Spent the weekend reading The English Patient, Cat and Mouse and A Temple of Texts while Harry got sick and threw up and Zaid and Travis worked in the yard. It was lovely and relaxing (except for the throwing up part) and when I got back the city was waiting for me.

My parents got so frantic over the last week that they contacted about twenty hispanic-oriented organizations, and now they all want me to volunteer. I think I'll blow them all off and stick with Human Rights First, maybe tutor a bit on the side or do weekends for City Year. In any case, I'll be researching Melville and making clothes regularly, so it's all fine by me.

I have this overbearing feeling that with the right education I could really be something, could really be great, could become an intellectual permenantly, could live in my Bohemian paradise and revel in mismatched plates and dusty lampshades. Or I could become what my parents became. This fear more than anything drives me to experience everything I can, seize every opportunity, read everything in my path and write instead of sleeping, listen to music at traffic lights. I want to educate myself in the important things, keep myself inspired at all times, stay alive. Harry's parents did it and mine didn't, and they're still talking about books and writing plays and talking about technology that my parents don't know exists. I have to make it. I have to make something of myself.