My God.

I want to begin blogging with greater regularity. My graduate school applications are out and I'm (im)patiently waiting for decisions.

This blog has been an interesting and rewarding part of my life. It was about a year ago that I stopped writing regularly on it. My output was quite extensive for a while. Then I slowed down. I wanted to focus on applications, I began to doubt the seriousness of my thinking.

I feared that I would never go to school, that I was just some self-centered young man who liked to spin his pseudo-philosophical wheels.

Now that my applications are in I can rest a little bit more easily. I've taken the first step in becoming an academic, or a teacher, or some kind of professional thinker. I remain just some guy for the time being.

One of the strangest parts of the application process was dealing with the homelessness that I feel in the world. I don't know what it means to belong. I suppose I belong in my family, and I suppose I belong among some of my friends. But somehow I just always have this feeling of not belonging.

I once wrote a poem about how

I am not a stranger

How this is not a strange land.

Yet, I don't believe myself. I don't dwell very comfortably. I take great pleasure in feeling that feeling with clarity, though.

In applying to schools I certainly had this idea, this vague, barely conscious hope, that I would find a home in a university: that a group of people would greet me in a way I felt true to my heart.

This homelessness confounds me. I think I partly inherited it from my father. He partly inherited it from Nietzsche. I partly inherited it from Nietzsche.

I recently read Twilight of the Idols while my friend Jeremy was in town. Nietzsche is his major influence. One night we drank quite a lot of wine and were getting into the thick of talking about Nietzsche. My emotional response surprised me.

Even though I was the one doing most of the talking, I was experiencing the conversation more as a listener than a speaker. I had had enough to drink that words were flowing from me without hesitation.

I told Jeremy that I felt like I was reliving the trauma of Nietzsche: the trauma he felt in his own life, the trauma that he unleashed upon the world, the trauma of a world without meaning, the trauma of being responsible for creating my own values (not that I buy into the idea of value creation, anyways).

He is a serious challenge, one that I'm excited to be taking on.

I'll be posting here more regularly.