this article just tears me up.

all of a sudden: I do know what it's like to pass winter in a old dormitory with one-pane-thick wooden windows overlooking the tennis courts with boston in the distance. It's cold and nobody's around and you wake up on a sunday morning and walk out the front door in your pajamas. that girl you like is in another dorm. there's someone walking outside barely awake to the dining hall with its chimney steaming of smoke. if you go, there will plates of leftover scrambled eggs and a scattering of people talking idly. it's too cold. there's a box of pizza lying empty on the desk, a videogame has been paused on the television overnight, a sweatshirt lying around on the couch over there. most everyone is asleep or absent.

maybe you decide to go into the city. the walk is twenty minutes, the trolley is fifteen minutes, the T is thirty-five minutes into harvard square.

four years you later you keenly and always understand that your recollection is only yours, because for those who stayed in that city the overlay of people and encounters dilutes every human presence on every street corner. the most recent inscriptions of a palimpsest are the most visible.

there were still: the forbidden, the hidden, the mystical, promises of this, this, this. once you found a medium format negative lying in a book, ran to develop a print. some soldier standing. when was this from? who was this? that experience was a convenient metaphor epitomizing this, this; there's more, it'll happen, there's stuff to find. there are few rankings. are you interested? are you fascinated? life becomes permeated with deliberation, careful examination. what is this? what is that?

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what's more valuable -- heterogeneity that comes from seeking after obscurity for the sake of being different, a reliance upon an external definition of a norm ---- or being comfortable with (or deliberately comfortably oblivious to) the relatively mundane, normal, slightly interesting, believing in the myth of an untouched presence unaffected even by that which one usually wishes to rebel against, and so therefore not rebelling for the sake of rebelling manifests itself as a hope for independence that may or may not align itself (hume's word is "conform", I say co-incide) with a complacent attitude of embracing the norm?

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cuuuunctation.