I'm sitting in the library "working on my thesis." As I have been for the last two hours. This is, approximately, how I have spent that time:
10:20 - 11:20: focused and much-needed editing on what's written thus far
11:20 - 11:30: thinking about my categories and how to organize them, since nothing I've written is actually IN any kind of order
11:30-11:45: wandering around the library, looking at books with pictures (I found the section on Idaho history)
11:45-12: surfed the internet
12:00-12:15 - wrote a couple paragraphs from my most recent research and notes. Slightly distracted by listening to Clap Your Hands, which indicidentally is not very good study music
12:15-12:30 - checking email
12:30-present - writing on my blog
Woot.
I think I might have a fast-developing case of ADD. Or maybe I just need a break.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Saturday, April 5, 2008
the question
is my course now going in circles?
I was in the middle of my shift at Wild Ginger, a slow Saturday lunch, when a server stood before me with an intense and surprised gaze.
"Do you ever hang out on the hill?"
I look at him. He does not look familiar. I tell him I do, but not often.
"Why?"
And then I remember.
Don Quixote. Standing before me, in the daylight, as sober now as I had been that night. The stranger who now suddenly isn't.
When I get home, I dig out my myriad journals and search for the entry I know I have written. It is small and inconspicuous, starting at the very bottom of a page, with the words, "Tonight I kissed a stranger, and it was a very very bad kiss." I remember the moment, I remember the distant feeling that it was a one-time occurrence, that we were two ships passing in the night. Because when he told me about myself, he said things that were true, and I needed to take them to heart.
And have I?
I can't shake the feeling that we weren't supposed to run into each other again. And he is not the one who is in the wrong place.
Here are the truths that I never speak. Because what Don Quixote told me was that I felt estranged from my family, from the people closest to me, that I felt they did not understand me. That I hungered for a place I hadn't found.
My parents are facing the first move of their married life, as my father gives up the only profession he has ever known and they leave the farm and the farmhouse that holds my entire childhood. Not by choice, really, but with no other options, as the weird and chronic disease that has been part of his life for over a decade has gradually taken away his ability to work.
My grandmother on my mother's side is in the later stages of Parkinson's disease. She is slipping away from us. The last time I saw her, I don't think she recognized me. But what if, for one last moment, she did?
The question arises, as I walk the cement streets between cement buildings, and work at jobs I don't really like, and watch the city with a growing hunger for sunshine and open space---
Why am I here and not there?
"
I was in the middle of my shift at Wild Ginger, a slow Saturday lunch, when a server stood before me with an intense and surprised gaze.
"Do you ever hang out on the hill?"
I look at him. He does not look familiar. I tell him I do, but not often.
"Why?"
And then I remember.
Don Quixote. Standing before me, in the daylight, as sober now as I had been that night. The stranger who now suddenly isn't.
When I get home, I dig out my myriad journals and search for the entry I know I have written. It is small and inconspicuous, starting at the very bottom of a page, with the words, "Tonight I kissed a stranger, and it was a very very bad kiss." I remember the moment, I remember the distant feeling that it was a one-time occurrence, that we were two ships passing in the night. Because when he told me about myself, he said things that were true, and I needed to take them to heart.
And have I?
I can't shake the feeling that we weren't supposed to run into each other again. And he is not the one who is in the wrong place.
Here are the truths that I never speak. Because what Don Quixote told me was that I felt estranged from my family, from the people closest to me, that I felt they did not understand me. That I hungered for a place I hadn't found.
My parents are facing the first move of their married life, as my father gives up the only profession he has ever known and they leave the farm and the farmhouse that holds my entire childhood. Not by choice, really, but with no other options, as the weird and chronic disease that has been part of his life for over a decade has gradually taken away his ability to work.
My grandmother on my mother's side is in the later stages of Parkinson's disease. She is slipping away from us. The last time I saw her, I don't think she recognized me. But what if, for one last moment, she did?
The question arises, as I walk the cement streets between cement buildings, and work at jobs I don't really like, and watch the city with a growing hunger for sunshine and open space---
Why am I here and not there?
"
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