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.

Welcome Back to a Foreign Land

It's my first Saturday night since classes started and I'm in my room in a sweatshirt and slippers, too lazy to reach three feet to turn on my heater, but hungry for warmth all the same.

It's strange to think I've been home for nearly two months--one-fifth of my time abroad--and I still catch myself saying "last semester" in reference to my last semester here. It's jarring, the way Melbourne doesn't seem to exist anymore. It's exactly what I was afraid of. I find myself aching for ways to hold on to a year that has long since retreated. My walls are plastered with pictures, the rainbow lorikeets have found their way into my poetry. Still, though, despite my efforts to reconcile my past with my present, I can't help but feel that rediscovering my American attachments is somehow disconnecting me from Australia.

I had prepared myself for changes when I returned home. On my flight into L.A. I envisioned new structural developments sprouting up throughout my neighborhood. For the amount of mental preparation I gave myself, I don't think I would have been surprised if the city of Seattle had covered the Space Needle in a coat of neon green paint. What I hadn't counted on, though, was the fact that the biggest changes wouldn't take place at home--in fact, I'm still shocked at how unaltered everything seems to be here--but within me. I knew things would change while I was gone, I just didn't know things would change because I was gone.

Christmas came and went, wonderful as always. The cold was a welcomed departure from the heat of Melbourne's December. It's amazing how quickly life settles itself, how the once familiar, made unfamiliar, can become familiar again so quickly.

And we just keep on moving.

1:44 a.m. on Wednesday, December 2nd. I've never been awake late enough to see the moon at this angle. Not much else to say except that I never ever want to leave this place. Knowing I only have a week left makes me sick to my stomach. It's not that I'm not looking forward to seeing my friends and family, to being back at UPS and wandering through Pike Place Market. I've just never really had to say goodbye indefinitely. Here's to firsts, I guess.

Shut

So I'm sitting in my apartment at 7:18 pm on Tuesday night listening to the Glee Cast version of "Bust a Move," wishing I actually could. I spent the morning souvenir-shopping at the Queen Victoria Market with two friends, and right now my spoils are strewn about my desk like some tasteless contemporary art exhibit. I just finished dinner--rice with my attempt at chili (basically some veggies doused with cumin and chili powder)--and I'm contemplating either loading another episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (I've rediscovered it and couldn't be more in love) or finding the tabs to a new guitar song. The problem there, though, is that I have yet to entirely master a single song. I think I have musical A.D.D.

It is now officially 16 days until I leave this extraordinary country. As the hours pass, I am becoming acutely aware of how little time I have left, the realness of the threat that my life here will very soon become a mirage. In the past ten months I have progressed through the entire spectrum of human emotions: I have woken up broken, I've been so anxious I couldn't sleep, I've acquainted myself with the blissful evenings of sitting barefoot on my balcony with my guitar and singing to myself. I have cooked and been happy with it, and I've charred more than my fair share of grilled cheese sandwiches. I met incredible friends, and when they left I met more. I have been absent for deaths and emotional crises at home, and for this I have been both devastated and relieved. I've gone surfing and caving and swimming with a whaleshark. I was hit by a car. I was hit in a car. I fell in love, fell out of it, and am now hovering somewhere in between. I have learned and taught and slept and jumped into a pool with my clothes on. I have gotten more from this country than I ever expected I would, and because of that, I can't imagine any moment that is not this one, with my balcony door tied to the white iron railing with a garbage bag, the ding of a tram on Flemington Road, my pant legs rolled up almost to the knees, wondering how long it will take me once I'm home until I close my eyes and can no longer see the streets of Melbourne transcribed in my mind like they've belonged there all along. Losing this place scares me. In fact, I wouldn't be exaggerating to say that aside from the death of a family member, nothing has scared me more. I think back on all those times I complained about being so far away, and I wonder what the heck I was thinking. I never had it so good. This freedom can't be replicated, and now it's almost gone. Just when I thought I had come to terms with perpetual motion, when I thought my endless cycles of self-reflection had landed me on the doorstep of acceptance, the city called me back to myself.

My lorikeets are back. I call them mine knowing I have no right to claim such ownership of wild winged creatures that shoot past my window in blurs of red and blue and green, but after spending so much time here it's almost as if I've raised them--or, more appropriately, as if they've raised me. They're here and it's just another sunset, but I feel like I'm living something for the last time, and I don't even know what it is. So goodbye, eucalypt shadows across the browned and brittle grass. Goodbye Yarra River, the vein of the city. Goodbye opals and wombats and Brighton Beach bathing boxes. You truly were a gift.