A Familiar Blond Chick Taps Your Shoulder:

Hi.

You probably don't remember me... I'm that girl you used to know. We talked all the time. Well, I talked. You listened.

Yeah, it was a long time ago. It's okay. I hardly recognize you now. I bet I've changed too.

To be honest, it might not be the best idea for me to start blogging again, because next week I'll be leaving the country for two weeks and who knows if I'll remember to post when I get back.

Okay, I probably will. I'll have so many pictures to show and stories to tell, and nobody to show and tell with except for you, my family, and whoever else comes within earshot of me all summer.

Conversations

As I sit here, taking turns between chewing on my toothpick and crunching on conversation hearts (purple, "my love")

I am reminded that Valentine's Day is a week away.

Chapeau!

It's one of those gorgeous grey days that has me thinking about the UK and Washington, two places a lot rainier than here.  Autumn, my favorite season, is lapsing into the cold, hard winter.  Luckily there are still a few bright spots left between the bare branches of the trees around here, so this cloudy day isn't quite as colorless as it could be.

I've been pretty busy, finishing up The Courser and getting it ready to go live.  The Courser is the blog for the student newspaper here on campus (well, one of them).  I finished it at about 1am this morning and was so bugged by it, seeing as I had been working on it since about 4 in the afternoon, that I put it on public and commenced writing my Approaches to Literature paper.  I know, my priorities need to be sorted.

So, here, go look at The Courser.  Please.  Share it with your friends.  Check out The Accolade, too.  I'd be much obliged.

Other than that shameless self-promotion, I don't really have a reason for writing.  It's raining now, but it looks more like mist than rain.  I hope that it stops before I have to go out.

...See, these are the things that go on in my mind now.  There's nothing profound or funny or blog-worthy in the slightest.  I'm just working, trying to keep my head above water until the semester ends and I get a break.

But that's not even a big deal.  I take my life way too seriously sometimes.  I think everyone does.  You let yourself drown a little, maybe for the drama.  Maybe so it ends the monotony of everyday life.  You hate it, you lose your head, you screw up your priorities and get close to being unable to function.  Secretly, though, you  love it.  Procrastinators always act like DIDs (damsels in distress), as if there is some man with a gun to their head telling them they can't start or finish a project until the night before it's due.  The truth is, I think most of us do it on purpose.  We do it for the long nights spent writing a paper that we've known about for a week and a half, because although we hate it while it happens, we have to admit that it's a little bit satisfying, finishing up 10 minutes before class starts.

We're also an intentionally disorganized lot, but I'll save that for some other ranting blog post.  All that you need to know about me right now is that I'm thinking of the United Kingdom and Washington, two ancestral homes in very different ways, it's raining outside and it makes me feel like I'm in a film, and I've just turned in a solid B- paper because I was too busy working on The Courser to start it.

I'm not mad.  I'm thoroughly content with my life.  Today is my friend Emily's 20th birthday, and we just went out for Chinese for her birthday lunch.  There was the tiniest little strawberry pie thing and I saved the tin because I have an incredibly childish love for miniature things.

Did I mention that it looks like a little silver hat?

Chapeau!

This is my life.  Hope you're alright that this is completely unorganized.

Cloudy Playgrounds

Today was the first time in a long time that I had the chance to get to know myself.



That's a weird thing to say, you're probably thinking.
And I'd have to agree with you.  I think weird thoughts, as does everyone else.  You guys just don't share them as often as I do.

What I meant by that statement, though, is that I was alone for once, but not only alone, I was out of my room, walking and reading in the woods.  The sun shined it's happy face down on me, I enjoyed the words on the page and the warmth of the sunlight.  I was free of obligations for those few hours, and my thoughts were allowed to go anywhere that they wished.

I haven't had time to be alone with myself lately.  Sure, I'm alone pretty often, but I'm always doing other things: homework, sleeping, eating... stuff like that.  Y'know, the important things in life.  That's why this afternoon was so great, because it was just me, thinking my thoughts, being at peace with myself and my surroundings.  I felt like I had the strength of character to do anything that I wanted to.

Peace.


Finally.

But then, "oh yes–the world," as Annie Dillard would say (I was reading "The Writing Life" by her as I took my stroll today).

The world happens to me more often than I want it to.  I'm such a dreamer, my head constantly in the clouds, and when I come down it's not always the happiest experience.  It's not always a bad thing, either; usually, it's so abrupt that I don't have time to process it fully before I'm acting and reacting in the real world again.  Guess that's why I'm a little wonky and off-balance most of the time, because I'm always trying to climb around in the clouds, and the real world is always pulling me down by the ankle.

I'm not meaning to complain.  I really like my life right now, and I'm not just saying that.  I'm so happy so often that when I'm not, it's easy to tell.  Maybe I still have those moments when I'm thinking weird thoughts up in my cloudy playground, wondering if they're too weird to share, and then the conversation halts and I get pulled back down into reality.

Hey man, it's all good.  That spacey-ness is just a part of who I am.  You don't like it?  Tough cookies.

One of my adventuring songs.