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I graduate in 63 days
And I feel fine!
I’ve been thinking about this line, from one of Liv’s poems: what to do with time/here, time still left.”
There’s a lot one has to do, apparently. The sort of all of your plates, and all of your bowls packing-up energy. And also something to do with this software named Stellic? I receive many emails about this Stellic, emails which have begun ratcheting up in ALL-CAPS-baby-on-fire urgency, but emails which have not begun, yet, to address me directly by name—that’s when you know they’re serious.
Sometimes, though, you get so wrapped up in answering the “what to do” question that you forget you are actually answering it right now. All of your moments, spent answering it. Over dinner, a friend said that if you spend all your time with friends simply catching up, what sort of relationship do you actually have? I think the same framework applies to the future: you can plan and plan and apply and apply, but at some point the future is here, and you’ve just got to live. “Where can we live but days?” Philip Larkin writes.
Continue readingThe tape will stop the mouse from escaping the closet
I’m taking refuge while the boys downstairs consume football.
Most of us are from Massachusetts, but we also have a resident Coloradan, and THERE’S TENSION. Apparently.
Continue readingWe’re running a goddamn newspaper
And sometimes it’s great! We’re publishing important pieces, and running funny comics, and creating a shared sense of empowerment, and other times it is 1am time, and we’re still workshopping headlines for the most suburban op-ed known to man because apparently 18-year-olds have very important thoughts.
But we’ve all been young.
The newspaper and radio station share a building, and every Thursday at 10pm, this 60-year-old local radio DJ walks into the office, declares, “You’re all fake news!” and everyone cheers.
“I was waiting for you all to come back,” he says. “It was lonely around here with no one to pick on.”
Continue readingAlright so everything’s great but also this is crazy because
My housemate submitted his Fulbright application this morning.
How are those possibly due this early?? That cannot be true. Who knows their future self a year in advance? And those other September deadlines, from where did they creep? Who let them in? What are we all going to do next year, and why did we have to start planning that answer months ago, because we just got here — we’ve barely figured out how to do this thing. I’ve been living off of cereal and trailmix and scavenged fruit for a week. I’m still figuring this out.
So maybe we just throw ourselves at cover letters and coffee chats and fracture our futures into formulas for fellowships on foreign continents but also there’s laundry to do and dishes to wash and will someone close the blinds in the bathroom, the neighbors can see right in.
I go for a long run.
First years on the library steps during orientation
Continue readingSome bumps in the road. Some fairly sizable bumps in the road.
Whew. It’s been an intense week. I’m glad you’re here.
Eight days ago, my housemate Lilly and I got into a pretty bad crash on our drive back east.
“You know when you ask Google to ‘do a barrel roll’?” I tell a friend. “It was kind of like that.”
Continue readingTwo weeks left in Berkeley
I’m walking down the street in San Francisco when someone approaches me.
“Do you know any cool things to do around here?” he asks.
“What?” I say.
“I just moved here,” he goes. “I’m looking for recommendations.”
“Like this?”
Sooo yeah, I’m a local now.
Continue readingWhere the weather is mild and spirits are high
We had a funeral for a bird. Decapitated. Whole big thing.
One of the house’s chickens died last week. (I am so tempted to write “co-op’s chicken,” but puns don’t feel appropriate at this stage of mourning — is there a pun stage of grief? I would put it between bargaining and depression.) The chicken was egg-bound, which is actually a new term for me and is quite graphic so I won’t go into any detail here, but the bird’s name was Lindsay LoHen, and she will lay to rest in the old amphitheater next to the graves of Chicki Minaj and Meryl Cheep.
It’s been pretty wonderful here.
California Dreamin
I’m standing in the parking lot of an O’Reilly Auto in Steamboat, Colorado.
Hunched over the Corolla’s open hood, I’ve got four new spark plugs and a socket wrench and I’m trying to rip out these ignition coils from the engine because I’ve got a mission and a vision and I’ve watched a few YouTube videos goshdarnit.
Jake approaches. He tells me in at first uncertain and then certain terms that this is a bad idea, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and we have a functional engine so let’s keep it that way.
I sigh. I concede. I check their returns policy.
“Projection,” Freud writes, “is the essential character of every love.”
Goshdarnit.
Continue readingThomas Road Trips: the first 2,100 miles
There is a fly in the car.
It buzzed in someplace between Des Moines and Omaha, and Jake’s got a death warrant for its beady little eyes. He’s thrashing around and opening windows and hooting and hollering at it, and I’m yelling, because “Jake, you can’t possibly kill a fly! You will never catch that fly! And if you can’t make peace, it will drive you and me insane and off the road and into a ditch and have you ever even seen Breaking Bad??”
We are, truly, having so much fun.
Continue reading