The First False Sunset of the Season

Well, the summer has begun. Naturally that means spending my first night on Orcas during a windstorm and consequently taking an hour and a half the next morning dumping water and pine needles out of bowls on the backyard tables at the pottery shop. No matter. I told myself this would be my summer, and what better way to start than having the only noteworthy comment by a customer be, "Excuse me, would you mind if I take a picture of your cat?" Because, of course, who would want to take a picture of the hundreds of gorgeous ceramic masterpieces, laboriously thrown and glazed and fired to soul-numbing temperatures, when there is a feline in the vicinity? Can you take a picture of my cat? Knock your socks off. He's not my cat.

Over the past two days, I have become paranoid about two things: phone calls and the crunch of car tires on the gravel. Let's dissect this, shall we? 1) Phone calls mean pottery orders. Pottery orders mean questions that I can't answer, being the only one working in or near the shop for the next week. 2) Cars mean customers. Customers mean questions that I can't answer, being the only one working in or near the pottery shop for the next week.

My evenings are spent huddled in a near-fetal position in front of my computer with my hood up and my hands wrapped around a mug of tea, obsessively watching the last five minutes of the season finale of House, in which House and Cuddy finally get together. Is this necessary behavior? Absolutely not. But here I am in my refrigerator of a yurt, inadvertently memorizing an entire scene of my favorite television show just because I'm the world's biggest sucker for romantic entanglements in medical dramas.

Also. Sue Scott from A Prairie Home Companion is my hero.

Foiled Again!

Greetings from the PR-PT 2500 section of the library--third floor south, window side--where it is a balmy 74 degrees Fahrenheit (really that's just an estimate, but I have an uncanny sense about these things). I have just decimated my tall nonfat Duke (wow, okay, that sounds dirty--it's an Earl Grey tea made with milk), and I am busily clicking away at my thesis. You know you're in for a long weekend when you seek your professor's help during office hours and get an emailed response with the subject "You may not thank me..." Thus I am here, now entering hour two, while outside the window the entire Music Department is parading up and down the sidewalks with stereos blasting some radio station for God knows why. On this campus, I've learned to never ask questions.

I have exactly eight days of classes until my undergraduate career is over. It's so weird. I can remember every thought in my head as my parents hugged me goodbye, climbed in their car, and headed north. Four years ago, the 45 miles between Tacoma and Woodinville were enough to make my mind spin. Home was halfway across the world.

Now that I've heard the bells chiming "Eight Days a Week" and "Let it Be" on Saturday mornings from my usual perch in the library (second floor, corner of the D section--I thought I'd mix things up for today), now that I've eaten at least one black bean burrito every day since second semester of freshman year, now that my trusty computer has seen me through 24 American classes and eight Australian ones, it's nearly time for me to make the 45-mile trek back home with a car full of a finished life. I'm not ready to graduate. I don't know enough yet.

I'll miss waking up to the stench of pulp from the paper mill across the river. I'll miss how each floor of the library has its own autonomous climate system. I'll miss writing the story of the Broken Flying Screw with Tyler, the five-year-old I have babysat since sophomore year. I'll miss how his two-year-old brother Carter announces his nap completion week after week by exclaiming, "Poop!" but how only once has his diaper been anything but simply wet. I'll miss how the rain slips down the glass diamond that is the Oppenheimer Cafe. I'll miss listening to This American Life and Wait Wait...Don't Tell me on my iPod while I shelve books every morning, quietly laughing to myself in an empty library. I'll miss my poetry classroom before my professor comes--our conversations about the ineffectiveness of pandas as a species and how Irish poet Paul Muldoon should not be allowed to invent words the way he does. (I'm sorry, but no way is "gammy-gam" an actual thing. It's not in the Oxford English Dictionary, so it does not exist. Then again, if I were to follow that logic, I would not exist either).

Now that I have discovered what an excellent procrastination tool this blog has turned out to be, I should probably make more of an attempt to avoid this kind of distraction. Maybe. Friday afternoons are just not conducive at all to a studying mindset. Much like sun. If they don't let me graduate in May, I'm blaming whoever invented Fridays...and, well, distractions in general.

20 Things I am Doing Instead of My Thesis

1. Applying lotion to my feet.
2. Learning "Wild Horses" on the guitar.
3. Drinking lavender tea.
4. Lifting weights.
5. Doing calf raises. Exercise, that is, not cow-rearing.
6. Watching my lava lamp.
7. Planning my wedding in my head.
8. Adding tasks that I've already accomplished to my whiteboard To-Do list just so I can have the satisfaction of erasing them.
9. Deleting text messages from my inbox.
10. Cleaning my comforter with a miniature lint roller.
11. Writing inane messages on Post-It notes and sticking them to my walls.
12. Updating my blog.
13. Watching 30 Rock.
14. Researching student loan repayment options.
15. Alphabetizing my DVDs. Well, they were already alphabetized, but I have to shift them in their case every time I get a new one.
16. Straightening my hair.
17. Searching for a proper-sized screw with which to reattach the toe-clip to my right bike pedal.
18. Pining for a life coach and a personal stylist.
19. Planning the life I will have if I ever move to Chicago.
20. Editing photographs of tulip fields.

Mmm...White Cheddar

It's Saturday night, as it frequently is when I decide I'm so bored that I'm actually motivated to update my blog. I'm eating white cheddar Cheez-its and waiting for an episode of Will & Grace to load. I was taking a free online career test (you know, those really accurate ones riddled with spelling errors and comma splices) but I figured it would just tell me I was destined for pig farming, and after spending the entire day slaving over my thesis I just don't need that kind of anti-encouragement right now. But I do love pigs. And farming. And my current life goal is to move to Killarney, Ireland and have lots of sheep. Maybe I should finish that test.

I have a tin on the kitchen counter in which I keep all my tea (the bags, that is, not the loose-leaf). During my last semester on campus I bought a box of peppermint and a box of peach, both Celestial Seasonings and thus both containing unwrapped sachets. I have these floating around in my tea tin, and because they've been in there so long next to each other, they've all started to smell like peach. Of course, when they're dry you can't discern the color of their contents, so when I pick one and drop it into my mug, I don't know what kind it is until after I add the water. It's like a little game I can play with myself: it smells like peach, but is it? In case you were wondering, yes--this time it was.

There is a small whiteboard on the wall next to my desk, and I use it to keep track of my assignments, because really, paper planners are so last semester. I've been really big on abbreviations lately, because a lot of my assignments are long and writing them out in their entirety is exhausting. This is currently what my board looks like (if you're confused, join the club):

Tulips -- ?
WoJ - 140
Meat and potatoes
DEATH (due Sunday)

Allow me to decipher:
"Tulips -- ?" = a reminder for me to call my cousin to see when she is free in April to drive up to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival
"WoJ - 140" = read Walls of Jericho through page 140. That one's not interesting at all.
"Meat and potatoes" = no, I have not started eating animals again. This is a reminder to read the chapter entitled "Unmetered Verse" in my prosody hand manual written by--you guessed it--Alfred Corn (may he suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune).
"DEATH (due Sunday)" = I doubt you even need me to decode this one, but I will. Thesis rough draft. Due Sunday. Which is, in case you were wondering, in less than two hours.

I also have "I [heart] [the shape of Australia]," a small box in the bottom left-hand corner to keep tally of my babysitting hours, and a string of five numbers--the importance of which I have completely forgot. Whoopsie. Also, the words "capture," "possess," "photograph," "image," and "access," which I have used approximately 36 times on each page of my thesis and therefore need to spend some quality time with my new best friend, thesaurus.com.

Will & Grace is taking forever to load, so I'm going to keep playing this game. Here is what I see directly in front of me on my wall: the first-ever photograph by a woman published in National Geographic in 1914; a watercolor painted by my best friend; a postcard from Hobart, Tasmania; a postcard of a woman holding a crazy huge eel with what look like garden loppers; a picture my friend clipped from a magazine of Will, Grace, and Jack sitting on a couch, attached to a blue sticky note that says, "We missed you!" with the names of the characters and my friend's stuffed koala (Joey).

In the section of my closet that I can see right now, there is a bike pump, a power cord, an empty plastic drawer, and a bar of soap. Don't really know what my soap is doing in the closet.

I think I'll go now, but I thought I'd leave you, my loyal readeR (love you, Mama), with an image of my apartment in Melbourne, just because I really miss it right now.

And scene.

Current Obsessions

1. Old National Geographics.
2. Post-its.
3. Making blatant references to Fried Green Tomatoes at inopportune moments.

4. The Tacoma waterfront.
5. Oranges.
6. The Moth podcast

7. Homemade pizza.
8. Pretending I can cook without a recipe.
9. Learning how to actually use my camera.
10. The John Tesh Radio Show, "nights on Star 101.5!"
11. Rewriting episodes of House in my head so that House and Cuddy are finally together.
12. Mango Madness tea from Mad Hat Tea
Company.
13. Spying on the contents of people's garages.
14. The song "Kangaroo" by David Gray.

Cyclical

When I was younger, my best friend would visit once a year from Berkeley. Ours was (and still is) the kind of relationship that feeds itself, that grows despite the distance (or perhaps because of it), that is so thick an impenetrable that it is almost a tangible thing. Indeed, at times I feel I could reach out, grasp at the air in front of me, and if I pulled hard enough I could yank her across the California border, through Oregon, and in my back door.

It is easy to forget, in the midst of thesis-writing and novel-reading and poetry-writing, that moments never really leave us. Everything loops back on itself until the fragmented parts of our lives run as smoothly as the South Fork of a Californian mountain river.

Anyway, my story:
Whenever Sara would visit, my parents would pull out the heavy wooden bed frame from the shed and position it in my room parallel to my own bed. At night, Sara and I would spend hours sharing our fears and insecurities, telling stories and recounting adventures, promising to love each other until there was nothing left for either of us to love. We would laugh and laugh until the saltiness of tears stung our eyes, and Sara would reach for her glass of water on the shelf next to her bed. My cat Taffy, for whom raising a paw to swat a passing leg now constitutes a grueling workout, but who was once slim and trim and halfway caring, would have her head wedged so far into Sara's glass that the rim of the cup reached the base of her neck, and the hair covering her narrow face was pushed firmly against her cheekbones like she'd just jumped from a plane and the wind had blown her skin taut. Sara and I never tired of this scene. Our laughter would roll into more laughter. Every night we would lower the water level, and every night Taffy would make her way to the shelf, slide her head just a little bit further, and drink.

It has been years since my parents hauled the bed frame inside and upstairs. These days when Sara comes she sleeps on the futon in the guest room, which is directly across the landing from mine but still feels like a continent away.

I'm home this week for Spring Break, and I have been sitting on the couch working on my thesis for hours. Realizing that I needed to hydrate myself, I went into the kitchen, got a glass of water, and set it on a coaster on the table next to me. It wasn't until about three minutes later when I heard a once-familiar sound and looked over to see Taffy, her head stuffed shallowly into the cup, lapping at the water. Suddenly everything was happening again--my life was folding back on itself--and I couldn't do anything but laugh.

I love you, Sparks. Come home.

February's Pink

February was uncharacteristically warm this year in the PN-Dub, and it was hard to believe that on my birthday five (ish?) years ago school was canceled for a snow day. It's a quiet sort of season nowadays, with introverted sunshine and rain that seems to fall in slow motion. February is gone, and everything keeps on keeping on.

All around Tacoma the trees and flowers have been tricked into blossoming early, and lawns and sidewalks are battlegrounds of pink shrapnel bandied by the wind. Petals line gutters and cover street drains; they disguise puddles as pavement and droop with waterlogged conviction.