maybe you were kidnapped, tied up, and held for ransom?

No matter how quickly I rush home from work, how fast I eat, how rapidly and semi-carelessly I fulfill the immediate academic requirements of the day, I am only left with fifteen minute breaks in the day.

With my whole heart, I just want this semester to be over and done. Even though I have so many things to do before January 5th, I would gladly take the stress of doing those, rather than the drawn out, burning out, endlessly aching feeling of these classes.

Among the increasingly impossible stack of everyday things that I am running after is now taking care of the sick. I am not particularly maternal by nature but I do know how to be humbly attentive, as long as my patience holds out. Every time you drift away from me in slight delirium, and I have to leave to attend to a thousand other things, I go slightly catatonic with hurt and silence.

I have never suffered from such a profound lack of discourse as I am experiencing right now. I lack any words strong enough to penetrate the protective shell of numbness, and its subset of warm affection, down to unspeakably blank sadness around which everything else rotates.

Reading old Charlottesville City School Board papers from the desegregation process yesterday at work, I contemplated why we are weak and amnesiac. I knew people mentioned in those bulletins, and I knew that they had been involved when I was attending the very high school that was to be the result of these battle lines. But how could I have brushed that aside so lightly? Why are we constantly apathetic about the very real struggles of our parents' generation?

And why am I not as strong or as self-sacrificing as my own actual parents? I still don't understand how they unrolled their private drama and still functioned as a unit, always overshadowed by our needs, constantly at odds with their own families.

Maybe I just had less to lose, or less desire to save what I had. Or more of a self-destructive pride in just being free.

a rebel without a clue

Last night was the first time I really talked, a full disclosure from beginning to end, and even while I was being held and cradled and apologized to, I still wondered if I felt anything yet.

Mostly I am just focused on getting through.
-through the hundreds of pages of reading I am behind
-through the raging cold/virus I am fighting
-through the mid-range steps of my meandering path to Lyon (update: plane tickets purchased!)
-through the massive piles of clean laundry, the lack of sleep pushing behind my eyes, the books I have to read that I can't even find
-through the clinging attachment that leads me to write French papers with you curled up in my bed, fast asleep with a stuffed pony under one arm
-through yielding, giving in, allowing myself just to be admired and stretched out and wholly decadent.

I'm skipping class to get homework done, which strongly suggests that I should go do that reading now.

the fountain of apollo at the garden of versailles

Six songs for the current moment, in a specific order:

Viva La Vida // Coldplay
Forever // Chris Brown
Butterfly // Mason Jennings
Starting Now // Ingrid Michaelson
Crazy Faith // Alison Krauss
Mary Jane's Last Dance // Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Isn't that just about everything?