my middlebury education vs. bill and bonnie's house in middleburgh, ny

dare i say, synonymous?

i've read your letters from november 5th and 6th, a few times now. firstly, i shouldn't have said anything about your writing, or lack of writing recently, because if i can guess anything about writers, its that they can be incredibly sensitive about their writing and reluctant to face that silly thing called writers block. i think i have had writers block before. only with push ups. i got to a point in my life where i could do almost 80 pushups at once and i really started to scare myself before i would start. i thought it would be a big deal or something if i didn't hit at least seventy. but who really would have cared? its just that people began to put me up for contests and shit and it would make me nervous. but anyway, thats not really writers block, there is another word for that. but its a sad phenomenon that i try not to think about because its a little bit of what has really gone wrong with sports in our society. something id like to fight someday.

you know, it'd be interesting if you worked at burke, coached soccer and taught english or something. or photography. or pottery. i'd teach social studies and do stuff with the "community". i'm sidetracked, and i think its cause i have soooooooooooo much to say about this letter of yours and dont really know where to start.

i'll start with how it made me feel. first, happy to hear from you. second, enlightened by your observations of rural ny. third, releived that you were still able-bodied enough to write me letters at that point--not too cold, or shot, or something else that happens is scary in rural places like those.

and most of all---i was excited for you. you made me excited. i lived vicariously through your energy (that was really energy passed on to you by bonnie and bill and everyone in their movie, isnt that kinda cool to think about? how it really is the thoughts, the energy and love that people pass on to one another that sustains individuals and leads them to more sustaining ideas, people and places. oh...the spiritual side of emily qi wheeler)

and after transcribing your page entitled, NOTES, or actually during the entire reading of the page entitled NOTES, i kept being blown off my feet a little bit. is that even a phrase? i think i mean something else but you get it, the ground was shaking (not literally) just a little.

because, yes josh, i have in fact heard of some of those names you were spouting. malthus, pimentel, and best of all....james howard kunstler. in hubert language, what a crazy bastard! he swore like a sailor and offended nearly all of Dana Auditorium the night he came to speak. but his ideas! boy were they provacative. urban planning. democracy in buildings. nature band-aids! and his books seemed pretty interesting too. geography of nowhere and some other book that he was promoting that night. and behind all the profanity, he had a hopeful vision. and it was beautiful. it was about urban gardens and mass public transit. and like hubert, his bitterness toward the world seemed to be rooted in this insatiable desire to see the world be a better place. because not all of us can face up to the kind of shit that goes on these days. and our grandparents scoff at us for being so connected and taking the internet or granted. and the truth is that the world we live in, the globalized world of our generation, really takes a toll on our souls. the sheer scope of information that we have in our heads, and infinitely more that we have access to..alot of it is scary shit. and thus makes it difficult to process at times, difficult to untangle. and so we take periods in our lives to go a bit slower. to not make hasty decisions. to just experience for a while until we come to something. i am in that now i think. you are in that now too, to some extent, i think.

but in conclusion, let me review my three points and my thesis statement and try to have a witty las sentance so that you are struck by this blog post in a way that makes you think "emily is smart, emily deserves a positive reaction to this work" and then i can throw up on you if you say that because it will mean that its too late to save your soul from the institution.

alas, no. that is exactly what i came here to write about tonight. the letters josh, the re-confirmed something for me. and that had something to do with education and alot to do with you and how it might just be possible that so many of the facts and ideas that i was fed at middlebury college, are not unique to middlebury college, or unique to college at all. i thought about how if you really took this list that you wrote out for me and really pursued these people or these ideas until you felt satisfied with them, then you may have read nearly everything that i read in my college courses and gotten more out of them.

but in the end this is not meant to be an anti-college post, because as you saw me be so emotional about in the car that day, i am clearly not anti-college. but i just want you to know, and you do know this, but i can tell you again, that i am right behind you in all of this. i am excited for you. you are doing something that i never had the guts to do, nor the will. and eventually it became that i did not have the reason. and maybe you will also find that the reason to leave is no longer. and maybe that day came already. either way, i am excited to talk to you about all of this.

i will try my hardest to make it tomorrow. can we turn on the fire in the barn?

love,
me