Can’t sleep. It’s strange, the past couple of years I’ve been having terrible dreams, and yet I love sleeping. I wonder if that makes me a masochist, lazy, or both? In the spirit of philosophy being about discourse and all, I joined some philosophy forums linked on the left, posting under my name, Alexei (of Newark). For the curious, curiosity killed the cat. Luckily, she had nine lives, so it all worked out. An intro, I’m about to begin my (hopefully) last semester at Seton Hall University, the school with the fire. My majors are philosophy, classical studies, and Catholic studies. I started studying philosophy, having gotten a taste for it at the end of high school with the existentialists, Sartre’s Nausea to be exact. I turned to studying Ancient Greek and Latin, largely because of a girl, and then realized I might as well do classics too. Two years back, circumstances led me into Catholic studies, though I’m not Catholic myself. For the most part it has turned out alright, mainly because of the large overlap between Medieval philosophy and Christian theology. Still, I do stand out a little when among seminarians. Seton Hall is a strange little place. The school stands on the border of South Orange and Newark. The campus is fenced off all around, with card-operated gates here and there. I live in on the other side of the fence and walk to school. However, most of those inside seldom come out my way. Students get mugged, carjacked or assaulted on a fairly regular basis, as we are notified of it through campus-wide emails. Eventually, South Orange Township decided to put up road blocks, preventing traffic from entering the town from Newark. At first there was an outcry, mainly people complaining about inaccessibility for ambulances. But since the roads were fairly minor and because crime did seem to drop, the road blocks stayed up, where they stand to this day.

There are two gates for dreams; the first, they say,
Of horn, gives easy exit to true spirits.
The other gleams perfect, carved of white ivory,
But sends false dreams from the dead to the world above.

(Virgil, Aeneid 6.893-897)