Wired Mesh

And to Edward Appleby, a Friend of a Friend

I wrote my Senior Integration Paper at Covenant College on the films of Wes Anderson, arguing that they are visions of the restoration of American community. For the last three months a variety of people have been asking me to read the SIP, for reasons that I suspect have less to do with their love of my writing and more to do with their devotion to the Kumar. But the paper was saved on the Covenant computer system, and I couldn't quite summon the motivation this summer to drive up Lookout Mountain and retrieve it.

Yesterday, however, I had to sign up for two fall semester classes that will complete my graduation requirements (if you must know, they are Intro to Mathematics and PE, Part II), and I took a few minutes to salvage documents from my files before the school deletes everything. The strangest part of the process was going through old e-mail archives (I'm a compulsive packrat of computer-mediated communication; I never delete anything) and seeing all the messages from people I used to know. Many have moved away. A few I'm no longer speaking to. At least one is dead. But there were all their thoughts on the screen, frozen in the moment they were composed. Reading them, it was impossible to believe that the hope, anger, confusion or love expressed had in any way changed or faded.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, my SIP: I was indeed able to find it, along with lots of other papers I've written at Covenant. It's entitled Searching for Rushmore, and I should warn that it's rather lengthy. Enjoy.