Past few days, last few days

Wow. I'm at the end of my first half of college.

Well, I have one more paper first, but then it's over.

These past few days, in review:

The poetry reading went well. I didn't stammer or cry or self destruct or anything (which never happens, but I always worry that it will). The thing about writing poetry is that it comes from a really personal place. That is, you reach down into the depths of your souls and pull out the best and worst things about yourself and then, for cathartic purposes, write a poem about it. When you share it with your peers it's really odd; on the one hand, you're bearing your soul and letting them see a part of you that you rarely show. And then in direct contrast to that, you never speak of what was read again. For example, I read a pretty sad poem about losing someone. Only two people in the room knew the story behind the poem (the professor and a friend of mine). The prof gave me a nod when I was done and my friend patted my shoulder- but we haven't spoken about it since. The same thing happened when my friend read his stuff (he's a talented writer); one of them was about family. It was a beautiful poem and the central part of it was something that I've never heard him talk about before or since. But I suppose that's really the point of writing poetry- the work says it all so that you don't have to. I told him I liked it; he said thank you, it had been on his mind for a while. The same went for everyone who read- we got a glimpse of something very real and personal to them through the lens of their poetry before they packed it up and put it back down in the depths of their souls. Poetry is catharsis. It's cool.
Wow, that was a long aside. Now that I'm pretty much done I'm worrying about goodbye gifts/cards/letters to people. They've been my projects of late. I really should start packing up my room, as it's not really mine. I'm not too attached to the space like I was last year, but I finally found a setup that I like and I hate to take it down. Although that really shouldn't bug me, given that college students live in a sort of perpetual transition. Casey and I were saying the other day how we don't really feel at home (in terms of being in a room, not the people we're with) anywhere anymore. We were uprooted from what was always home (e.g. our parents' houses) when we moved to school, and even though we go back there periodically it isn't really ours anymore. But the dorms are definitely not ours. We signed a lease yesterday for our apartment next year, but even that is with the understanding that we leave again 11 months later. Even after we graduate we're going to be moving around a lot- we'll have internships or volunteer posts or odd jobs- and we'll scramble around until we figure what we want to do with our lives, and once we establish that we have to find a job or get a degree, and then once we're all set we finally get a job. We won't really settle down and have a permanent home until we have our own families. It's a really odd thing to think about- I'll always have a roof over my head and a place that I call home, but it's not really my home. That notion is a little depressing and pretty liberating at the same time.