5/29/2002:

As graduation looms, I'm less concerned with things like "where will I live" or "what will I do." I'm worried about the transient nature of friendship. Just looking at the friends I've made just in this past year and remembering old friends from freshman year and before who I never see anymore (but we always plan to do lunch) gives me shivers that in the upcoming years my circle of college friends will contract, slowly, but surely.

It's so easy to say, "This time's different" - until you remember all the other people you said that too. For me, that's Mira and Helen. Helen and I try every so often to begin emailing again, always with an email saying, "We were doing so well for a while!" Mira and I were doing OK this summer, but then this year we drifted. That's what happens when you mainly discuss about romantic angst with a friend and then they fall in love.

Sil said that with true friends, you can just pick up right where you left off. It just takes trust that such reconnection is possible. Jason echoed those sentiments when he saw his two best friends from high school last weekend. Maybe I just need some trust.

For a while, I was trying to go out with people I'd always wanted to be better friends with, as if my actions in the last weeks of school would be a piton in the cracks of their memory. But if I were meant to have been friends with them, surely it would have happened earlier in school?

You'll go mad thinking of stuff like that.

Next year's comic strip or whatever writing project I'm doing will be thinking of stuff like that.

Don't think I'm all sad, really! In fact, I've been in a really good mood lately. As usual, don't want to talk about it, for fear of mucking up the whole business.

I finally got to tell my story last night! It went pretty well. It's a sad, poignant story and I followed a funny story and was followed by another funny story. But I think mixing it up was a good thing, as I think I made someone in the audience well up. I was just glad to tell a story that didn't have the usual structure of threes. If you want to read it, here's the text, transcribed from the Oxford World Treasury of Stories.

Art notes on the strip... at first I had just Kip and Sil talking, on an amorphous background of white, as is my usual. I was going to reuse the polyptych from a while ago, but then I decided to do a representation of our apartment instead.

With any luck, this'll be the last busy weekend of my college career. It's a doozy though.

See you in the middle of it.

kip