Hooray for the weekend!! Hooray for sunshine! Hooray for shorts! Today I worked with some odd folks. Everybody who came in today was just slightly off. Using odd turn-of-phrases and pairing knee-high dress socks with cargo man-shorts. Even the weather was off. There was a dangerous looking thunderstorm and surrounded us. We could see the clouds and hear the thunder all around us, but the sun shone through this little pocket sky where we were. I spent most of the day with my brow furrowed. And now it is the weekend. Hooray!

Another rainy day, glorious and relaxing. Baked with my mom and my sister, then watched a movie (All the Pretty Horses). Poked around on Craigslist and found a seemingly super apartment. We shall see how things progress. You all know how I don’t deal well with uncertainty. I like plans and right angles and clean carpets. And cookies. God, we made some stellar cookies today. I tell you they were delightful. Thinking now, I just realized that the only things I’ve eaten today were sugary baked goods (and the dough from whence they came).

…Wow…

I feel like a fish stick. I mean, all of a sudden I feel like eating a fish stick.

In other news, last night I had a dream in which I got to be all of the characters. The dream included both a birth (I didn’t get to be the baby, however) and a jailbreak. We (a gang of wrongly accused, though suspiciously criminally adept prisoners) had to run through woods and a sort of wooden machine/jungle-gym/amusement park ride. I woke up when we got caught (though not apprehended) and the baby got taken away. It sounds much sadder than it was, because we all knew who would win in the end. It was a thrilling tale of love, adventure, and friendship.

Finally, a day off of work. After a disconcerting phone call this morning (most morning phone calls are disconcerting I suppose, this one was especially so), I called my mom and she came over and said all sorts of encouraging Mom things. Then Sisteree and I went to look for glasses. I found a pretty awesome pair, but they would have cost 400 dollars so…they stayed at the store. After a lovely lunch rejoining Mom at the Mexican Village, I went home and propped up pillows in my bed and watched a movie. Then I walked around Munsinger Gardens with cousin Ruth, who is both groovy and swell. Then I made brownies and watched t.v.

I talked with Ruth today about marriage and children and realized that my goals in life have shifted, probably temporarily, but shifted all the same. I think maybe I’m suited to being alone. While I’m still struggling with being out of a relationship/relationshark with This Certain Boy (TCB), I thought today–not for the first time in my life– that I imagine all sorts of interesting things for myself as a single person. I could buy a little house and put a tent inside of it. I could have an entire lifetime of secretly sleeping in a tent in my house. I could be a professor, respected by my students and colleagues and maintain a public life of friendship and respect (which I really do want) AND ALSO have an entire quirky free secret life of indoor tenting and god knows what else.

I’ve always felt that I was living two lives anyway. I suspect most people feel like that: everyone balances the imp and the superego. This is good. The tension between the two keeps people from both going crazy from lack of freedom and from self-destructing from lack of boundaries. What would happen to a person who clarified the lines between the two lives? I love my life/lives; what if I simply demarcated  the  different aspects of it into categories of being?

I know a guy named Ed who told me that men categorize everything into mental cabinets. They store various information in one or another cabinet and deal with one at a time. He also said that men have a cabinet in which they store absolutely nothing. The Nothing Cabinet. This, my dear ladies and gentlemen, is how men are able to do nothing and why women are not able to do nothing. You see, women’s brains, according the the ever-wise Ed, are tangled masses of live electrical wire. This is why we are on the fritz so often. Thus ends Lessons from the Gun Club. I’ll see you next week for our segment on whether the rising cost of lead is leading more and more to put down the rubber ducky in order to play the saxophone.

I’m blogging now, are you happy? Bloggity blog blog. I’m cranky. Today I got to work and realized that my tire was flat. Flat flat. It stormed last night so I had to sweep off the leaves and shit from the patio at work. When the leaves are wet, they cling to cement like saran wrap clings to…itself, I guess. Then I poked my self in the eye with the end of the broom. I have a black eye and a cut on the corner of my eye. Then I got my check and realized that they screwed it up AGAIN by not putting the correct amount of hours or the correct pay-per-hour or the back pay from last week’s screw-up. Then the wind blew a bucket of Mr. Clean into my face. You know it’s windy when there are white caps on your mop bucket. I hate you mop bucket. I hate you.

I’m writing this next little comment after I’ve taken a bit to calm down, so bear with the slight change of tone.

I heard a rap song on the radio today that, I swear, valiantly praises a well-known Victorian novelist. In the song, a young man spells the word “independent”, and then asks “you know what that spells, you know what that means?” Then, another young man interjects what I can only understand to be “Jane Austin! Jane Austin!” This seems accurate historically. Jane Austin was a popular writer in her time and was one of the first female writers to make her own unmarried way  by means of her pen. But can this be an actual rap song; are these actually the lyrics?

I’m going to recount only the highlights thus far.

Went to Duluth: Got the crap scared out of me. First impressions were that Duluth is a gloomy, industrial place and that its inhabitants (at least the ones I will encounter every day) had brains much more active and adept than mine.

Went to garage sales: with Dawn and my parents, separately. Got mirror, shirt, bedspread.

Saw trifecta: The highlight of highlights thus far, we ate and giggled and drank and watched movies. I regained a sense of okay-ness as well. I’d been feeling pretty blue in the preceding weeks. A message to the girls- I need you guys, as it turns out. You make me feel like the confident, odd, happy lady I actually am.

Had a birthday: ipod! Tacos! Family!

———

Here ends the recap, and here begins a normal blog.

Last night I had a dream that my brother went nutso and killed everybody in my family and I had to shoot him—- I know how sick and horrible that is, it freaked me out too. Sara says that I’ll be awesome in real-life horrible situations because they’ll seem normal compared to my dreams. Oh! also, I woke up without any clothes on. I went to bed with jammies and woke up without. Imagine how confused you would be if that happened to you. I’m telling you it put a whole twist on the day. A whole, where-the-hell-am-I-and-what-the-hell-am-I-doing shwizzle-spin on this beautiful sunny lazy Tuesday.

I’ve been having a lot of those pinpoint moments where I say to myself “did that just happen?” For instance, yesterday at work the owner of the club walked in with an elk head and says “mount it.” What experience in my life led me to the point where a millionaire hands over a goddamn elk and walks out, leaving my boss, Ed, and myself to wrestle a giant elk onto a tiny nail in the wall?  We named it Earl.

So, I graduate in a week. If I could do undergrad over again, I think I would have done it the same way, minus only a few classes (chemistry, bio, laaaaaaaaaw). I would have taken voice lessons the whole way through. I think I would have picked the same school. Academically and personally, I’ve enjoyed it here. If Concordia could be relocated out of Moorhead, I’d go for that, but overall my four years here have served their purpose.

I still don’t know where I’ll be next fall. I do know that I’ll be somewhere, St. Cloud or Duluth, but am waiting for Duluth to notify me of their acceptance -or rejection, but let’s think positively here- of my application for a graduate assistantship. If I do wind up at SCSU, and you’re taking Intro to Composition next fall, sign up for my class!! That sounds so weird. Babies and gentleman, boys and squirrels, I’m gonna be a professor.

In an effort to be more efficient, intelligent speakers, Meredith and I have been eliminating fillers from our speech. My pet filler has recently been the annoying “I feel like…”, which is even worse than “I think.” So, if you hear me using fillers in conversation, I don’t know, tell me to like, knock it off, or something.

Today I’m supposed to be writing a paper about Robert Frost. This is what I love about English classes: the vaguest assignment, a page limit, and the freedom to learn about whatever you want. This works particularly well for a Philosophy major who wants to do philosophy in literature. So, I’m writing the paper about how Frost refuses to ascribe to any particular political, religious, or moral ideology, but also hesitates to be relativistic. Hey! THESIS statement!! There it is! It just popped out! Woo.

It snowed. 15 inches, Mere says the internet says. April 26. I was sad. I called my mom yesterday and she talked me down off the edge. It’s weather.

I’m hongry.

For those who don’t know (and why don’t you?), my family has suffered under the tyranny of…a troll, for years. A young mutant without sense or soul squatted upon the home my parents built, literally and metaphorically, and shat upon it. This shitting was fairly drawn out, possibly one of the longer personal shittings (those shat by individuals upon other individuals, as opposed to systemic shittings, which involve entire groups of oppressive shitters) I’ve seen in my brief life.

Friends! I’m here to announce that the shitting has ceased! The bonds have been released and we shall stink no more!

Halleluia, halleluia, forever and ever, amen.

MAY I, MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE.

26 DAYS TILL GRADUATION

18 DAYS OF CLASS LEFT

THANK YOU.

I’m just so impressed. Some people are just really great.

I’m speaking of course, of Hillary Clinton and, to some degree, Barrack Obama. I went to see them speak last night in Grand Forks for the North Dakota Convention, and man are my wings tired.    yes?

We left, skipping myth (I’m so sorry Dr. Schmoll!) in the early afternoon, waited in line, found out that political conventions are like fairs minus weirdos plus a gavel minus cotton candy plus Bovarian almonds (”they taste as good as they smell!). There was much sitting. Initially, we had pretty crappy seats. Obama spoke movingly about the need for change and optimism and how Americans need to be Americans again. It was very moving emotionally, but not intellectually. He said some very nice things though.

HILLARY, on the other hand, knocked my socks clean off! Very specific, very ballsy, very “here’s a problem, here’s my plan, and here’s how we’ll implement the plan, here’s how things will be better, next issue, here’s the problem, here’s the plan…” Plus, Hil-top’s got a sense of humor! I don’t mean just little jokes in the introduction to her speech, but she laughed at a funny sign that someone had that came up on the Gigantoscreen. Allllso, she stayed and talked with people for forEVER afterward!  I hope hope hope she’s President.

OOOOOOooon a completely separate note: I’m okay.  I’ve retained my sense of humor, and also I’ve been practicing opening my knife with only my thumb. I’m okay…Mom, Dad.

I like this quote and I feel like it’s maybe applicable to the last week: “I can’t say that I’ve ever been lost. I was bewildered once for three days.” -Mark Twain

I’m happy to say I’m no longer bewildered. I’m bouncing back like Flarp! Noise Putty.

 Pay attention, this is what you need to know:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred mils through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver (page 222)