time and again it amazes me how very little it takes to change my mood - even my very outlook on life. transient as i am, a little change almost always does me good.

lani and i decided to rearrange our dorm room. we'd talked about it before and now i wished we'd done it sooner, but i guess it was only yesterday that everything - our feelings, the logistics of it - came together and felt right. now the back room is our personal study area in addition to sleeping quarters, and though desks, beds, drawers and shelves are crammed into probably the smallest physically possible space, for the first time since i've been at school my room feels like my room. freshman year i lived with a lunatic, last semester our room became for all intents and purposes a lobby, but this is what i imagined a dorm room to be like. small, homey, friends sitting on random pieces of furniture eating pizza and talking about nothing. now that my room feels like a place to escape to and not from, i think i will feel a whole lot better.

then again, it doesn't make me like this stupid fucking school any more. but i suppose i will make the best of all that. the fortunate side-effects of this new living situation include incentives to study harder and keep cleaner -- and i really have no idea how i thought that related to liking this hellhole better, but maybe it can keep me focused on other things. nothing is going to make marietta a better school but i can be better, and if marietta can't help me get into grad school i can do it myself.

speaking of grad school, the future... lani's daydream, how much do i want that! (aside: when she told me about it, it was something like: '...and one of us was pregnant, and there was a kid running around--' me: 'that must have been you.' ;) obsessed with the future as i am, i want to do a little fantasizing of my own...

i've got the netherlands for study abroad. the summer after my junior year i'd like to do an internship in washington, dc. senior year we'll have an apartment in the new dorms, hopefully. that summer, i'm completely up for a cross-country road trip, with potential stops in lexington, ky and colorado. :) grad school immediately out of college and ohio state is my only real option, as its the one women's studies program in the state and i think i'll still want to be in ohio. josh and lani have been toying with the idea of osu as well and i can't tell you how wonderful it would be to live with them in columbus.

that's where my certainty ends. i'd like to earn my masters full-time, but osu doesn't offer a phd program and i think i'd hate to move on so soon. so after my masters i'll probably work in columbus for a few years in some governmental or advocacy capacity. i hope i don't become too invested in this job, though, because in a couple years i imagine josh, lani, our new friends and i will go our separate ways and i'll work toward my phd. i think a new england school would suit me well and if things work out i'll live somewhere in new england the rest of my life. by the time i'm 40 i'd like to think you could rightfully call me dr. lauren. i'll write and teach for a few years but i doubt i'll ever have tenure because that has to be second to my real dream...

the coffee house. we've entertained this fantastical notion of opening a cool little coffee house with books and open-mic nights since last semester. it seemed like a pipe dream for so long i think it's only recently dawned on us (us being, primarily, lani and i) that if we want it, this could easily be a reality. if and when it does happen i imagine it will be decades from now, after we've explored our individual dreams, accomplished separate goals, forged new and meaningful relationships, and in some cases had families. i see the coffee house as a new beginning at the end of my journey. and what makes it attainable is that i share lani's vision of it entirely: it's co-owned, it's personal, it's us and our respective loves and other friends and couples in and out, an intellectual society providing a service to the larger society, a new bloomsbury group. the providence group? (but we won't need an name and we won't need t-shirts.) though the scenario is real and tangible it is most certainly the height of idealism.

i will always aspire to providence and the coffeehouse, even if it becomes more and more abstract. sometimes i get hit with this overwhelming sense of dread, thinking oh no, i have less than ten good years left, then i have to be an adult and get a job and my life is over. i want to think - believe - that i have a lifetime of good years left, i will never be an adult, i will always be interested in what i'm doing, and i will always have something to look forward to. i want to learn forever, i want to be an academic. in my field, i want to push myself as far as i can go. i want to help people. i want to travel. i want to teach. and at the end of the day i want to serve a college sophomore a latte while grooving to my favorite tunes and discussing important things with my best friends.

i need to believe that is possible.