It's a new semester already. I am trying to recognize that for the rest of my life I will not deserve a summer vacation ever again, and that it is OK that for the first time I did not have one. Went on a soul journey pilgrimage to Dollywood, a little slice of paradise nestled between her mountainous titties. I rode a roller coaster that turned me upside down in exhilarating ways, and then slept in a haunted house. Then I went to Mexico.

I am already having an existential crisis at school. My professor photocopied my in-class writing as an example for the class, along with a bunch of other admittedly shitty paragraphs. While she critiqued most of the writing pretty harshly, she talked about mine last and said that, while it wasn't perfect, it was one of the only adequate responses. Still, I can't help feeling weird when I am the only white person in the course and the professor is holding me up as what my fellow students should aspire to. Isn't that one of the reasons that HBCUs are important, to be a place where minority students can feel what it's like to be a majority for once? It makes me feel like an intruder, like I am in a space where I do not belong.

I have given this plenty of thought in my time at this school. In most ways it is a very positive thing for me to be enrolled at NCCU. I pay my full tuition, which opens up financial aid for other students who have to have it to be able to attend college. I get an experience similar to what minority students must experience at any other college; when I look around a classroom I mostly see faces that do not look like me. However, my experience is completely different. Instead of being dismissed and silenced, when I do speak up in class my words still carry the privilege accorded to white people in America. I have had opportunities far beyond those of my fellow students; the poems we were discussing are by Natasha Trethewey, a poet I actually got a chance to meet at Governor's School. And while I take pride in the fact that I know enough to write a perceptive essay about black women's experiences, it also feels weird to be publicly commended for it in front of a group of them who a professor has just told that their writing is woefully inadequate. Yall, I am 23 and yall are all 18. If it takes you 6 years to finish your undergrad degree, I bet you'll be able to write a pretty solid Freshman English paper too.

Whoosh, apparently I had SOMETHING TO SAAAYYY.

Also, Ellie Greenwich died. To Ellie: thank you, for writing songs so beautiful and true.