Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Maybe it will be a little countdown tradition?

It being precisely five weeks until I go home, I am taking this moment to compose a short list of places I just can't wait to go.

1) The dojo. Uptown, downtown, class, or workout, I can't wait to get back to being the eternally-abused brown belt.
2) The barn. I would be happy to reek of horses, leather cleaner, and hay-dust.
3) Bodo's.
4) The downtown mall -- I hear it's having a facelift?
5) The nest.
6) My huge, low, down-comforter-dominated bed at my parents' house.
7) Proffit Road.
8) The Lawn-proper, The Corner, steps of the Rotunda, Old Cabell, Harrison-Small, and of course ALDERMAN.
9) Greenberry's.
10) Daedalus Books.

listening to: ML's mix (rap side)
reading: notes for Souveraineté et Mondialisation

Sunday, April 26, 2009

dive in like honeybees

I have so much to say, and it feels like so little time left to say it.

Maybe I never mentioned that I could never stop writing, not even for a brief hiatus, when I turned my back on the suggestion of being an English major and fell into the challenge of learning about something new. I know what you're thinking, that I could have sunk so deeply into literature, poetry courses, an interdisciplinary creative writing honors program, and come through these long four years with a portfolio worth showing.

I wonder if that would have been a better use of my time, as I tap my fingers on the dirty table and wonder how I am supposed to write a historical thesis abstract in the the next twenty-three days.

It's been more than four months since I've sat down to write an academic paper, the notes and sources and reference books arranged around my cross-legged form in a perfect semi-circle, coffee cups perched on the table and ignored, a pen twisted in my hair to keep it out of the way as I frown in concentration, my fingers flying to keep up with the corseted, gasping, tightly-laced flow of facts and images. I haven't recently had the pleasure and the tension of a deadline ticking down, the exquisitely formatted margins bottlenecking my text, three tabs on citation formats open in the background.

When I write papers, I write them straight through, churning out a page every fifteen minutes with footnotes included, racing through a detailed outline, until finally I reach the end. Then I sit back, reread, edit, scowl and change things, delete and add, move paragraphs around, polish the piece.

That love/hate relationship with the tightly bound freedom of writing papers is, at the end of the day, why I want to write a thesis so badly. Maybe sometimes I have been forgetting that desire.

Reading: my notebook
Listening to: What Sarah Said // Death Cab for Cutie

Thursday, April 2, 2009

listmaking early on a Thursday morning.

In precisely two months I'll be journeying home.

Here are the things I can't wait to see:
-bagels
-correctly formed lines
-stores that are open between noon and 2pm
-trees, grass, and similarly green things
-mountains
-American coffee
-ponies
-you

Here are the things I could be fine with never seeing again:
-American cars
-news from the conservative right
-my class schedule for fall 2009
-traffic on 29-North
-prices in dollars
-most fast food restaurants