afternoon, but I apparently needed to catch up on sleep a lot more than I had realized. Alright, let's talk about this show. A lot of people have been buzzing about it, but seriously, this is the best and tightest Little Theatre Mainstage that I have ever been involved in, period. The acting is way the hell up there, we've got so many new and talented faces up on stage, the set came together despite scheduling setbacks and the need for some clever improvisations, the costumes are great, the lights were pulled together in the nick of time by our crack team, and it's all followed up with slamming receptions put together by Arts Promotion and, even more phenomenally, by our own Lindy Grugel. I can't imagine going out in a bigger way. I could gush, probably, for paragraphs about how excited I am about Little Theatre this year, about the new and amazing and enthusiastic and dynamic people that we've got in the club, about everything we've been able to build together, but I think I do more than enough of that on a regular basis, so I digress. Kudos especially to our producers, Lyndsy and Krystal, who effectively took the fire out from under my own rear end this semester, Aleigha for being such a damn tough-as-nails trooper when we needed one, The Blur, Kelly, Mike Vornehm, and the rest of the dedicated techies, Dan Lance Dan for being the leader that I wasn't, I mean, really, I could keep going, but I won't. Unlike Diegesis, this wasn't my show. This was our show in an important and powerful way, I feel blessed to have been a part of it as an actor and Light Knight, but as I remarked before the show yesterday, I am now absolutely confident that I can leave behind a fully autonomous "amoeba of theatre" at Canisius. I would even be so bold as to say that I'm going to leave this club in better shape than I found it, and that's really what's going to set my heart at ease when I graduate. The shows during this run, I think, are going to get tougher and tougher for me. Strike, I'm willing to wager, is going to tear me apart just as much as it's going to tear the set apart. It's definitely not going to be easy. Meanwhile back at the ranch, I leapt out of bed at two in the morning a few nights ago to inform Derek that I had just seen a spider, I was standing fully upright on the bedroom floor, he groggily flipped the lights on. There was definitely no spider to be found, and I reflected vaguely that "if anything with legs that isn't you gets in here, I will be really angry." A few seconds passed before Derek, with all the half-awake wit in the world, inquired about the status of a one-legged murderer crawling in the window to get me. We went back to sleep. After the show on Thursday night, a good measure of the gang hit Pano's, I got to sit with Tony and The Blur, chat it up with Betta, and it was a strawberry night in the worst way imaginable. The milkshake saw it coming before I did. My efforts to attend economics class this week were duly (and dually) thwarted by the time Friday morning rolled around, but I really didn't seem to mind. I'm vaguely on top of things now. This semester is going to keep rolling away from me, but weeks like this help me to realize that every second is still worthwhile. We've done good, I think.

3/10/05 1:45am Tuesday was one of those right vivid days... the kind of day that makes me feel good about everything I've been doing here. Woke up after a very full night's sleep, got myself kicked out into a bright, sunny day, blasted through Ethics, my mailbox held an acceptance letter from University of Chicago Divinity School on the way back home, I did a jig, threw on some khakis and and a nice shirt, danced some more, made myself two very grown-up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, bolted through the tunnels, personally invited Fr. Cooke to see our show, danced around a little more, helped teach the old chemistry lab amidst court intrigue in the Chemistry Department, inherited some Tropical Skittles, visited Jenn at work, hit the Deck with the classic group, danced around quite a bit more, then spent twelve hours in the theatre. So the first part of my day, a full day in every respect, was amazing. So too was the second part... we had half a run of the show, the director and a few others decided that the lights were not up to scratch, Hasheen, Ryan Hall, the Blur, and myself stepped up to the plate (with some initial intervention and diplomacy from Jess Marinelli) and re-plotted, re-hung, and re-programmed the whole darn thing. Our little party broke up around six in the morning, we hit Pano's for breakfast, I stumbled home at around seven and collapsed. Amazing day. Part of me had hoped that I wouldn't need to pull a kamikaze night in the theatre this time around, but the more I think about it, I'm really glad that I did it, you know, for old time's sake. This is pretty much my last show at Canisius. I'm going to curb my feelings on that subject right here and now, though, because it hasn't fully hit me yet. It will, I'm sure, sometime within the next week. We open in less than twenty-four hours, tonight's run was awesome, everything is in good shape, I've got everything locked down, got accepted to at least one grad school, I'm part of an awesome club, I've got a girlfriend who will surprise me with Gatorade in the lighting booth, and it's all putting a smile on my face. Time to break some legs for the last time on that there Marie Maday stage.

3/1/05 6:19pm Back way too late after teaching a chemistry lab, completely exhausted and irritated as a result. A conversation over a cup of Earl Grey this afternoon sent me spiraling into the future, which is a marvelous, exciting, and terrifying place. I can't even track all of the thoughts that my head is spinning with, but there's no time to think anyway. The next two weeks or so are going to be stacked with intensity... I can just feel it. Time to put the hammer to the anvil one more time, Fate's gonna kick us to our respective corners of the sky, and there ain't no getting off of this train we're on. I hope to God that the people I love will be waiting for me on the other side of all this.

2/27/05 3:46pm The sun is out in a powerful way today, and even though this grey, grey town is covered with snow and scorched by rock salt stains, there is a vibrant blue sky overhead, and that alone is enough to get me smiling. The past week or so, taken together, has been very much the same way... even with the passing of a good friend, and all of the sorrow attached to that experience, there has been an overarching and pervasive quality to the last several days that has never let me lose sight of the fact that life is full of joy and wonder and brilliance, and is altogether worth celebrating. The week began with one of the best days I've had in a long time. After doing a little bit of research, I kidnapped Jenn and we made a dash for Hamilton, Ontario, a city twice the size of Buffalo that is nestled beneath the Niagara Escarpment and around the toes of Lake Ontario. After a stop at the Royal Botanical Gardens, which jolted us out of our winter malaise for a brief moment, we headed into town, she pointed out Dundurn Castle and a bunch of other nifty little places that she'd been, we hiked along the escarpment overlooking the city for awhile, then went downtown and wandered in and out of a music store and a newsstand and an international food market and here, there, and everywhere... it was great. The high point, though, was when I surprised her by taking her to dinner at a jazz venue I had found -- the only live jazz in the city on that Monday night -- and we had the place completely to ourselves. During the breaks between sets, we chatted it up with the musicians, two extremely affable and talented Canadian fellows. The food was really good, and I was digging the bass, as usual. Moreover, I was grinning like an idiot the entire night. I digress. Thrown back into the grind, I found myself working to get everything done, helping to plan out memorial events for Mike, and drawing every blessing from the amazing family that I have in Little Theatre. The week was tough, but the support coming from the entire college community, and especially the club, was tremendous... I was nothing but proud to be a member of Little Theatre during this difficult time. The week ended, I fought back in Hebrew by preparing for the lesson pretty thoroughly and meticulously, had the simple pleasure of making dinner on Friday evening, lots of my friends and I got together and watched A Midsummer Night's Dream after the wake. Lindy baked cookies. Yesterday was a marathon, up early for the funeral, a bite to eat and time to talk with Mike's family and friends directly after, rehearsal in the afternoon, and a big club dinner and celebration in the evening. We played theatre games and ate pizza, seriously, for about three straight hours. I was pretty thoroughly happy the entire time, got to hang out with a lot of great people, and I'm confident that it's exactly what Mike would have wanted. Already pretty tired, I headed over to Palisano for this semester's FUSION game night, and a good time was had by all. Mike Suffoletto handed it to me in chess, I played a neat railroad game with Dan Lance Dan, DDR and Halo with Jenn, got knocked out of the Mario Kart tournament with ease, and got all up in Zac's grill for being a Twister fiend. By the end of the day, I was completely exhausted, and definitely too exhausted to watch Ghostwriter on tape, even though I appreciated the nostalgic value of witnessing the escapades of a neon "comma on crack." I woke up to a beautiful day today, went to brunch and rehearsal, then escaped the confines of Canisius and the indoor universe by taking a walk around Delaware Park with Jenn. Even though I'm exhausted (didn't get much sleep last night between the Ghostwriter party and having to get up early again), I am very, very happy with the way things are right now. In short, life is good.

2/22/05 3:36pm This is going to be a tough one. One of my good friends at Canisius and a fellow member of Little Theatre, Mike Neary, passed away this morning. I had to get the news to the club as quickly as possible, but when I got it together and sat down to type out an e-mail, the words just weren't coming. I didn't know how to phrase anything. There were a thousand things to say about the man, about how much he meant to us here, about how he found his home with our club, but none of it was coming together. All I could eke out was the memorial service information and some scattered comments about Little Theatre's tentative plans to honor his memory. Being the bearer of bad news is rough, but I'm glad that we all have a little bit of time to respond now, to come together and show the community and Mike's family how much he meant to us.
I personally can't believe it. Mike was a guy with a tremendously wry sense of humor, a guy who was always there to give everything he could at the tech calls, he jumped at the chance to perform during every Studio X, to showcase his talents, he was always quick with a joke or a clever comment in the clubroom, and above all, he was a great and loyal friend to everyone who took the time to know him. He was never one to step aside and let obstacles stand in his way. He wasn't the kind of guy who lets his limitations get the better of him. As a rule, Mike went above and beyond what was expected of him. He let his spirit carry him wherever his own legs couldn't. You could see it best when his eyes lit up on stage or at the punchline of a joke, but it showed through in everything that he did. We lost someone very valuable in Mike Neary... the hole that he's leaving in this community won't likely be sealed up for quite a long time.

2/19/05 11:10pm So I was in warm and sunny Brockport today for this year's regional College Bowl tournament, representing our school on a team consisting of two Little Theatre members and two College Republicans. Our nonpartisan task force was able to perform at a level that can be described as "lukewarm at best," but I had a pretty good time, and after all was said and done, I had a decent personal record. Highlights included Zac busting out Gilmore Girls and Dungeons and Dragons, me missing a question whose correct answer was "Albany, NY," all of us generally fumbling a lot of easy questions, and positively stomping rival Niagara. Really, beating Niagara was the one goal we set for our team, and since we satisfied that goal, I can rest easy tonight. Anyway, I've got a couple of days off from school, so tomorrow I'm taking a personal day to sleep in and get as much work out of the way as I can. Fortunately, my World of Warcraft free trial ended today, and I am not resubscribing until my thesis is rewritten and in a solid, presentable form. This should boost my productivity at least a little bit, but we're heading into production crunch for A Midsummer Night's Dream, so we'll see how long it lasts. In general, I'm identifying a need to get the hell back on the ball. I've been to two Economics classes out of the last eight, my reading habits are atrocious, Hebrew class feels like getting intellectually dragged behind a chariot around the walls of Troy almost every single week, and my two clubs are basically running away with themselves, right out from under my feet. I suppose that the last bit, however, is good news, and pretty much exactly what I wanted. It reminds me, though, of a line from Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped: "A soldier covers nae mair of the heather than his boot-soles." Translation? You can only be in one place at any given time, and, from a realistic standpoint, you have very little control over aspects of your life that you're not immediately attending to. I think one of my bigger struggles this semester will be to come to terms with that... I can't be everything to everybody at all times, so I'm going to take these next couple of months to not worry about much of anything and just be myself. That strategy hasn't failed me yet.

2/15/05 10:22pm It's sort of creepy to think that Uncle Sam is keeping close tabs on me, but it's also kind of reassuring -- I just got a brochure in the mail, apparently they want me to become a Navy Chaplain. Sure, they still want me in the Armed Forces, but now they've got me pegged as a religious individual. This can only be considered a step in the right direction.

2/15/05 12:02am Just got back from Hotel Rwanda at North Park (the theatre, incidentally, is exactly what I imagine the old Norma Jean Madison must have looked like; they don't present movies like they used to anymore). I really don't know how to respond. It's like... feeling Western upper-middle class Protestant white boy guilt is such an empty practice, it's completely pointless. Nothing hurts more than seeing how a proper person ought to act, than knowing the basic truths of human worth and dignity, than believing so fiercely in an abstraction like justice, and at the same time feeling so utterly and absolutely powerless, altogether unable to singlehandedly bring an end to the chaos, insanity, greed, the hatred in this world. I say "singlehandedly" because this is going to take something tremendous, a collective display of compassion and solidarity so staggering, so unprecedented... it seems ridiculous for me to even talk about it here. It seems ridiculous to think that I'm going to be able to do anything, to make any sort of impact at all. It seems vain to believe that I'm anywhere near cut out for the business of making the world a better place. Goddamnit. Here's to finding the will, the courage to stand up and act every day as an instrument of peace. Everything I learned in New York, the diametrically opposed schools of thought that I slammed down in my notebook during Chris Lee's fundamentalism class today, it's all echoing in my brain, I want to run, I want to medicate, I want to get out. Help me find the strength to stay and work.

2/12/05 5:49pm Alright, here's the deal. First up, I went to Boston this week, the good people at Weston Jesuit took me to dinner and put me up in a nifty house for a night and made me feel pretty extremely welcome. It was great to fly, it was great to get out of Buffalo, I got a way-too-expensive haircut at Logan Airport, I had a high-quality conversation about saving the world with some kids I had just met, two from California, one from Florida, one from Rhode Island, we talked about grassroots processes and power structures and trying to get things back on track in a post-postmodern world. I'm not altogether sure about Weston, though, now that everything's been said and done. There are a few pretty severe potential drawbacks, one of which being the possibility of the school picking up and moving to Newton in the next couple of years. I would transfer out, immediately. Another possible drawback is the severe Catholicism of the place... I might need a more nondenominational setting. I'm just not sure. I guess the bottom line is that wherever I end up, it's just going to be for two years. After that, I'll have some pretty large-scale decisions to make. Hrm.
Another point of business is that I'm three days into a ten day trial of World of Warcraft, and the game totally owns me. It doesn't even run very well on this computer, but MMORPGs are so damn endearing, I dunno. Probably for my own safety, I will not be continuing on after the ten days are up. Of course, I say that now.
So I went to the annual DiGamma dinner last night, at -The Buffalo Club-, rough equivalent to the Fort Orange Club if you're an Albany peep, as near as I can figure, although I haven't actually been inside the Fort Orange Club so I really don't know. Anyway, I wasn't all that thrilled. Mostly (and I will gladly go on the record for this) it was me sitting in the middle of a very loud, very warm room full of old white men drinking and fronting. It got to be so crazy at one point that I ducked out entirely, found a darker and more quiet room, listened to a great piano player, got him to play Autumn Leaves. The evening wasn't a total wash, of course; I got to wear a tuxedo, I got to see a lot of my friends all dolled up (including one very pretty lady), I got to drive on the Skyway and then on to Lackawanna (I'm not sure why I enjoyed this so much, but I did), and the food, while irritatingly under-portioned, was pretty good. Overall, though, the whole event left a not-so-great taste in my mouth. It was probably the taste of privilege.
One final note, I received word today that my thesis was approved by the regional conference of the Society of Biblical Literature, so in April I will indeed be giving a twenty-five minute talk about conditional and no-longer-conditional salvation in Third Isaiah. I am very excited and very terrified. Time to get to work on that, I guess.

2/2/05 2:08pm Not very much wind in my sails today; I have everything I need to accomplish all lined up, but none of it is clicking the way it needs to. I'm really in desperate need of an adventure. I need to kick some spice into the soup, I need to crack out of this not-caring-about-school-or-much-of-anything routine, I need to bust out the hang glider or something. I really honestly cannot wait for next week, because I get to fly (!) to Boston for a day, hopefully that'll shake it up a little bit. This is probably just an energy level thing; I'm sure I'll be fine come tomorrow.

1/31/05 12:35am I feel motivated to write something, but I don't feel motivated to write anything in particular. This past week blew by in a crazy way, I technically turned 22 on Monday, a bunch of my friends and family remembered me and made it quite good, I ate like a king, I was happy. Most of the rest of the week was dominated by a three-day headache, I have no idea where it came from, but it all but knocked me out of the picture on Wednesday. I dragged myself through to the weekend, went on the Kairos retreat, felt extremely loved, came home to the state of utter bedlam that I left my room and to-do list in at the end of last week. I've got a lot of cleaning and sorting to do on a lot of different fronts, but it's nothing I can't handle. Hit Mighty Taco just now with the amazing people who I allegedly live with, had a great time. Time to buckle down, I guess, and live the fourth.

1/22/05 1:40pm Wow, is it ever snowing out there. Buffalo is hilarious, in a particularly tragic kind of way. It's sort of in the Midwest, and it's sort of in the Northeast. Its economy is all but completely imploded. It's very, very cold. Very cold. When I was growing up in the Hudson Valley, it snowed a lot, it was cold, sure, but in Buffalo the whole winter precipitation phenomenon seems to be a little more crippling and hostile. Maybe it's because we're on the lake, maybe it's because being a melancholy victim of the universe is such a part of this region's contemporary milieu, maybe it's just something I observe that isn't here at all, but Buffalo winters are just particularly depressing for me. Combined with my mounting second-semester senior apathy, I don't see how this is going to be at all good for business. I really just want to curl up and hibernate, make some tea, play some videogames, and spend time with my friends. Indoors. Meh.

1/19/05 8:27pm Just wanted to take a quick time-out from diving back into Homeric Greek (didn't I swear I was sticking to koine?) to mention that I love my Little Theatre people to death. That was the most well-attended constitutionally-mandated-super-lame top-of-the-semester meeting ever. In any event, things are going well here; so-called "senioritis" has hit me like a ton of bricks, I responded by commencing a game of SNES Zelda with my wonderful girlfriend. I've never actually played through the game (having had to depend on Paul and Billy for my SNES action in my youth), so I'm looking forward to spending my semester in this way. My classes, thus far, have been pretty routinely droll, which is basically an indicator that I need to get the heck out of this school pretty soon. Hopefully Dr. Kelly's ethics class will heat up once we get into it... I've been exposed to almost everything on the syllabus earlier in my Canisius era, but he's a good guy, and ethics is one of my pet concerns (who has "right action" as a pet concern? I mean really), so it might not be so bad. Economics, once again, will be a hilarious way to spend my mornings, that is, when I end up going. Rounding out the trio of classes I've had so far was Dr. Wadkins' modern Christian history course, which I'm actually pretty excited about. My only fear right now in that department is that, as far as I can tell (and this is obviously based on me taking thirty seconds to judge everyone else in the room), I am the only one in the class for a reason other than needing to knock off an Area Studies credit. I was thoroughly amused and embarrassed when, in the first moments of the class, I was more or less identified to everyone as "that Religious Studies jackass who sits in the front row and answers all the questions when nobody else can or wants to," or "that jackass" for short. Maybe when I get to grad school, things will change a little bit. Anyway, I'm a happy camper, played in the snow this afternoon, have been getting a lot of random stuff done, and now I'm settling in for a good hour of Homer. Cheers.

1/17/05 3:26pm Turning to face the strange changes, my future is what's keeping me up at night, most of it got sorted out over a pool table in Schenectady, but none of it could have prepared me for the week in New York. I honestly didn't want to leave Gotham after all was said and done, but I had to roll it all away and pack it up tight (I only carried one backpack, after all), an afternoon train carried me up along the Hudson and back into the Matrix of my quasi-aristocratic existence. To think that I felt at home in Spanish Harlem. To think that I was able to pull up a chair to Dr. Martin Luther King's table of brotherhood and break bread. To think that I was welcomed with open arms by a community that has been wholly marginalized by the power structures in American society. To think that, for one moment, I felt like I could make some kind of tangible or meaningful difference in the world. I don't know what to make of all of it, but what I can say is that we live in a world of contrasts that most people are completely ignorant of. We've gotta repair the breach. I can't... nobody can do it alone. Having stolen back into my safe and happy world, we played RISK, Africa with the Moses Line won it for me, Schuman did his best Jim Morrison, the Ping Pong Sensei had his day once again, I vaulted back across the Empire State, hacked my computer onto the Canisius network, threw myself down on the line, and finally found a cause to dedicate myself to (albeit a maddening one). The semester fires up tomorrow, but I really don't care. I'm not in Buffalo for myself anymore. This one is dedicated to all of my people, near and far. This is the victory lap, my friends.