Hello all!


I'm wrapping up my first semester at college now. It's been a fantastic few months; hard to imagine that it's over already. I think I'm going to declare an Anthropology major in the spring, but we'll wait to see for sure...

I thought I would just post a little update to say that I'm fine, doing quite well, learning a lot and making art.

Hope you all are doing well!

Joe



Also, I've got a Vimeo account I sometimes put stuff on, and I just put up a video of some clips from my senior year: [link]

Neunzehn jahre.

Birthdays are always such interesting events. I update my Journal here every birthday, regardless of how little I otherwise update it.

I find myself each year spending my birthday thinking about how different I was a year ago, how different my life was, where I am now, where I'm going, where I want to go. I'm certainly far from where I imagined myself last year.

But things are beautiful: I'm not exactly sure where I'm going or going to end up, as usual, but I feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be, doing what I'm supposed to be doing, hard as it may be at times.

In the last year, I've been out of the country for the first time, been accepted and came to a wonderful college, graduated high school, met wonderful new people, some from far far away, started learning several new languages, made art, danced, learned a new instrument and picked up an old one, developed a keen sense of coffee quality (!), read some, wrote some, realized what it is to live away from everyone you love the most, and so much more....

Things in this world go a million miles an hour--it's like someone tossed paint into a wind tunnel; all the colors are dancing and mixing and becoming new things; the only sad part is that there's too much to see and do in the time I've been given.



I hope this finds everyone well, doing good works and finding that good place in the sun.

All my love,
joe

I'm doing National Novel Writing Month



"It was an interesting phenomenon to the employees of the Fill ‘n Fly gas station located on the extreme brink of suburbia where the sounds of the interstate fall like spittle from a lispy teacher’s mouth barely making it, and disappearing just a bit further on. Greta, the general manager of the store as well as sub-regional chairperson of the employee welfare committee for the tri-county area had discovered several grey hairs on the lower left side of her scalp. Two years prior, Greta had been advised by her Psychic Phone Friend that grey hairs were not simply signs of age, but of the need for a change in one’s way of life. Unfortunately for the Fill ‘n Fly employees, the Psychic had not known that Greta’s life was, in fact, somehow mystically bound to that of her station. "

In other news,

I'm away at school now in Beloit, Wisconsin. I absolutely adore this place and I've met so many wonderful and fascinating people. I feel like I'm in a wonderful place in my life, a sort of continuation of the last year that I never expected.

My final year of high school was incredible, an adventure I couldn't have imagined. At the end of the year I found myself repeatedly realizing that I had never been so happy in my life, and that sort of wonderful feeling of place, that feeling of direction (however vague) that tells me to keep going is still with me.

My trip to Europe this summer is still dancing in my head. So many adventures and thoughts packed into such a brief eruption of time... I've been working on the photos I took there on and off all summer and they'll continue to provide fodder for my creative fire for some time.

I'm enrolled in courses on Ancient Greek, German Studies, Medieval History, and Biological Anthropology this semester, maybe adding a half-semester course on Ancient Manuscripts later on.

Just a brief update, but one that was long overdue.


How are you all?

Greetings,


What's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?




Sincerely,

Mich.