That Old Familiar Summer Daze

I have neglected this blog for far too long. Mostly because I forgot the username, but also because I have had very little time to write anything outside of school.

 

As far as summers go, this has been a pretty good one so far, though. A blur of classes, working, adventuring, general summertiming. It's so hard to believe that this is sort of my last summer of late adolescence. Okay, so I'm 20 and no longer a teenager...but I still live with my parents, I'm still and undergrad, I still have a buffer between myself and the scary world of adulthood, taxes, and rent. I recently bought my first car, and have been introduced to the world of insurance and various other payments. For the first time my name is on the mailing address of these bills and statements. This realization that I'm a grown up (kinda) hit me while I perused grad programs (my favorite being the MA in Cultural Studies) in late June. It was not the first time I had looked at grad schools, but they had always seemed so far away--like I was researching for a dream vacation that would probably never happen. But it is happening, and I'm shifting into adulthood, and I can't stop time.

 

I feel excited for all the new things ahead--getting my masters, getting my DSW, entering the work force, being totally independent. 

I'm also fucking nervous. This nervousness has sublimated into a need to return to and shift through all my remaining childhood possessions. I don't think it's an unconscious need to relive childhood, or an act of regression (though I wouldn't know, given that it would be unconscious. heh.) but more of a fare-thee-well. The toys, drawings, report cards, photographs and knick knacks remain in their boxes while my collection of grownup mementos continues to grow--textbooks, papers, forms, bills, account statements. If only those envelopes didn't look so serious...maybe if they looked inviting and fun the transition wouldn't be so jarring. My clothing has made a similar transition from band shirts and bright tones to neutrals and plain shirts. 

But I'm not an adult yet, and I refuse to ever erase playfulness from my life. So I continue to put off replacing my plastic X-Men wallet even though it's falling apart. I still jump in every puddle, visit playgrounds, spin on office chairs until I can't see straight, and all of my folders feature portraits of small baby animals. Everything may be changing, and I might not be able to freeze time, but I still have a little while until full fledged adulthood, and I might as well make the most of it.

I think the rest of the summer will go swimmingly. 

Downpour.

The thunder clapped like a sheet drying in prairie wind. Its crispness slowly unfolded, the creases that let go of themselves and turned into cool damp slides. Their only purpose to catch the fat drops that soak into the fabric, until every thread was filled and gushing at the seams. Streams of water raced through dusty front yards, creating tiny rivers and enormous puddles, filling every crevice it could find. The dust slowly becoming muck, the potholes miniature lakes.

For a split second the entire stretch of earth became illuminated, the sky, the grain, the houses spattered anywhere. It all, for a microsecond, was pure white. A calm transcendence, a pinhole in the firmament. The fire lit faces extinguished in a hiss. The comfortable warm scent replaced by sporadic flashbulb bursts.

When they raise their tired heads and open their shadowy eyes everything will be the way it was before. All of the rain, the astounding down pour, will have vanished. Everything feels cleaner, but nothing looks different.

one.

I have always felt a vague apprehension towards blogging, worried that it will just become a day-by-day account of my life, or someone elses life, or perhaps a a quasi-artistic meditation on god knows what. However through the stubborness of procrastination, another sleepless morning approaching, and perhaps a dash on vanity I have made the final cultural assimilation into my generation: here are my words, rambles, musings, tid-bits and scraps.


Introductions have never been a strength of mine, and conclusions tend to be worse. However, I hear the middle parts are sometimes interesting. But you can't very well get to the middle without and introduction, proper or otherwise. So here are some things that make me particularly happy, as pleasure is often overlooked in blogs (at least that I've read).

• Rolling down hills. The "thump thump thump" of your limbs and head hitting the dirt at different times and angles. The smell and taste of freshly cut grass (or dried clippings) that cling to you like cigarettes. If there is one particular activity that defines summertime, it's this. And an active participant in my chronic "mysterious bruise syndrom"



• Words. How a slight rearangement connotates a drastic difference in meaning. The loopholes, anatomy, sound, sensation, and symbol of these abstractions. Using them and reading them. During fits of procrastination I've been reading "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" by Jacques Lacan, and it's probably the reason that I won't finish any of the papers for any of my classes.
  
• Those nights that end in mornings, that can never be recreated, and that always consist of a Sheetz run and my torso half way out the window speeding down route 5 screaming Pearl Jam.
• Stars.
• Exploring woodlands and getting lost.
• harmonicas, banjos, mandolins, and murder ballads.
• twelve strings, six strings, slides and gutteral howls.
• grilled cheese sandwiches.
• The following women: Bertha Capan Reynolds, Nawal El-Saadawi, Patti Smith, Katie-Jane Garside, Zora Neale Hurston, H.D., Isabelle Allende, Courtney Love (judge all you want, she probably writes better lyrics than you), Marya Hornbacher, Germaine Greer, Judith Butler, Maya Deren, Iris Marion Young
• The following men: BOB DYLAN, T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, Marcel Duchamp, William Faulkner, Arther Rimbaud, Carl Jung, Slavoj Zizek, Jean Cocteau, Louis Althusser, Louis Bunuel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Blind Willie McTell, Son House, Skip James, Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck
• American Moderist literature/poetry/manifestos
• camp fires, and how the smell of burnt cedar never washes out
• Watching the sun rise
• Being with the people that I love, and who love me, and all the warmth from those interactions
• wearing childrens clothing (without people even realizing)
• tin types, memento mori, and high collared blouses
• make-believe, dress-up, glitter, bubbles, and coloring books
• making lists.

I'm going to make this a place for positivity.

There is just too little of it left in our generation, and yes the world is a scary place right now, but complaining won't fix it. I have very very very little to complain about in my own life, so this shall henceforth me a whine free zone. (this doesn't mean I won't bring up injustices or oppression from time to time, in fact I will most of the time, but any complaints about my personal life? Why bore you?)

peace,

C.