It's ELECTRIC, Boogey-woogey-woogey-woogey...

For about a month now I've noticed that I'm a super conductor. Okay, it's only when I'm in my office, but it's just me--not Denise, not Steve, not visitors to AH 307C--just me.

I have these two massive file cabinets where I keep all of my GA work and some of my not-so-GA-work and I have to access said cabinets almost every day. From the time it takes me to shuffle the 12 to 15 inches from my chair to the cabinets, I somehow produce enough static electricity for a painful, super-charged interaction between flesh and metal. Sometimes I feel the shock before I even touch the cabinet; a thin but potent stream of current actually bridges across space and time. Sometimes an audible "pop" can be heard; Josh has compared it to the sound of Fun Snaps, those tiny white balls you throw on the ground for an equally tiny explosion and popping sound. Sometimes I have so much electricity stored in my body that one touch of the cabinet will not be sufficient enough to release all of it, so I will be shocked multiple times in a row.

I don't know where I acquired the following bit of information (either television, an article, or from my mother's vast knowledge of precautionary measures) but I've heard that one should always touch the metal on their car after they get out (especially if one has cloth seats) before filling their gas tank to release any possible charge because even a small shock can cause a spark and ignite the gasoline. Since I'm mildly OCD (like many other people in the 21st century) and a product of my mother's, well, general cautiouness, I admit that ever since I got that information I have been touching the side of my car (even though I do not, in fact, have cloth seats) before filling my gas tank. Now, aware of my super-conductor-ishness, I put both hands on the car before fueling up. I know that the only place I seem to be afflicted is in my office, but soon, I might start wearing rubber gloves to the gas station...just in case.

Tonight while I was flipping through the channels on TV, I stopped on an image of a young Asian child with spoons and ash trays that were sticking to his bare chest. The child was standing straight up, his father was placing metallic items on him, and the commentator was explaining that the child seemed to be magnetic. Then it showed the father placing a 6-pound iron on his own chest and resting both of his hands at his side while the iron stayed firmly in place. The father said he first noticed his ability in the army when a friend placed a spoon on his forehead and it stayed there...for hours. Apparently his other son was also "magnetic." A researcher explained that the family was tested and there was no evidence of a magnetic field around or within them. They were an anomaly: no scientific or medical explanation.

As is my office. Or, more accuratley, the effect my office has on my electrical make-up. If this happened to anyone else while in my office, I wouldn't be so intrigued, just pissed-off, instead of what I am now: intrigued and pissed-off. I've tried different shoes. I've tried no shoes. I've tried fully picking up my feet to eliminate any static build-up. Still shocked. I need to de-ionize somehow. But, if I can't figure out how to do that, and if I have enough time between now and the end of next semester, I will try to harness the power, develop the skills to fire electric shocks at will, sew together a superhero outfit and dub myself "Conductress," form an alliance with the MAB (Magnetic Asian Boys) and use my newly acquired and honed superpowers to kill the president.

Movies that I have recently re-viewed and even though I liked them the first time, I just realized how effing awesome they are:

Kill Bill, Volumes I and II
Adaptation
Elf
Apocalypse Now

Snow Dump

The first snow of the season doesn't announce itself; it just happens. You wake up in the morning to snow-covered yards and school closings and plows scraping their rusty bottoms on the roads. It falls to the earth like powdered sugar from a sieve: it's soundless and it floats through the air and it piles.

I, however, witnessed the first snow that came about a week ago. I had been in bed, reading Blue Hour, until about 1:30 when I dog-eared a page and turned off the light. My bedroom remained eerily bright -- I say eerily because the walls closest to my huge window had a soft orange color -- and I couldn't close my eyes hard enough to make everything black, so I got up and peeked through the blinds. I was shocked to see everything covered in white because it had been 70 degrees out just a few days before and since I hadn't turned the television on since I got back from my weekend home I heard no weather reports or forecasts for snow. It was beautiful for all the reasons that snow is beautiful: pure, soft, shimmering in certain light.

But, what was the orange color? It couldn't have been coming from the four 80-watt lightbulbs that line the back of our building; the entire sky was sour. I stood in front of the window, thinking how fucked-up nature could be, wondering if the pumpkin hue to everything was one of those wierd natural phenomenons or just pollution. The first snow had been corrupted by this bizarre orange sky, robbed of its sheen. It was as though someone had placed a fuzzy orange filter across my window, forcing me to see through an altered lens.

I couldn't sleep in a room as bright as winter dawn, so I stayed awake and thought about how snow can dump itself in inches and feet on top of you, nearly silently and within a very short time. And it's heavy.
*
While the first snow of the season was falling in Minnesota, my grandmother had cancer in Iowa. I found out two days before and it came just the same: suddenly and silently; buried in an old woman's broken body. I woke up to it, after years of good weather, after years of what we thought was luck but was really just ignorance. And the news was heavy and it continues to pile.

My thoughts haven't separated into sentences yet. They're still feeling. All I can do is write about how orange snow makes me think of the unnatural in the natural which makes me think of cancer in a uterus. And how fucked-up life can be.

Almost all of the snow has melted now. So, sometimes, I'm able to think about resilience and beauty, and that will get me through until the point that sentences form.

The Red-Eye

Good news: I made it through Sunday night...managed a decent amount of sleep...and delivered a sensical, albeit non-illuminating, poetry analysis in class on Monday.

Bad news: It's 1:25 on Wednesday morning and I'm grading papers for tomorrow and I'll be skipping my afternoon class because I won't have the work done.

Damn you not-enough-hours-in-the-day.

Disclaimer: Do Not Read. It's a rant.

FUCK.

It's 11:30 in the post-meridiem and I have at least four hours of a paper to write on a god-damned book of poetry that makes no sense. And I was totally coming around to poetry this term...willing to play on poetry's team...able to decipher the decent stuff, be in awe of the amazing stuff, and argue poetry's merits. But Carolyn Forche is fucked-up and all I want to do is sleep.

So I played in the snow all day yesterday and agreed to watch Pixar's Cars (during which I fell asleep) instead of coming up with insightful and beautifully formed analyses of how Forche creates meaning in her poems. Yeah, well, my bad.

"White. Given lilacs, lilacs disappear. Then low voices rising in walls."

How do you analize something SO abstract and SO unconnected to anything else in the poem that contains it?

This will be my, ahem, analysis: the impossibility of finding meaning where only purely subjective meanings can be found. That can be 500 words, easy. Slap a Works Cited on the end and my name on the top. And that's just what I'm going to do. And I've already wasted 10 minutes with this rant.

Long time, no blog.

Has it really been this long? I feel like a bad mother. Here is my problem: I get distracted. Like my little friend in the t-shirt here.











Only, I don't usually flip the bird for no good reason.
















Shit.
By the way...damn, that's a long finger. It's the size of my face. I always thought I had the potential to be a hand-model, but now I'm not so sure. I'm kinda like "Man Hands" on Seinfeld. Only, I'm "Long Fingers." Yikes....Case in point. I get distracted. Easily. This post is NOT suposed to be about middle fingers.

Yesterday in workshop, we got a little off topic. Prompted by one student's decision to use the word "pop" in a story, my other student's began discussing the use of "pop" versus "soda" versus (the rarely heard) "cola". It was actually a pretty intelligent conversation, despite the topic. We discussed possible reasons for the difference: regional differences, marketing, dialects, etc. I even brought up the fact that overseas (as far as I know) they say "Coke" for all soft drinks. The conversation developed further: "bubbler" versus "water fountain", "rest room" versus "bathroom", "ya'll" versus "yous guys." The point is, we got way off topic, and stayed off topic. As the teacher, I probably should have been more aware of the task at hand, but no, no, no. I am perfectley content to allow my mind to wander off -- far outside of the city limits, leaving all responsibilites and tasks to not get done at home. If this only affected me, that would be one thing, but as soon as I start playing my little flute during class like the Pied Piper for the workshoppers to follow, it's not a good thing. Pretty soon the hour is up and we're all in the middle of wheat field with about 200 miles behind us, separating us from the place we need to be.

This tick of mine not only affected my poor students, but generally dictates my life. Some examples: when I first got my guitar I did a pretty decent job of learning tablature, the easy way out of playing songs without having to really learn to read music. That got me through my formative months of reacquainting myself with the frets, the body, the sounds, the tender fingers, and so on. However, now that I have a pretty good idea of the sounds I can produce, that's all I do -- produce sounds -- try to put them together -- with no clue of what I'm doing. When I sit down with my (pretty kick-ass and expensive) chord book, I do a few strums, turn a few pages, but pretty soon I am leaned back on the couch just sliding my fingers up and down trying to piece together a good mash of made-up finger positions. I can do that for an hours. And I'm not learning anything because I never remember what the hell I did. Needless to say, learning the guitar is slow-going.

Example Number Two: Most days I arrive at work at 9:00 (rough, I know) but I never actually begin any work-related tasks until about 10-10:30. Why? Simple. If Denise is there, we chat. About nothing. About her godson, my crazy professor, the fact that it has snowed three gawl darn times already, and the work we both should be doing. If Denise is not there, I play on the computer: iTunes, McSweeney's, all the porn I can find (wink), and pictures of australian shepherd puppies. Or, if I happened to pick up a Reporter (school newspaper) on the way over, I read that. Every page. Every under-graduate caliber, fluffy, typoed page.

I could go on, but that would be boring. I suppose that as long as I don't allow myself to get distracted by really stupid things and have that affect really important things in my life or the lives of others, I'll be okay. Hmmm, that makes me think...kinda like the time back in '98 when the media went nuts over Clinton and Lewinski and fooled the American public into thinking that voting for a man like Bush in the next election would be a wise thing to do. See! There! I got distracted. Again.

Addendum

P.S. To the previous post:

In the name of humanity, I think that Christiane Amanpour should have some eggs frozen, and John Stewart should have some sperm frozen, so that by the time the bird flu pandemic hits or Kim Jong Il starts pressing buttons at will, America has a back up plan for repopulating and can start from scratch with Amanpour/Stewarts. It's worth considering.

This just in...grrrls rule!

Christiane Amanpour can make me care about things that I would otherwise have little to no interest in: Hamas, Peabody awards, integrity. Her journalism is raw, without agenda, unlike the lisped, affected, camera-loving bobbleheads that report most news. Whether she's in a head scarf against the backdrop of a war-torn country or leading a panel discussion on Clinton's Global Initiative (www.ClintonGlobalInitiative.org), she feels refreshing to me, like the crisp release of pressure when opening a soda.

She has a somewhat manly quality, and maybe that's where her appeal lies, (I mean come on, does any self-respecting woman really take spritey Katie Couric seriously?). Her hips are narrow and her shoulders are broad. Her breats her only curves. Her hair is thick and black - no highlights, creams, or hairspray. Even without extensive styling it holds up like the baby-boomer housewife down the street whose natural style and body send the neighborhood wives to the salon in droves. Her features are a mixture of handsome (a strong chin and nose), dark (wide, piercing eyes and Iranian coloring), and feminine (full lips and high, cupped cheekbones).

In Hollywood, Catherine Zeta-Jones would be Amanpour's best, albeit sexified, match. They both have that nearly full British accent (Christiane born in London, lived her first 11 years in Tehran, then back to London). They both have deep, masculine voices: Catherine's is alluring in a Kathleen-Turner-come-hither-raspiness, and Christiane's is low and deliberate like the steady delivery of Walter Chronkite, a mid-range register appealing to the masses, dispensing words like tools of metal and wood.

She doesn't pose for the camera. Most reporters look into the lens like dogs when a treat is dangled in front of them, cocking their heads and pricking their eyebrows. They try to sensationalize the news with their pitchy voices and dramatic pauses in their speech. Christiane doesn't do that because she doesn't need to. She's objective. Purposive. She has the balls and the calculated restraint to let the story speak for itself.

She is the consumate correspondent; the regaled reporter; a cool chick.

Best if purchased by 5/17/last semester

My poetry is like a loaf of Wonder bread. If you don't keep it in the refrigerator, it will get stale and grow mold within a few days.
These are some gems from the deep freeze that I came across from my poetry class last semester and that my professor liked. I was forced to write stuff, and this is what I came up with. Since any piece of writing doesn't truely exist as art until it has an audience, I thought I'd post them. (The other four poems I had to write were dried into croutons for the birds long ago.)

Spring

The dogs are prepared for spring,
sheared like sheep in the
early Saturday sun. Blue postures on the porch
as the horse clippers lay tracks on his back,
and fur falls to the concrete collecting in a
loose merle fluff at his feet, or flies into the trees,
soon to become cribs for bald,
blind birds.

Cobber, the other, is dreaming under the car
and the machine’s buzz. His legs pump horizontally, taking
him nowhere. His lids beat as if he were seizing,
and I see the backs of his eyes – mucid, milky bulbs,
showing him nothing. Blue yelps and wakes his litter-mate.
A skin tab on his stomach got caught in the blade sending two crimson missiles
from his tuck, that spread into roses
upon impact. I put one finger on the wound. Cobber
tries to sleep. Blue’s blood coagulates. The sun warms
and melts snow.

I woke to silence on Thursday morning.
No cockatiel squawks or cat-calls from the cage in the foyer. I found
Mr. Yellow far from his perch, half-paralyzed, resting on the bedding.
With his beak and left foot, he drug his right side,
rung by rung, to the top of the cage, carrying his distress
like Quasimodo and the tower, trying to convince me
he was okay. Cancer. An olive-sized tumor on the x-ray.
“Probably on the testicle,” said Dr. Dan,
“It pressed on the nerve and paralyzed his right side.
Poor little guy.” A tumor as big as my thumb
in a bird as big as my hand. If we had caught
it earlier, even as recently as September, we could have helped. But birds
don’t show illness. In the wild, at the first sign of injury,
the bird will be killed. I whistled with Mr. Yellow the day before
we gassed him, blissfully unaware.


moon glow

she gives us light
rippled blue on lake waves
bright white on winter’s sheets
creamy through our window pane
showing you the way - your calloused hands
that fumble in her absence - not at all
during the day
rough on pink skin
i don’t want the light on
i want to show you with my
moon glow


-Thank you and good night.

Five years ago

Five years ago, I had just started my second year at the University of Iowa. I was living in my first apartment, alone, located behind a frat house on Oakridge Avenue, which we affectionatley referred to as "The Oak Ditch Holler". There were huge trees, a ditch, a stream, and altough it got too dark at night, it made me feel safe.

It was Tuesday. I got out of bed, took a shower, and fixed myself a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch with no milk because it gets soggy fast. I sat down on my purple couch and turned on the television to The Today Show. I must have been watching something on NBC the night before. Matt and Katie looked somber, but they delivered the news in the clear, steady voice that makes network anchor.

Someone was crashing planes into buildings.

When I left my apartment for class there was a helicopter circling the Old Capital overhead. When I arrived, my Professor (Margaret something) was crying at the front of the room. She was born in upstate New York and lived and wrote for twenty years in Manhattan. One of my classmates, a feminist with a bleached pixie cut, was crying with her. Her uncle worked in the World Trade Center and she couldn't get through to anyone on the phone. Details started leaking out from my other classmates: it wasn't an accident; all flights are grounded; thousands of people are dead. Two thousand seven hundred and forty nine, I learned today.

I spent the rest of the day in the student union, huddled around big screen tv's with strangers.

I didn't think about the future or what any of it meant because it was too soon. No one realized that it was far too late.

Divine Inter"vend"tion

Never wear a red polo to Target...

...especially on a day when there are tornados sucking up earth in all the surrounding counties and the emergency sirens are sounding as you pull into the parking lot. I don't care how much you need ice cube trays and a drain plug for your sink. Don't go to Target at all in these conditions, and if you absolutley have to, don't wear a red polo. Customers will approach you and ask you where the George Foreman grills are, even if you're wearing black pants, have a basket full of merchandise, and there is no trace of a walkie-talkie on your body. Then, when a tornado is spotted a few miles west of the city and you're coralled into the back room with every other customer and employee in the store, you'll find yourself avoiding eye contact with everyone because you're afraid they'll ask you when they can leave or how sturdy the building is or "doesn't this place have a basement?". You'll find yourself on the fringes of the mob, slinking down the baby doll isle, willing to risk being sucked into the vortex outside just because you wore your red polo to Target.

In a nutshell, that's how I was welcomed back to Mankato...in confusion, chaos, and frustration. But I only have myself and my Phoenix Staff shirt to blame. I hold no grudges. I went to Target last night for a hairbrush and a surge protector. I left with those items plus granola bars, a book that I won't have time to read, a prayer plant, and cork coasters.

School feels good again; familiar in many ways. Yesterday I felt the muscle soreness at the base of my neck that comes from toting between ten and thirty pounds every day in my backpack. The walk from my apartment to campus is considerably less this year (only about ten minutes from apt. door to office door), but it will still take a week or two to get used to. When I'm not wearing a skirt and have decent shoes on, I ride my bike, which cuts the commute in half but has it's own drawbacks: windblown hair, which can either look good or awful, and grease marks on my pants from the chain. Usually I just hike one pant leg up like LL Cool J to avoid that, but sometimes the wind is just too damn cold. Another familiar feeling is always being prepared with something to say in my Wednesday class that goes from 3:00-6:00 in case my stomach starts grumbling audibly. That's so embarassing. Who schedules a class through dinner time? Isn't dinner the most important American meal? Do they want me to lose all sense of my own culture? I'd be happy to live the Spanish lifestyle with siesta's and mid-day naps, but until then I'll just have to be ready to speak over the grumble.

The familiar is good to know, but rarely exciting. I have a batch of students now (hopefully the first of many batches) which is wonderful and exhilirating, but wierd because we co-exist in the same, relatively small, community. It didn't really occur to me until the end of the first week of class that I would be running in to these kids on campus. I was walking across the street and heard "Teacher, hey teach!" shouted from a car. Since I'm not used to being called "teacher" I didn't realize he was addressing me until he drove off and I saw the baseball hat he wears every Monday and Wednesday and realized who it was and that he was shouting to me. I'm afraid that 1) I won't recognize all my students and remember their names so I'll ignore them when I pass them in the halls, and 2) somebody will catch me when I'm having a really bad day or I'm in a pissy mood. I'm not exactley 'eternal sunshine' but I'll have to learn to fake it...but I detest even the idea of that...so I guess they'll just have to take me or leave me. Can't be everyone's best friend. I'm sure I'll run into kids at the gym when I'm sweaty and I have a scowl on my face from the soreness in my legs. God - what if I run into them at the bar. Shit. Maybe I can become the "cool teacher" who is "so laidback" and "throws back a few cold ones with us". So it is - so it shall be.

There's a skinny, mop-headed kid who brings his guitar to the plaza outside of Armstrong Hall (English building) and plays Sublime, Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, and takes requests. He played Sweet Baby James for me last May. His name is Jon - no 'h' - and he's got a sweet voice that can follow a melody anywhere. We have a loose agreement from last semester that I would accompany him with my mad tamborine skills. I haven't seen him around this year, which is disappointing, soI keep the window in my office open so I can listen for him. Maybe he's found another window in another building to play under. Maybe he's found someone who actually owns a tamborine and will shake their hips when they play.

Going Home

It's raining hard here. So hard that I can't hear the cars pass through the parking lot just 20 yards out. I can't hear the sounds that usually keep me up at night. It's all rain. It's the hardest it has rained since I've been here, and I've been keeping track. The slabs of concrete where we park our cars have become little lakes, and our cars, boats, docked until summer. In a few days I'll pull anchor and steer home, back to Iowa, like the water that is falling now into the Minnesota which will flow into the Mississippi and eventually to the Gulf. It's only natural.

There's just a spray of wet below the railing of my porch, about 4 inches deep. The rain can't reach me here, and the sun can't either. I have five potted plants shoved up against two windows. Two have grown catawampus towards the sun and I fear that one day they'll topple over on themselves; the cactus has turned brown in the back, but the spikes still sting; the bamboo has thrived; the last, a mystery breed, has died. But, I'll still pack all five up with me when I go, hoping for full recovery for most and one last shot at rehabilitation for the last.

The rain has slowed to a dull static - a song stuck between two frequencies - I hear it, know it, and I want to sing it, but just can't tune it in. There is thunder and lightning to my right, I'm guessing somewhere over the pond at Lyon's Park. I'll miss that pond, more specifially, the goose-shit covered path that circled it and the familiar goose-honks that followed me as I walked it. I'll miss my daily walk in the other direction too - to campus - on the wide, biker friendly sidewalks. I'll miss pushing the button at the corner for the little white man to show and usher me to the other side. I'll miss the faces too, and conversations about writerly things. I'll miss complaints about shared superiors, shared spaces, and shared frustrations.

Although it's almost midnight and so blue you have to look really closely to make sure it's not black, I can tell that the rain has stopped by looking at the little triangle of light coming from the streetlamp. There aren't any raindrops passing through it. There are frog calls coming from the pond beyond the parking lot, wet car tires over wet blacktop, and a steay drip from the roof to a metal grill lid on the lawn below...a rhythmic ting ting, ting ting...incessant as a leaky faucet.

As I said, it's almost midnight and the rain has stopped. So, there's not a very compelling reason for me to stay on this porch. Some rain will be absorbed into the soil. What doens't fit will be carried to the river via the sewers, and in a few days we'll both be barreling toward the Mississippi.

Wish list: Summer '06 --

In lieu of a New Year's resolution list, I have begun a new annual tradition for myself, the Summer Wish List. This includes, but is not limited to, things I want for myself, things I want for others, things I want to accomplish, things I want to avoid.

And now, in no particular order,
1) Get paid to









this summer.


2) Go to

and spin the



and give a smooch.

3) To marry Todd Sickafoose. He's sexy, he's sweet, and he knows how to go down...









...on the bass, of course.


4) To have the option to marry







. Even though I prefer the mens, it would be nice to know that if I preferred the womens I would have the right to marry one of them. (Hello boobs.)



5) To finally decide where on my body I want to put









and then to actually get it done.

6) Grow lots of tomatos, zuchinni, onions, eggplants, beans, etc, etc, etc in the






and survive solely on them for an entire year.

7) To never hear






speak again.

8) To have something important enough to say on this stage,






and to have people listen.


9) To spend AT LEAST one hour each day like








but with my computer, and not while lying in bed, and with less facial hair.

What Hy-Vee Tea means to me.

In the office…again. I just made myself a mug of Hy-Vee brand black Chai tea with water from the probably bacteria-infested fountain across the hall and I stirred in three – count ‘em, THREE – packets of Sweet ’N Low. Since I’ve banned myself from purchasing ANY food that doesn’t come from the grocery store, getting a mug from the Union or a diet soda from the vendo downstairs are not options. So, I’ve settled on the tea. I would have opted for caffeine pills if I had them, but I don’t, and I’m exhausted…again.

In just a few weeks, I won’t be writing five-page poetry analyses until 3 in the morning and then waking up the next day at 7am to bike to the library to finish the paper before work begins at noon. I’ll be back in DBQ, spending my nights in front of a campfire or seized by the soothing massage of hot tub bubbles. I won’t buy any tea, generic or otherwise, and probably won’t drink soda. During the days, my eyelids will be light and my eyeballs will be clear. My body will be rested and happy.

In just a few weeks, I won’t be kept awake by the following:
- The abrasive, wall-penetrating tone of Room-mi’s cartoon-like language, rising and falling, swooning and accusing, all in Korean so that I can’t even understand what the conversation is about, I just get to listen to the noise of it
- The car alarms from the parking lot below my window
- The constant wind that shakes my apartment building high up on the Kato Plateau. It’s Wizard of Oz wind. I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw a witch pedaling a bike out my window, three stories up.
- The sentences, paragraphs, and pages that write themselves in my head as I try to fall asleep. Lately, it’s the only time they’ll come; I have no access to them during the day when I sit down in front of a blank Word doc. So, when they appear in my mind, floating along the hazy balance of awake and asleep, I have to write them down or I’ll risk losing them forever.
- The muffled thumping from the apartment next door – more specifically, bed thumps – more specifically than that, sex thumps
- The eye-burning glow from my UltraBrite computer screen as I type out bullshit assignments that I don’t have done for the next day and that I know I could have done better if I would have started them sooner.
- The essays that I know I should write but never do.
- The fear that I won’t hear my alarm clock or that the batteries will fail in the middle of the night and I won’t wake up until dinner time.

I might, however, be kept awake by:
- The irresistible lure of old Roseanne episodes on Nick at Night.
- Knowing that I can stay up late downloading songs because I don’t have to be anywhere the next day.
- The sentences, paragraphs, and pages that write themselves in my head as I try to fall asleep.

But at least I’ll be home, and the sun will be hot, and the stress will evaporate. And if I get tired in the middle of the day, instead of consuming liquid uppers, I’ll take time between the far-more-distant deadlines and lazy, undemanding summer pressures and I’ll nap.

A warning....

....I type this blog a bit...under the influence. Pls forgive errors, rants, ramblings, and rumblings. My arms are tingly and heavy. The tiny joints in my fingers feel like the mechanical, ping-ping articulation of the The Terminator's robotic hand. I went to Good Thunder tonight, for a party. The route I took to get there was windy, with turns, snaked around hills and flattened out over fields. The road home was one: 66 - straight on home. My point here is that this blog will be more like the route there, winding and difficult to follow, than it will the road back. No...I had a better, clearer, cleverer point when I started writing that, but I've lost it somewhere along the way...no doubt on the road there, along it's curly-cued, multiple-county roads, but I know that the way back is straight. Jesus H. Forget it. I'm stoned.

What do I want to talk about? Carrie's party was fun tonight. I wish I had taken some pictures so that I could frustrate myself by trying to figure out how to get a freaking photo posted on this blog! Vivid description will have to suffice:
The fire was hot, and had orange-ish flames. There was a narrow walkway made
of retaining wall stone that went through the yard. It was hard to navigate
sometimes. The woodwork was simple, clean, overall attractive. They had a
kick-ass dining room table.
Anyway, there was a lot of good food there. Someone brought their child, a little girl, and she was speaking fluent Spanish and I thought it was just so adorable. When her mother or father weren't around (the little girl kinda just flew in and out of the house, so these times were common), I would try to communicate in her native tounge. "Hola!", "Como say llama?", "Bailas!". She ran away. Later on during the night, she was back in the kitchen, this time accompanied by an adult, and speaking in fluent English. So Impressed. SO IMPRESSED! There wer some cute men there, so that was good. Also, Carrie gave me a plant! She thinks it's iris, but she dug it up from her yard and put it in a pot and gave it to me! So Nice. So NICE! I wish more people gave me plants. I think I should give plants to people. And it's even more fun when you don't know what's in the pot. It'll be a surprise, like mine will, like my plant from Carrie.

It's been a long, crazy year, and now it's come down to the last three weeks. I feel joy and I feel pain. Some professors inspired, some professors sucked (one in particular: TouchDown); some essays soared, others died before they were even conceived; most days were "good" as in "sane", a few followed the gook down the drain. An expectation died (and hit hard), a blog was born.

It's wierd when people you think you know reveal to you what you don't know, and you never would have guessed it, or you might have and hoped you'd never see it. Or worse yet, when you want so badly to like someone, and have it be reciprocated, but then they do something that makes you realize you don't want to be friends with any person who could act like that or say those things. And why? And how could you ever understand her? You thought you could be the one, but it just couldn't happen. What will I do the next time I see her, after the way I see her has changed so drastically?

Oh, God, I almost forgot: Roo-mi (pronounced "roomy")! My Korean roommate! The following photo montage is a small example of the food I live with:

Shrooms? Well Room-mi, I had no idea.

These are bags full of old, crusty rice that she scrapes out of her giant rice maker. She saves them. And leaves them on the counter. Eugh.

Ha! This one is my favorite. Notice the Betty Crocker cake mix on the top shelf. Her one, American indulgence.

I live with this shit - on the counters or the stovetop, just sitting for days, out in the open sometimes, stinking up the entire place, so much so that my clothes have the permanent weird-food stench. It's like living in a barn, when I get into the city, among the cityfolk with their startched up Sunday bests, I can smell the manure-y cloud of stank emanating from my clothes. By I can't smell it in the farm, in the middle of all the farm-scented air. Point: my clothes stink. Lydia said she smelled it in my car, "big-time". I smell it as soon as I unzip my duffle bag back home. But it all blends in here in #733. I cannot wait to be rid of her and in my own place next year.
If you'll indulge me in a brief brainstorm about the things I will not miss about Room-mi:
the smell
the food (on the counters, overflowing the freezer, and even on the porch)
the phone conversations at 2AM, shouting Korean and laughing that annoying half-laugh
the pink rubber gloves that are stored ON THE SINK, like you can't put them UNDER
THE SINK
the freaking dishes - put them away!
the shuffle-walk
the never getting your own mail deal. you're welcome. again.
oh yeah, the not being able to speak English deal, too. that's annoying.

Ha! Hearty chuckle! Room-mi just came out into the kitchen and was surprised to see me. "Oh, hi" she says. Then I flash her a goofy smile with my eyes half shut that probably lasts a little too long. She gets into the kitchen and says, in that so odd whisper in english that isn't quite soft enough to not be heard, and is just english enough to be understoond, "HeHe...she's drunk..he". Ooooo Room-mi! Yes, yes, I am drunk. And burning insense. And flicking a lighter. Oooo she bugs me. And I'm a reasonable person - it takes a lot.

In summary, I hope this long, winding, rambling road has been a fun one at least, and that through it all, you see the true path, straight as an arrow, quick as a clear thought, that was there all along.

That's good and all, but EVERY day is Earth Day

I just got back from a refreshing rollerblade along the flat, treeless, refuse-dappled landscape that is my immediate surrounding area here at The Summit. I was cooling down on the porch with a half glass of Crystal Light when a blue-shirted brigade came out of the door underneath me: four girls and one guy dressed in matching light-blue tie-die t-shirts, toting garbage bags and pick-up sticks. (my apologies for all the hyphenation.) They are picking up all the trash around the pond, which is no small feat. The "nice view" I had off my porch when I moved in has turned from quaint patch of nature just beyond the parking lot to booze/cigarette paraphenallia catch-all. (I can't help it. I love hyphenated words.) I commend them for getting out there and doing their part, even though it is Earth Day and they might not be out there otherwise. It's a lot more than most people do.

And now, for a moment of self-congratulatory reflection: I feel good about my conservation efforts over my time at The Summit. I can count the number of times I've driven to campus on one hand, and that's including sub-zero, severe wind chill weather. I have walked or ridden my bike as much as humanly possible, risking tardiness(okay, sometimes causing tardiness), illness, sunburn, sweaty pits in class, and blisters on feet from new footwear. I carpool. I keep my tires full and the car light to save on mileage. What else, what else...I take short showers, don't leave the water running while I brush my teeth (you can save up to two gallons a day!), and I've stopped buying individually packaged foods to eliminate waste. (Some items are just ridiculous - break through the shrink-wrap to get to the individual box and then open that to a plastic bag that holds the goods.) I do more and need to do even more than that.

In elementary school I was in a play called "Every Day is Earth Day." I was a bird. One of the songs was a rap called "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle." Awesome. The melody is going through my head right now. Here's a little taste of the lyrics:
Recycle, recycle, recycle now/
I can teach ya if you don't know how/
So get your mama and your daddy and your sista too/
'Cuz recyclin' is the thing to do/
I didn't have any lines, but I had a kick-ass costume thanks to Pa and his infinite creativity. White leggings and a long sleeve-shirt underneath a body suite made of bright orange, yellow, and red feathers. But the kicker was the headdress. A Styrofoam halo of feathers, bobby-pinned into my permed, red hair. I stood in the back next to KT (a trash bag) and Andrea (a tree). We have it on tape somewhere.

Anyway, thanks light-blue-tie-died-shirt people for reminding me that it's Earth Day. I'll be thinking of you tonight at Carrie's bonfire when I'm roasting mallows over the fire and dreaming of summer nights under the stars in my relativley unaffected-by-pollution-so-that-the-nights-are-still-clear-city.

Uncomfortably enlightened.

I'm sitting in the office on a warm, sunny, springy Saturday afternoon. Came here to do work because I have SO much shit to do between now and the end of the semester. I wrote a gigantic e-mail to Ship, an unneccessary e-mail to my family, and now I'm finally writing my second blog. None of this is in the name of correspondence or productivity, it's all procrastination - my nemesis.

The "Comfortably Numb" remake by Dar Williams and Ani DiFranco just came on mvyradio. How freaking applicable. Damn you meaningful coincidences.

I have a crush on Angelina.

I Google her image. When I know Entertainment Weekley or E! News or one of those other ridiculously celebrity-obsessed shows is on, I tune in to the first few minutes to see if an Angelina story is coming and then I flip back to the channel periodically in case I can catch Angelina. I got a free trial membership to Netflix; rented 8 Angelina movies in just a few weeks; saw young Angelina, androgenous Angelina, schitzoid Angelina and slutty Angelina; so that I could fulfill my guilty pleasure through the mail and not in a video store with clerks who would probably take note of a young woman who only rents Angelina movies. I defend her against my friends and list all the reasons she's better than Jennifer Aniston (far too many for this blog). I wonder how she looks naked, although from all the images I've seen, I can piece together a pretty good fascimile. I wonder if she drinks red or white. I wonder if she's ever read Dillard.

I like the idea of Angelina. I want to be like her, not with her.

While I'm on the subject, Scarlett Johannsen is pretty freaking hot too.