Wednesday January 4, 2006, today. So the past few weeks have consisted of reading books, playing frisbee, playing poker, and just hanging out with friends. All in all quite possibly the best Christmas break I have ever had, but you might have already known that from my previous posts in the break. Recently I finished "Gilead", a book I borrowed from Josh Lake. It was a great read, very moving and very nice. I also agreed with Josh that it was a good break from alot of the non-fiction I had been reading. Earlier this week on Monday I played ultimate and then poker with alot of guys. Both were fun, especially poker because I won some money haha. Anyway, been hanging out with friends playing video games and watching movies and all that good stuff. School starts tommorow which is kinda sad but it is an encouraging thought that this is the last semester. So, with school coming up and friends all around I would like to make an observation from "Gilead" that I thought was interesting.(As you can probably tell from my posts I like to quote things from books). Gilead is full of interesting things and this is but another example. It is also an example of just enjoyable reading and good writing in and of itself. Let me find the page. Finally, about four or five lengthy songs have passed on the playlist and I found the page. The setting is that a character in the novel is pondering about certain things after having a conversation with another character in the novel.

He starts out by reciting to himself, " 'For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?' " He continues thinking to himself " In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a seperate language in each of us, also a seperate aesthetics and a seperate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge , more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us. "

When I first read that the thought that popped into my head was that "That is what friends are for. " Which sounds cheezy and corny because of the old line " Hey what are friends for?". But, quite honestly, friends and relationships are there to close those " untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us." Though these spaces between us may never be completely gone in this life, our friends and all of our relationships are attempts to close these spaces with certain people because their is comfort in that. So I bid you good luck in closing the spaces, whether it be with friends,girlfriends, or boyfriends. School starts tommorrow.

Raise your glasses in a toast, to closing the spaces and passing the classes.