Killing the White Man's Indian

I love American Indian Fiction. Finally we are getting to some in my class. Until this point we were reading dime store crap fiction from the 1800s, including (sob) this absolutely bitter, racist, monstrous Mark Twain piece called "Huck and Tom among the Indians." Mark Twain just can't be my hero anymore, this blemish on his record is too big for me to just glance over. Of course we read Last of the Mohicans which was nice and dull. We read some Willa Cather which I thought was really interesting, so much that I wrote a long paper on it in conjuction with a Phillip Deloria article on the formation of the Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls. In the early 20th century there was this identity crisis in America and for a time culture turned towards the indian who was our "authentic" Other-- the man that was in touch with nature, lived simply, and sustained himself with his hands-- at a time when all the real indians had been stripped of any power and herded onto poverty striken reservations. You know the phrase, the only good indian is a dead indian, well, this turned out to be true on many different levels. Anyway, I love it. And I love Geoff Sanborn. No really, I LOVE Geoff Sanborn....a lot. He gets a 9.98. Okay, so he doesn't make me blush like Eric does (and still does), but he's really great anyway.

I'm doing something really special tomorrow. I'm going house-looking. At 1:30 tomorrow. All I know is that it is a blue house with lots of bushes and trees in the front. Trees!!! It's really close to the Black Swan where I play. I'm really excited about the prospect of living in a real community, and more importantly away from the "i'm finally free so I'm gonna be an idiot all the time" thing at Bard. Thinking about it makes me feel more independent, like I'm taking charge of my life, like driving alone on the highway with a destination in mind, or better yet, no destination at all. Of course maybe it will be a shithole and I'll have to keep on looking, but that's okay too. The price is right too. 500 a month rent makes living off campus still cheaper than Bard, but 400 makes a marked difference.
I'm worried about losing my Stafford Loan. I don't what I'll do. That's 5000 dollars a year that I'll have to borrow from someplace else and have to start paying interest immediately. Hopefully that won't happen, but if it does, then I don't know what.
I'm worried about the Double G. I know that you can't expect your grandparents to live forever, but there is something incredibly painful about thinking that those people at the the head of your extended family no longer holding it together. That breaking point where the children become grandparents. Of course, no one in my family is having babies anytime soon unless Shosha's got something up her sleeve, but that's not the point. Mama said over break that I needed to hold on to my time with my grandparents and it made me shut up about not wanting to go over there and visit, but it is true. We think that they will be there forever and that's not how it works, and if we don't realize that now, then it will be too late later on down the road. And those people are more important than we think. Who they are is a part of who we are, because they shaped our parents. And I grieve at the prospect of loss more for my parents. My grandparents are still once removed from me, but Gan-Gan is my mother's mother. Her mother. I don't even want to think about it.