Are the SP initials of SomePoems and Sylvia Plath enough to convince you that she and I share a mystical bond? (Does that mean I have a mystical bond with the Smashing Pumpkins too?)

Well try this one on for size:
I was reading/rereading The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, which over the past six months has been becoming my new favorite book, all apologies to David Sedaris, Nick Hornby, Robert Frost, James Merrill, Heather McHugh, et al, et cetera, ad infinitum. Anyway, if you like to read these blog things, you'll just love this book, not only because Plath is an amazing journal writer, but also because she's very kiss-and-tell too, at least to her private journal. It's a very voyeristic experience, reading someone's thought that were never meant for daylight.

Online journal authors always have one eye instinctively turned toward the faceless internet audience, and rightly so. Plath didn't have thousands of readers in mind, of course, but the book reads like she did. It is by far the best written journal I've ever read, although to be fair, I don't read all that many.

I normally just crack the book open to a random page (or flip through to find the pictures... she was so damn beautiful), but yesterday I thought I'd make a serious effort of starting straight through. In one of her first entries, she writes about how she looks out her window and always sees "Hopkins House," which I assume was the next building over from her first-year dorm at Smith College. Well, let me just tell you that the windows along one wall of my apartment all look out on the Hopkins House apartment building, not up in Massachusetts, but right here in cicada-infested Baltimore.

You might be thinking: but Dave, I'm sure lots of people live next door to a place called Hopkins House. However, I'm sure none of them are as obsessed with this fact as I now am. I've been convinced for some time now that Ms. Plath and I share something of a supernatural connection, and this new information is really just icing, not the basis of the argument. I'm not saying I'm Sylvia Plath reincarnated or anything... yet. I'm just saying that when she had the chance to live in WB Yeats's old London flat, she didn't take it lightly either. Especially since Ted Hughes got her interested in emulating Mr. and Mrs. Yeats in their practice of the occult.

Plath was very keen on signs. Why shouldn't I be too?

Bless me, I think I've sinned: it's been almost two months since my last post. Two months of deadlines and papers and other people graduating and other stressful things.

Phish is breaking up, for good this time evidently. Their last show is in August (the day after my birthday) and all of the shows anywhere near me are already sold out. Which makes 1996 the last time I will ever see them play, barring the possibility of them getting back together or a reunion tour or whatever further down the road. I always expected I would see them in concert again, even though their shows became more and more inaccessible to me: higher ticket prices, shows selling out so quickly, and so on.

This time last year, I expected there to be a mass exodus of people out of my life. But it never really happened. Sure, my friends Pinzler and Steve moved away, but the majority of my friends from freshman year stuck around with jobs or more schooling even after they graduated. And I ended up starting three new close friendships last spring/summer that have only gotten closer over the course of the year.

This summer, then, marks the real breakup of the band, if you will. Another May is ending without my college graduation, so I'm tied to the same place. My three newer friends Emily, Natalie, and Lisa are going to law school, poetry school, and western Pennsylvania, respectively. Tammy and Patrick are going to NYC. Mike and Sarah are moving to Towson, which, though still pretty close by, is a lot farther away than fifty feet. Thankfully Dan is staying, but it's just the two of us left from the second floor Jennings crew. Mark has been home in Jersey for months now, and it really sucks to be living alone for the first time ever in my life. I don't recommend it.

This school year, my days have been taken up by Natalie and Emily, and my nights by Lisa, the bunch in apartment 17, and Throat Culture. When everybody leaves, what happens to me then? There are friends from the poetry grad program sticking around, there's Dan, maybe Mark'll come back, but it feel like there's a bomb going off and we're the cooling shrapnel or the one wall left standing. The heart of the thing is gone.

I spent last weekend helping Emily to move out of her apartment and repaint her dark purple room to white (think two days and lots of paint) and it was fun, but she's gone now. Very adamant about not coming back to Baltimore, too. And it's really sad because, while I'm positive I'll see her again, I'm also positive that I'm never going get another IM from her about going out to lunch, which is what happened practically every other day this year.

There's a brief article on nytimes.com concerning the Phish breakup, and the writer lets us know that everyone in Phish will be reasonably happy going their separate ways, because in the world of jam bands the musicians recombine in new directions just like their music does. Everyone in Phish has new projects ahead. Everyone has new projects, it seems, but me.