Don't you know me, Bloomsburg?

I'm the new Berlin Wall! Try to tear me down!

I got up at 5 again today. I took Maude's advice and greeted the dawn with a breath of fire. We had a lecture today from our classmate who started as a first year last year but ended up taking part of the year off because he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He spent the hour giving us an elegant, thorough, and personal presentation of the embryology, innervation, vasculature, pathophysiology, and history of his cancer. He walked us through every step of its diagnosis and treatment, including the surgical notes from his procedure and a graphic video about it - laparoscopic retroperitoneal lymph node dissection. Finally, he told us how much of a difference it made to him that he was here as a part of a small medical community, and we should never forget that we could actually wake up tomorrow and be diagnosed with cancer. He asked us to consider how we would feel about how we had spent the last several weeks if that happened. This message, which I might have dismissed as child's play just a few months ago, came at a very important time for me. I have continued to prod myself with worries that I would have been happier at Evergreen, and just yesterday I felt a really clear breakthrough about it. I thought about how many years of my life, important formative years, I have spent here in Central PA, and how radically changed the course of my life has been by the time I have spent here. I felt that this place is here for me as much as any other, offering me as much as any other, and I don't want to take it for granted. More importantly, I want to feel open to all that is here for me, embrace it, and thrive. I felt blessed in this purpose by Hedwig, whose child lover sang these words to us this morning as I drove to school:

Forgive me,
For I did not know.
'Cause I was just a boy
And you were so much more

Than any god could ever plan,
More than a woman or a man.
And now I understand how much I took from you:
That, when everything starts breaking down,
You take the pieces off the ground
And show this wicked town
something beautiful and new.

You think that Luck
Has left you there.
But maybe there's nothing
up in the sky but air.

And there's no mystical design,
No cosmic lover preassigned.
There's nothing you can find
that can not be found.
'Cause with all the changes
you've been through
It seems the stranger's always you.
Alone again in some new
Wicked little town.

So when you've got no other choice
You know you can follow my voice
Through the dark turns and noise
Of this wicked little town.
Oh it's a wicked, little town.
Goodbye, wicked little town.