Yesteray we had our first rain at Mills. The leaves are yellow and scarred with the winter’s first cold breath. My room overlooks the art museum, and across the courtyard everything is wet and gray and shades of yellow. I walked around Pine Top Trail (a trail that weaves between the eucalyptus trees that surround the campus), and by the lake this morning, taking pictures with my Lomo LCA+ and red scale film. I hope they turn out well! I haven’t got film for my Polaroid yet, but hopefully that will happen soon so I can post more pictures on Flickr.

Two days ago, Barbara Lee and Helen Thomas spoke at the music hall. I went not because I’m a big fan of theirs or politics in general, but because Helen Thomas is known as a witty, incredibly smart lady. This proved to be true, and she was one of the most real people I’ve ever heard speak. That is to say that she didn’t have that layer of performance or pretension that most have when they speak in front of a big audience. She wasn’t nervous, and she said what she remembered and what she felt. My favorite part was when Ms. Thomas was asked whether it was hard being one of the only woman reporters or if she wanted to stop being the person who always asked the presidents, “Why?” She responded that she proved herself and after that it wasn’t hard. Then, she said she never wanted to stop asking questions and she wants to die asking questions, chasing down a president. Yes!, I thought.

In a lot of ways Mills is an island. Around me there’s poverty and violence but it’s not a part of the day to day life here. Instead, I’m surrounded by trees and creeks and grassy fields and hallowed halls of education. It’s a strange disconnect. I manage to get out on the weekends and stay in the city, which is great. The streets there feel so comfortable hold such possibilities. So far I’ve seen several bands play, seen authors read, watched independent films galore, observed people, road BART (note: it is not the BART, it is just BART), road the MUNI at all hours of the night and day, had coffee at my favorite haunts, shopped at the thrift stores in Mission and Haight, and froze my ass off riding bikes up and down hills. Basically perfect. But then I come home and see Laurel, the district near Mills, empty of open stores but full of poverty ridden street people, and it feels strange. Or I hear shootings going on by the aptly named “Mills Liquor” and then ambulances and I think, How can this exist?

But really, Mills itself is marvelous. There is a deep quiet about it that is truly zen-like. In fact, I have come to call it Mills Monestary. (Not just because it is all girls…or should I say women?) The quiet is deep, and has to do with the way the trees stand in the sunlight in the afternoon, how the light places itself upon the branches like colors on some romantic-era painter’s oil of the new frontier. It also has to do with the smell of eucalyptus and wetness and a bit of vanilla.

To be honest, at first the silence frustrated me. I like to be in the thick of the action sometimes, and there isn’t really any action exactly. Well, there is not any ACTION. There is action (lower case). What I am trying to say is that I have liked, in the past, to hear voices yelling and to feel the pulse of a place beating away under my finger tips.

What Mills has taught me is silence. I am learning to be at peace with myself because I am so confronted with my inner voice and my thoughts that I can’t help but be at peace. There are two choice though: I can either detest what is within me and try hard to escape that through distractions, or I can come to a balance and accept it with love and virtue. (And I mean virtue in the Platonic sense of the word.)

Now, this isn’t to say that I’m at that perfect point yet. Far from it. I’m just attempting to live an examined life and go about it with awareness. And in addition to this, I’m trying to make my life exactly how I want it to be, with smells and images and people in it that are beautiful and interesting.

My room is a good example. I have a IBM Selectric, a coffee machine, books scattered every where, original paintings on the walls, quotes from Kafka and Salinger and various Zen poets and Wes Anderson tacked up, Polaroids and pictures on pin boards, film canisters on my desk, typewritten pages in stacks, a Gameboy with Super Mario Bros in it, flowers from the community garden in wine bottles, small action figures of Spock and Buffy in my window, my cameras hanging by their straps on the wall, a huge puffy reading chair, the comfiest bed ever, a lush Indian carpet laying on hardwood floors, and a white board with a Voltaire quote written on it. Plus notes, comics, postcards and doodles drawn for and about me by my friends on the walls. It’s just a big collection of my favorite things. I think the collective mass of it should probably be trashed immediately for the good of my enlightenment journey. But alas, I doubt that will happen any time soon.

The best part about college though has to be the classes. I’m taking Philosophy, Classic to Modern Cinema, English Composition, and my favorite, Advanced Creative Nonfiction taught by Patricia Powell. My philosophy teacher has a beard which he loves to stroke during discussions about Plato’s dialectics and whenever there’s an interlocution that involves “aporia.” It’s kind of hilarious. I’ve also decided that he’s the love child of Jason Schwartsman’s character in Darjeeling Limited and that Indian woman who plays the love interest.

I love film class. It’s probably my second favorite. We started off with the silent films, and I fell in love with German Expressionism (my favorite film is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but Metropolis was obviously good too). Also, I think that D. W. Griffith was an amazing director and film maker, but it was a tragedy that he was so racist and close minded. Intolerance was a master piece, undoubtedly. Last weekend, I studied, lived, breathed, existed only film. I had the hugest mid term imaginable. Three hours long. Several essays. I just got my grade back and I’m happy to announce I got far from a bad grade! Quite the opposite, actually.

After the test, he showed us two experimental films. The first was Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, which I had already seen. Our teacher, Ken Burke, put his own soundtrack in: Bob Dylan. It actually worked well! I always thought Dylan’s lyrics to be somewhat abstract. The other, however, was new to me. It was called–actually I forgot what it was called but it was by Maya Derren and it involved several images of keys and a surprisingly advanced knowledge of camera movement. It was my favorite of the two because it described a dream-like state, and it mimicked the emotions and feelings of a dream perfectly. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Also, the soundtrack was particularly effective in heightening tension of the actions–plus, awesome drumming. All in all an excellent example of formalist avant garde. (Edit: I found it after some searching! It’s called Meshes of the Afternoon.)

In Patricia Powell’s Advanced Creative Nonfiction class, we meet for three hours every Wednesday in a small room with amazing afternoon sunlight. It’s formatted a lot like a usual workshop class, and Patricia has the BEST voice I have ever heard on an English teacher. It is deep and lightly accented (she is from Jamaica), and she has this slow way about her that makes you feel relaxed and pensive. We actually discuss some very personal issues, so I’m happy that she’s so laid back and puts me at ease. The people in the class are pretty interesting characters, too. I might use them in a story one day.

Tonight I went to a reading by her; she read from her new book “The Fullness of Everything.” There were other authors who read, all from the South American/Caribbean/Jamaican areas. It was some sort of potluck and there were mounds of the delicacies from those areas. As Patricia read her thoughtful prose I sipped Puerto Rican coffee with fresh cream (literally just milked from a cow that day), and ate pumpkin seeds baked with cinnamon spices.

And now I’m lying in my bed, sleepy and content, after just finishing up a first draft of one of my writing pieces and editing an essay about online literary movements for my composition class. In about fifteen minutes I’ll put on a bathrobe and take a hot bath while reading The American Dream by Edward Albee. Then, I’ll either put on Lost in Translation and attempt to stay awake, or fall asleep and go to bed early tonight. It’s extremely probable that it’ll be the latter. This weekend and the past few nights have been both late and filled crazy adventure, so it’ll be nice to get a solid 8 hours for Philosophy in the morning.