I'm really a person that is afraid of a lot of things, especially things that I shouldn't be frightened about. Really, I'm frightened that I'll never do anything with my life, that the double major of latin and political science that I'm currently pursuing will be in vain, that I'll turn out to have no marketable skills and have to be homeless. And, these fears never stop, each one being inexorably entwined to every other fear, creating one little nagging voice in my head all the time telling me to wrry, because I am no good, because I am a failure, because other people are better than me, because my grades aren�t high enough, anything to put me on edge.

What if my parents stop loving me? I mean, I know they won't because I've always tried to be the best child a set of parents could have, but what if I do something completely stupid and force them not to like me. I remember how hard it was to win back any modicum of trust from them after I was suspended from school both times. I feel like I am letting my parents down as well, not doing as well as I did at High School during my college career, each "only a B minus average. You can do better", regardless of tone or inflection ripping at my heart. I know somewhere that I am depressing my parents, that I'm not doing something up to my levels. That I am a failure.

What about all the other students at DePauw? Pretty much all of them come from better means than I do and do better than I do in school. They will be the ones in posh law offices while I am out in the cold cityscape sleeping under newspapers and begging for whatever change I can get, with memories of my college career fading which each draught of the Thunderbird or Mad Dog that finds its way through my life. All the kids there either ignore me or despise me openly, and won't care if I failed. The only ones that might have cared have graduated, and left me to these ravenous students of the classes of 2003,2004, 2005, and 2006. I feel so alone in my Senior Hall room, looking up at the ceiling when I hear all the other people talking amongst each other, and wondering what will happen to me.

People that know me might have been confused at the very Trainspotting-esque treatment I did for my "Desire" piece, where I claimed to desire the "endless housing plans�the minivans", and on and on. Sometimes I just believe that if I had things like most other people that it would just be able for me to live life. Sometimes I think that, in my darkest hours, and sometimes I realize that it just doesn't make sense for me to want these things. I know I am different from the vast chunk of humanity that lives like that, and I would be faced with the problems of burning myself out in middle-management, dealing with divorc�s and unloving children, and scores of other issues that aren�t cut out for me.

I am James McQuiston, and nothing is going to change that. I might have been influenced by various external forces during this semester alone at DePauw, but this period with a supportive family at my house has really shown me those marionette's strings that were poised over me, ready to choke me into submission at the first opportunity. I may have been entertaining the idea of joining a fraternity, but I know that I just am not cut out for that type of close living. I've been to College Republican meetings, but that doesn't mean I am a Republican. I am James, and I have been and will be a very radically-minded person.

I have this ability to look at people not as part of a group, but as individuals. I think this is why I was so originally enthralled by the organizations that just weren't me. There are definitely some good people in each of the aforementioned organizations, but that alone does not make the organizations palatable to me. In my search for something to curb my loneliness/lack of friends at DePauw, I believe that I had let my defenses slip and blurred the line between acceptance and dogma, and I think that is where I began to go in a direction that I don't want to go. The reality check that was this Christmas vacation has saved me from doing something that was truly stupid in retrospect, and I have to thank a lot of people for letting me find myself again.

Conversely, before I wrap the article up, I need to thank those individuals who invited me with open arms into those aforementioned organizations. Besides being good friends, and you know who you are, you allowed me to go and see that I was not truly in control of my destiny. Having taken a look at both sides, I feel that I am much more liberated than I was at the beginning of this semester. I had to realize that I have to look out for myself, instead of trying to extrapolate what authority figures in my life would decide for me to do. Seriously joining each of the aforementioned groups, once thought by me to be a brash figurative one-finger salute to those tried-and-true authority figures, has became much more than that, a total recalculation of my life to this point.

This zine, who even I thought to be a sanctuary for my independent thought, was even co-opted by an overwhelming sentiment to give the majority what they want, specifically turning the personal content up for the perziners that always told me I had too much "non-personal" stuff in the zine. I came to the realization of this much later than my status in the aforementioned clubs, but the result is no different. A loved one gave me another view on what I was doing with the magazine, and it brought me to the decision to split off the zines into two. The personal zine is much too therapeutic to give up, and I feel stifled by the limitations offered by it, even as a split zine. The continuity offered by two different zines only dealing with one topic is much greater than what I felt in the bleary-eyed creations of the earliest days of NeuFutur (#1-5).