Wow, my last full day in Omaha until November. Finally the endless string of “lasts” is coming to an end, and I will actually be experiencing some “firsts” before the week is out. I apologize for my tardiness in updating this blog, but these last few days have been pretty hectic. I (+ mom) managed to get most of my stuff packed yesterday, but there are still a million little things to be taken care of before departure tomorrow afternoon. It hasn’t been that long since the last time I’ve moved, so you’d think that the packing would be fairly straightforward, or at least familiar, but such is not the case. At least when we moved to a new house I had some idea of what it would look like, but this time I’m sort of flying blind. I’ve never seen my dorm room, and I’m constantly concerned that I have too much stuff or too little. I suppose such confusion is typical among new students, but it certainly doesn’t do much for one’s sense of control.

Last night I hung out with Matt and Ed until about midnight. (Yes Ben was really out until midnight, unbelievable I know). We played tennis for a while and then watched Bowling for Columbine, which was certainly thought provoking. It was acerbic, unfair, and controversial, but it definitely raised some interesting questions and revealed some of the hypocrisy towards firearms in America. It was definitely not an objective documentary – it was clear Moore knew his position before he started out – but that doesn’t mean that some of what he said isn’t true. I agree with with a lot of what he had to say, and I agreed with it even before I saw the movie, so maybe I’m not the best person to judge, but seeing Charleton Heston claim that it was ethnic groups rather than guns that cause violence in the U.S. certaily revitalized my hatred towards the NRA.

I leave for Northfield tomorrow afternoon, and I move in to my dorm on Thursday, so I will try to post again sometime Thurs. afternoon assuming that my internet connection works right away. After that (starting on Friday) I’ll be incommunicado until next Tuesday or Wednesday because I’m going on a pre-frosh trip into Minneapolis. Hopefully whenever I post again I will have something new and interesting to discuss.

Well the last few days have been fairly interesting, at least on the scale by which I’ve been judging this summer. Yesterday evening I went and played tennis for a while with Matt and Ed, which was a lot of fun. I’m utterly horrible at tennis, but I still managed to enjoy myself, and we even managed to win a few games against a couple of members of the Millard West JV team. They beat us badly overall, but I still left with a warm fuzzy feeling. After it got dark we hung out in the Millard West parking lot and discussed politics until 10:15. Definitely not a traditional evening for me, but it was certainly fun.

Today the three of us (Matt, Ed, and myself) made an appearance at Political Roundtable. I was amazed at how many people that were there (around 20). It appears the club most definately did not shrink dramatically when our class left. Of course, the topic, homosexual marriage, ranks pretty high on the scale-o-controversy, so that might have boosted attendance. It was a little strange being back at Millard West – it still feels so familiar even though I’ve graduated– but it was really nice to have a chance to see Mr. Heys and all the other people at PR again.

I was at UNO today for a cello lesson, which isn’t anything new, but this time the campus wasn’t empty like it was for most of the summer. Classes started there yesterday, and teh campus was full of people. It was a little bizarre being there with so many students running around at the beginning of a new year. I felt very out place without a backpack or a class-schedule or anything else to mark me as a student. It seems so clear to me that the new year has started, but I’m still stuck in summer vactation. It’s become sort of a temporal dead-zone in between one world and another. Many of my friends have left, and it’s clear that my high school life is over, but I haven’t yet begun college. Maybe I’ll change my tune once I actually have to start doing the work associated with higher education, but for yhe moment I’m just anxious to get out of the house.

On the other hand, it was really kind of neat to see all the students and faculty and staff at UNO going about there lives. Seeing everyone walking around with there own individual agenda makes the campus such a vibrant place. I noticed the same sort thing when I was in Washington D.C. earlier this summer. The sidewalk culture of the downtown area made the city seem so much more alive than the car-happy suburbs. Maybe I’m just seeing profundity everywhere these days, but the interaction I saw in D.C. or at UNO seemed so much more human than that which takes place in the in the sprawl of new development. UNO is a strange place to come to such a realization, since I’ve been there so many times, but I have a slightly different perspective on things (especially colleges) at this point.