oblivious bubbles

there’s a room at brown that i particularly like to study in. it has a yellow wall, orange sockets, bright lights, and no windows. i joke that i study in there because it looks relatively cheery, and never changes— there could be an avalanche, tornado, enormous natural disaster or riot or the world exploding all over the place and it wouldn’t matter. the room would be unchanged, and i’d still study because i wouldn’t know. i am not conscious of it. and for all intents and purposes, it does not exist.

this is how i feel about college, period. i have my head so stuck far up my academic butt (i want to use the other word for alliterative purposes but agh. curses!) that anything else is not even a speck on my radar. 

i can’t help but care about these things when i am at home, because this is where i am confronted with them. two people who work at my old middle school thought that the students were worse. and seeing how one of them has been at that school for definitely (at the very least) more than a decade, i’m inclined to believe this. so then i start thinking about the parents that don’t know what to do with their misbehaving kids and is it the media? failing of the education system, the getting rid of tenured teachers, maybe something changed with alternatives to kids just hanging out on the streets or jeez, i don’t even know where it starts and where it ends. 

i meet up with friend and find out one moved to a city that provided a better feeling of security because, yeah, your home should be a place where you feel secure. and i was flipping through my high school yearbook and came across the page dedicated to the classmate -honestly, he had a really swell smile- who died from a driveby on his birthday. and i read the news, the last homicide of 2011 in oakland was a five year old boy. 

it makes me angry that i can brush aside these things when i’m at college, but i also don’t know what to do with my caring.