Earlham is its own smell. Maybe the air is different inside the bubble. Its in the atmosphere there. Im not talking about monkey chow either, its like... coziness in a smell. Just like how Ben's car smells like independence, Earlham smells like that feeling you get when you're under blankets and you're safe and warm. The sun on your face while napping in OA 3rd floor. The walk through the Heart to Lobill. Third floor of Carpenter or the basement of Runyan. It all smells like that. Maybe smell is the wrong word, but its in the molecules and you breathe it in when you're there and like nicotine or childhood you crave it when it's gone. At least i do.
A part of me will always live there. I forgot her there like my pretend friend Penny got left at the mall when i was six. The ghost of EarlhamBlanche lives in the mosaic in the mailroom. She lives in Hoerner, in OA. She lives on the swing, in the chem labs. That part of me lives on but separated and maybe all of this, this blog, this reading Ulysses, this half-assed nod to furthering my education is an attempt to bring her back. Welcome EarlhamBlanche back to her natural home somewhere in my left ventrical or my occipital lobe, wherever my capacity for being multiple people at once lives.
Its funny how different EarlhamBlanche is too. Reading Ulysses i realize Stephen Dedalus is an annoyingly broody Hamletesque adolescent that i can nonetheless relate to, which is somewhat embarassing. I mean look at this whiny introspection. EarlhamBlanche would love that part best(and the part of me that came back from Earlham did kinda fall for him. Residual affection remembered from Portait? Maybe) Maybe im not relating my life or the people i see on the street to mythology... oh, wait I totally do that.... anyway, Leopold Bloom is much more adult. He quit worrying about existentialism and resolving his aspirations with his existence. He's actually more interesting to read because of it. ColumbusBlanche sees the difference and appreciates Bloom more, despite my affections, despite my ability to relate. I guess that shows what value i place on my introspection.
So what does that say about my whiny, Hamletesque angst and my inability to resolve my aspirations with my reality? Put up or shut up, i guess. Maybe im just a Telemachus waiting for my Odysseus, walking along my shore in anxious contemplation. Maybe i make too many metaphors already and i dont need more. Maybe its something as quotidian as a smoothie with whipped cream and a black and white muffin from the jazzman cafe in the coffee shop.
Whatever i am subcosciously searching for, i doubt Stephen or Bloom can help me. Stephen needs a serious dose of reality and Bloom is... preoccupied with the oppressiveness of reality. And i wont ever get that EarlhamBlanche back, which i should have learned from the loss of CAHSBlanche (same scars like the separation of conjoined twins- CAHSBlanche lives in the theatre, the humanities room, the courtyard, laughing and dancing, languishing in the depths of education and youth). I never learn lessons like that. Life should quit trying to teach them.
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