I'm not going to lie: being here with ~200 people on campus is fricking weird.

It's kind of nice though, because it's causing me to evaluate Stonehill on a less biased level. Well, now wait a minute, I don't know if that's true.
I was going to say that my opinion of Stonehill would be less biased now that everyone is gone for the summer because there is no one clouding my view of what the school is really like. It's like... I can see the school's inner workings, the metal structure that holds it together and keeps it functioning.
But how much of Stonehill/my experience of Stonehill (which is what the school really is to me, anyway) is actually interacting with or affected by this inner functionality?
Stonehill students, staff, ad professors, as far as I'm concerned, are the community. It's these people that make me come back- everything else is just to deal with the logistics (which apparently get really really complicated, given the amount of "support staff" people who are needed to make the teaching and learning and living go smoothly).

It kind of reminds me of when my pastor did this unit at church on the church building itself. We started having worship outside a lot and doing some less typical church activities. He even spent a bunch of nights sleeping in a tent on the lawn, though I forget exactly what that part was proving.
It seems similar, though, because we were learning that the idea of a church community and the physical "necessity" of a church building often get conflated, and unnecessarily so.
I think I tend to do this with Stonehill. It's really the people that I'm here for- the Wendys and the Lizas and the Jamies and the Emelyes andandand- which is separate from the actual place itself, which really has nothing to offer me.

So yeah. It is weird being here with so few people on campus.
It's like Diet Stonehill.

My car broke yesterday.
This is not unusual for my car.

This time, however, my dad told me to take it to L&C Garage instead of our usual garage, which is closed on Wednesdays. I didn't know which place this was, so he described its location-- across from HoneyDew donuts (classy, I know)-- and I immediately recognized it as the place that had repeatedly cat-called my cross-country team and me as we ran by in high school.
I told dad this, and he said, "That's because they didn't know you were mine."

This annoyed me at the time, but I didn't realize why until later.
WHY. Why should the fact that I am the daughter of the man they respect elicit respectful treatment of me any more than the mere fact that I am a fellow human?

I wanted to go on and on about this, rant-style, but now that I've posed that question, I just have no more energy. There is so much that is broken in this world. More than just my car.

Doing work in the place that feels the most like home to me on this campus. 

In the future, I hope that this center can be to others what it has been to me this semester. I want everyone to feel what I feel when I come in here: inclusion and acceptance. Radical acceptance, even. There is no other place on this campus like that, which makes me feel so passionately that we need this.

We need a place where it's okay to be everything that you are all at once, because when you don't feel at home in your own mind, you don't need the outside environment to alienate you. You're doing an okay job of that with your own internalized oppression and ick-factor. 

You just need a place to be. That needs to be this place.