Oh but I

Today was a little overwhelming. I think I spent at least ten hours trying to write a good three-page essay for US Foreign Policy, and I don't even know what "good" was supposed to be. Fingers crossed that whatever my hands managed to wring from my brain was at least C-material, because that thing was 30% of my final grade. I like that class because I feel like it's challenging, but I hate the fact that everyone is older and more knowledgeable, has had the professor before, and in general makes me feel like a total ignoramus.

I have a presentation on Wednesday and a 12-page essay due on Thursday that I haven't started yet. Deep breaths.

Tonight is a little break, though, I guess... at least a couple of hours worth, since I was either in the library or in class from 7 am this morning until 4:30 in the afternoon. I walked around in the rain, talked to Kevin back home and my mother, who is actually in California (same time zone for once) visiting her sister.

I've been listening to Gulag Orkestar all night, imagining bomb shelters and Eastern European summers and toy pianos abandoned on less-than-picturesque beaches with gulls in the skies above. I am ready for summer and slightly craving oppressive heat, the kind that makes it so that you no longer give a fuck what you're wearing and just want to be as close to naked as possible.

I need space to think. I can feel my brain trying to check out, and my fight-or-flight instinct inclining more towards flight, but I keep reminding myself it's a little too early.

I own every bell that tolls me

Strange dreams last night.

We were on a train hurtling through the countryside, and it looked like the countryside in the Philippines... rainforest-y and rice-paddied, alternatively. We were slaves and we were trying to escape, but some woman at the front was watching us. Finally we convinced everyone (I think there were four of us). We ran through the forest and over the hills and then the forest was Oregonian and we were hiding in a thicket surrounded by snow. One girl was left out and she came tunneling through the snow with a Bible in her hand because a verse told her where to dig through the snow, and we were all together.

Then it started over and we were back on the train like in the first part, but everything was different. One girl had to get up on the wall and be the clock, and I was annoyed that the motion of her hands as they counted the seconds conflicted with the other ticking clock. She couldn't see out the windows and we couldn't convince her to leave. No one wanted to, and somehow escape seemed impossible and everyone was watching us more closely. It was slipping away. Finally I ran away but no one came with me, and the forest changed again like before, but I was the one outside the snow, with Tala and a bunch of my friends inside. I was holding the verses and trying to follow the instructions to dig through, and I could hear the people inside, but I could never get it right, and so I just kept scooping the snow away with my hands. The wall never seemed to get smaller and I don't know if I ever got in.

In other news, we don't have a place to live for next year nailed down yet. Ha.. ha... ha.

Waitlisted... like a FOX!

I think I am going a little bit nuts from stress. Which is probably why Kenna and I have a random shit blog called Shrike People now. You should check it out.

I am waitlisted for two classes, which are almost the ONLY classes I can take to fulfill requirements. Jesus fucking christ. If I do not get in to at least one of them I will rip out something's heart. It could be an artichoke's, but we'll see.

Anyway, my horribly crippled schedule as it stands now:

MWF, 10:20-11:20 : Spanish Comp/Conv (301)
MW, 12-3 : Photo I
MW, 6-7: Self Defense for Women
TTh, 9:40-11:20: Colonial Latin American History (141)
Sunday, 7-8: Ghanaian Music and Dance

KILL ME. I just want to take fucking International Organizations or Econ 100, is that too fucking much to ask?

Mulled

I feel like I am slowly slipping and falling over and everything, everything is covered in a sheen of beauty.

It's all sideways.

Brevity lets you fill in the spaces between words with something better than what would have been there originally.

I had a great day, the kind you would read about in a book, full of twists and turns and with a very happy ending. I am curled up into a ball of safety and warmth and I am prepared to have the best sleep ever, then bust my ass tomorrow with a workout and homework. This has been great.

I think the world it will anoint me, if I show it how I hold it

Sometimes I think the line between romance and bastardized, crass reality is pretty blurry.

Like taking something you thought was beautiful three years ago out of the box and realizing that it just seems cheap, sentimental, simplistic, ugly; you thought it was transcendent but it's actually just pap. Things that used to cohere seem a little too disparate to share the same space comfortably. Why do things go from glorious to trashy to disgusting to glorious again and how can they drift around in the spaces between those words, never completely affixed? I think sometimes my problem is that I don't pin anything down. Everything is beautiful and then ugly again if you've stared at it long enough.

I am sleepy but all I can seem to do when I try to fall asleep is lie there for hours, thinking. I am confused, because there is no real reason for me to be an insomniac now. I'm not terribly stressed and I stopped drinking caffeine late in the day. Maybe I am keyed up and I just haven't realized it yet. April frightens me this year.

A year ago, exactly, I was on a plane back from the Philippines. A bookend. I feel like I divide my life into plane flights now, which isn't so bad, and which is also why I enjoy flying alone. It scares me to think of myself as a continuum, rather than a loose conglomeration of fragmented selves. I associate with past iterations of myself the way one looks at old photos in an album. When I came back last year it was severe culture shock, like some kind of benevolent post-traumatic stress disorder, complete with flashbacks. I tried so hard to acclimate myself to life somewhere else that when I came back it was difficult to adjust. Everything reminded me of the kids and the people I worked with, and whenever my brain was unoccupied memories came flooding back in to fill the space. My mind was always somewhere else, touching down in reality only occasionally, when necessary. I miss that. I learned so much while I was gone and I feel like I'm just losing it slowly, because so much of it was intangible and indescribable. I don't want it to fade into distant memory, to become something insignificant, but that's what it will be eventually.

The few times I was really upset in Manila (and there were a few... sometimes it was hard), I remember lying in bed, crying, drawing a mental line back home, crossing the ocean and the vast distance. I always got that strange feeling where you know that you're far away but you don't feel like you are; it seems like your surroundings might just be an extension of your hometown, altered slightly. It happened in Thailand, too. In both cases, I was literally halfway around the world. I miss the swelling feeling of empowerment and beautiful isolation that comes with the realization that you are very, very far away from home and totally on your own, which was one I got every so often at my barangay.

I've just been thinking about it a lot lately, as it dawns on me that I've been back for a full year. My life felt kind of... stagnant for such a long time. I was so sick of waiting. And then the past year and a half was nuts. Maybe too many new hats for such a short expanse of time.

Subterranean Homesick Blues

... I don't really want to go back to school.

My flight leaves at 6 am tomorrow. This means we have to leave for the airport at 4:30, which means I would have to get up at about 3:30, which would be 12:30, Oregon time, and which means that I'm not going to bed tonight, because there is actually no point.

I have so much homework to do and so much everything to do and I didn't do any of it and I BLAME KEVIN. All his fault. Boyfriends are (wonderful, but still) timesucks of the third degree. Last night we walked around my neighborhood for an hour at 3 am just talking.

I'm trying to get a job at one of the nicer ice cream places downtown. That sounds like the least ambitious thing ever, but fucking hell, that is ALL I want. I just want a job I don't hate. It doesn't have to pay a lot. I'm worried that they won't hire me because I won't be back in town until early May, but that's still a month before Ohio State students get out, so... I don't know. I'm hopeful. If my only option is what I did last year - being abused by management and the elderly for LESS THAN minimum wage, I'm just... not going to take it.

It's really lovely here. Most people envision the Midwest as full of cornfields, or simply disgusting. Today there is a breeze and it is spring; the flowers are coming out and it's 65 degrees. Why the hell would I ever want to go back to school, to finals and research papers and deadlines that keep getting closer and closer? Six more weeks...

Like Kenna said, I just want to bring my friends here. I miss spending time with my parents. I'm really looking forward to this summer; it looks like I'm going to DC with my dad for a few days, catching a train to Philly, seeing my relatives there, maybe seeing Anna and a few other people I know, then catching a train to NYC to maybe visit a few more friends and spend a week or two with my sister. This sounds like bliss, especially because she actually has air conditioning this year. Plus, it won't be expensive! I'll only have to pay for a one-way flight. Awesome.

You know, I think if I could choose any existing building to live in, I would live in the Smithsonian. That's where some of my fondest childhood memories were born. I was three when my parents took me there for the first time, and they lost me because I was so enthralled by the giant squid, all laid out in a glass case in formaldehyde, that I ran away and found my way back to it. They found me with my nose pressed up against the glass, hypnotized by the dead leviathan.

More please

I want to be home longer. It's impossible to have time for my family, Kevin, my friends, myself, and a jobhunt in just a week.

I left my camera at Kevin's apartment after a ridiculous night (the way you're probably interpreting that is, by the way, incorrect) and I feel like I lost an arm. That might also partially be because the right side of my body has yet to fully regain function.

I fell off my bike for the first time in about fifteen years. Seriously, the last time I must've been six. I realize that math is incorrect.

I'm not sure what happened, but I was going down a hill and then I felt something jerk and the bike flung itself to the side and something flung me to the other side and I remember thinking "oh shit, this is going to hurt and this really, really sucks" and the milliseconds ticking slowly and then I was on the ground. And a few seconds later it hurt. I got up and the old man behind me was asking me if I was alright, and I said yes, definitely, in a far-too-alert fashion, and he told me to look at my elbow, which was in tatters. I shrugged, grabbed my stuff off the pavement and ran away, because my flight instinct had kicked in fast and hard and all I wanted to do was run away and proverbially lick my wounds in the shadows. Upon further investigation I realized I was missing quite a lot more skin than I had initially thought. And my helmet was cracked, meaning I probably hit my head way harder than I actually realized. Great. It all kind of hurt and I was kind of shaken up, but I was four miles from home so I decided to just keep going... bleeding the whole way, because all of the bathrooms at the park were locked. It's great to bike around covered in blood.

Going home was great, because I got to pick the gravel out of my skin and because the shock had worn off and everything was starting to really hurt. It still hurts. I couldn't pick anything up with my right hand for two days, and for some reason it hurts to flex the muscles. My ribs are bruised and my shoulder is fucked. I do have a really great bruise on my right side that's a nice shade of purple and continuing to grow, however, so I have that to look forward to.

It's been a few days and I think things are fine... no permanent damage, hopefully. I'm mostly weirded out by the fact that I didn't react very strongly when it happened. I did a LOT of damage to my skin and muscles, but I felt fine for a strange amount of time and later I could barely move without involuntarily yelping in pain. Weird. I'm not too broken up about this, though I guess it seems like I might be judging by how much I wrote - I just want to document it because I can't even remember the last time I hurt myself this badly (which isn't that badly... it's not like I went to the ER).

It appears spring break is half over, and this is unfortunate.