beyond the proscenium

Well, it’s good to see that about once a month I feel the urge to put something into words in this here blog. Perhaps this space will end up serving a purpose similar to growth charts; each month I’ll put my heels back against the wall, take a deep breath, throw my shoulders back and make a mark behind me.

I am doing well, thanks for asking. I am thankful for employment, thrilled at the idea of long-term employment with this editing job, and so grateful for all of the perks that come along with it. The work is new and exciting, and while it stretches my brain from editor to neurosurgeon-in-training and back again, I am finding the exercise exhilarating. Do you know the difference between an m-dash and an n-dash? Do you know how to write an operative dictation for a shunt replacement? I’m learning. Mostly learning the ins and outs of formatting and editing, but certainly dropping some knowledge about the neuro side of things, too. Neat.

In related news, I’m glad I have something to tell people when they ask what I’m doing these days. I graduated from college in May(ish…shhh). I moved out of my parents’s house a couple months ago. I am still working at Caribou (can’t deny that discount?), but I am also working as the editor for a small medical publishing company that has great potential for growth.

Growth. There it is again. I have very little to complain about. What a dramatic change that is from just a few months back. I am not bogged down in the day-to-day drudgery of college life, keeping up with everyone else’s totally justifiable histrionics. I am not bogged down in my own drudgery, in constant flux between mania and depression. I am growing. Stretching. Pulling my lines taut. Preparing for flight.

It is migratory season, after all.

Some are reaching, few are there

It wouldn’t take much to sing me to sleep right now. I’m enjoying a quiet afternoon on a day that has felt like Michigan summer since the sun came up. I finally got a good night’s sleep last night and woke early, ready for my day. Work was good; I’m finding myself writing poems in my head (in my mouth?) when I take my four month-old charge on our walks each day. There is something quiet and instinctual about walking suburban blocks, pushing a stroller and watching this baby girl slumping into sleep, lulled by the iambs of the wheels ticking off sidewalk blocks.

Quiet. That is what has been missing from my life in recent times. The internal beat of my days has been off, ticking frantically under the collapsing weight of imposed responsibility, fear. But as of late, I’m finding myself busy but happy, tired but fulfilled. I’m reading, writing, editing, painting, re-learning linear equations and polysyllabic words. I’m walking miles, pushing a stroller and reclaiming my internal rhythm, beat. I am embracing form.

Dry spells, hard times, badlands.

Life has been coming at me fast.  The summer has flown by and has taken me from there to here without me knowing quite what has happened in between.  Here’s what I do know: the school year barely ended before I finally let myself break down.  A series of unforeseen events (aren’t they always unforeseen) whipped me into a corner, cowering.  I didn’t know quite what to do with myself or where to go.  As I’ve written previously, I was neither here nor there.  I’ve been working hard all summer to embrace here.

And it’s working.  I am significantly happier than I was back in May.  I have taken time to breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth.  I have embraced the fragmented vision of now.  And really, I’m learning that I can’t ask for much more.  Perhaps I’m full of trite revelations better suited for a Lifetime Original Movie, but I am quite pleased with the summer skin I have donned.  I certainly did not plan for things to happen as they have, but I have fully embraced the mysterious qualities of my unknown.

In a couple weeks I am moving out, pretending like the idea of a mini-writer’s commune will be everything we dream of.  I am employed twice-over right now, with the promise of significant babysitting gigs still taking hold.  Life is pretty damn good, yo.  Perhaps this is just the calm before the storm–hurricane season has been quiet so far this year–but I do believe this calm has adequately prepared me for whatever is next.  And I like that.

Oh, and I miss you.  All of you.

The possibilities are endless. I can do most anything. And the impossibilities are beginningless. And meaningless.

You asked me why I like airports so much.  I thought about it some more.  It’s the convergence of beginnings and endings, yesterdays and tomorrows, hellos and goodbyes.  It’s a perpetual state of liminality.  Never quite where you are and never quite where you’re going.  Nobody is at home in an airport.

I am not home at this address.  I find it strange.  To say that I’ve slept in many beds in the past year is a dramatic overstatement, full of all the wrong kinds of suggestions.  But it’s mostly true: I don’t know where to lay my head at night.  I tend to pride myself on being able to sleep anywhere–the movie theatre in Kentucky during Tomb Raider, an air mattress perched atop a cot in New Orleans, in an open field under the stars up north–but I’m learning that there is a difference between sleep and rest.  And I’m feeling quite restless.

In two days I will embark on a trek, meandering across and up the state of Michigan, through the UP and on to Wisconsin for the summer.  In the coming days I will lay my head in 5 different places, the last of which will become another semblence of a home.  But before this happens I have to force my way through piles of clothing, tearing apart my childhood room which has been overtopped with vestiges of the past 4 years of my college life.  It’s the compartmentalizing that gets me every time.  Half of my stuff needs to go in bags for donations.  The other half of my stuff needs to be divided between what goes with me and what stays.  And again I find myself–and my stuff–hanging in the airspace between here and there, yesterday and tomorrow.   I don’t know where to begin.

I don’t know where to end, either.  I am frantically applying for jobs, hoping to earn employment come August.  The uncertainty of what happens after this idyllic summer leaves me restless.  In this restless state, the best I can do is keep moving in a feigned forward motion.  I smile through the congratulations and the questions, banking cautiously on the fact that with so many options, something will work out.

“You could make up a list of the things you want–could be anything.  When you’ve crossed them all off and there’s nothing left, just start again.” – Gomez

Honey, how you gonna make it on your own?

About that time, eh? Right-oh.

It’s been too long.  This semester.  This last semester.  Describe it in five words: exhillerating, exhausting, unexpected, nauseating, some-kind-of-wonderful.  Okay, I cheated.  I am not sure what I expected coming into this semester.  I think about how it started: after a whilrwind road trip from New Orleans.  We left at five in the morning (or something like that), payed our toll to get across the mighty Mississippi, bid farewell to the East where I lived last summer, and cruised across the border as daylight overcame us.  A snowstorm through the northern states, and too many pit-stops for a car full of young women swept up in the spirit of New Orleans.  We made it to Michigan by midnight, managed to get into our homes, dug the campus safety van out of the snow, and fell asleep with a beer in hand.

Who knew where it would go from there?  My last semester.  I better make it count.  And here I am, a mere two weeks away  from my graduation and I’m caught in a mysterious mental limbo.  I have had the time of my life here.  My Albion, dear Albion, much of who I am is indebted to you.  I hate to get all nostalgic now, as I sit in the KC on a Saturday night opting for furious paper writing instead of drunken debauchery.  My head is spinning as I look out on campus from the fourth floor window.  There is so much history here, and when I walk across that stage in two weeks, I will leave behind my stories.  It’s one of those feelings of being part of something so much bigger than myself; but I am just me.  Teeny-tiny, lil ol’ me.

I’ll move on.  I’m excited for the summer.  I’m heading straight down to New Orleans (sounds like a familiar theme, eh?) right after graduation, hoping that all of my worldly posessions can fit in the family vehicle headed back to GP.  I’ll spend a week or two down there, then head back to Michigan.  Thankfully, I’ll have some time home in GP for a couple weeks and then I’m heading on a grand adventure up through Northern Michigan to get Ashley and then over to Wisconsin to work at a camp for eight weeks.  Sounds like a pretty solid summer, basking in the inevitable joy of summer camp.

In unrelated news, my mother informed me on Thursday that she is retiring at the end of this year.  I’m not sure how I feel about having two retired parents.  I mean, good for them.  And I suppose it encourages me to get moving on my own future plans, which as of yet are unsettled.  I’m torn between Louisiana and Michigan come fall, and I honestly don’t know where I’ll end up.  The merits of living at home and working at the coffee shop and babysitting are pretty high.  I mean, I’ll bank a ton of cash and I can work on studying for the GRE and applying to grad schools.  But then, going to Louisiana and working also sounds pretty primo.  We’ll see.  One day at a time, and for now I need to focus on the retroactive (read: late) papers that I need to complete before the weekend is over.  I’m hoping to get to the end of this night in time to share a six-pack of beer with close friends.

Okay, sorry my oh-so-avid readers that this post was not more thrilling.  It’s scattered.  I’m scattered.  That should be enough insight for tonight.

Yeah, you look pretty good in that junk will dress

Well, that hit harder than I expected.  I didn’t get the job.  Unfortunately, I checked my email and got the bad news right before my three o’clock class.  So, instead of going to that class, I took deep breaths all the way to the career development office.  I walked in, broke down, and thought that it was the best place possible for a senior to break down about her future.  A sound endorsement, for sure.

Here’s why it’s hard: I had never felt so prepared for an interview in my life.  I had never felt so qualified for a position, as if my skill set was meant for the program.  I had never invested so much into researching a position and being absolutely sure that it was what I wanted to do.  And my mother, so adamantly against this, has gotten her way.  Not that I’ve told my parents yet that I wasn’t accepted.  Because it feels like every last thing I keep lamenting about this program feels like my mom saying, “I told you so.”

I can’t bring myself to tell my parents that I didn’t get this job.  Not that they have been sitting around waiting for the news.  But my mom just has taken such distinct pleasure in trying to make me feel like shit when I mentioned anything about TFA.  I don’t want her grinning from ear to ear when she tells her colleagues at lunch or the women in choir that I didn’t get the job.  I don’t want her nagging me about what else I should be doing.  And yet, simultaneously, I can’t stand the thought of letting her and my dad down.  Because, despite how she feels about TFA, I know she would be able to muster up some pride in the fact that one of her kids made it through college, got a degree, and was employed shortly thereafter.

It just kills me that my older sister turns 27 tomorrow and is still unemployed, immature, and bitter.  My parents have depleted their savings paying for her over the past nine years.  My younger brother dropped out of college after his first semester.  He told my mom as he dropped her off at the airport.  Smooth move.  So he’s back living at home and working at Kroger.  Perhaps my perception is all fucked up, but I feel an enormous weight on my shoulders to be successful, and soon.  I can’t imagine that my parents have the stamina to maintain the life of me, too.

Anyway.  This is quite a bit of processing a situation that still has my eyes welling up with tears when I think about it.  And that’s big for an emotionless creature like me.  It just feels like I had been strung along since last May by recruiters who affirmed my abilities to be an ideal candidate for the job.  So then i got excited about it, did my research, honed my skills, and wound up for a stellar final interview.  And what killed the most was the six week break between the final interview and the final letdown.  And those were six weeks in which I had to perform at social functions back home, smile through clenched teeth when people asked about what I’d be doing after graduation.  I needed to be dropped on my head sooner than the first day of classes.

Oh well.  At least I’m excited for my classes this semester.  And at least my bottom-feeders are back from abroad.  Bless them, really.  We’ve spent the past six nights ten shades of not sober, catching up on bygone days and sharpening our wit.  And last night when I shut myself off in a fit of uncharacteristic mourning, they showed up at my front door like, as Strangalang put it, “The mother fucking fourwise-men!”  Caroline handed me two chocolate bars.  Strangalang handed me a half-gallon of ice cream.  Anne pulled a six-pack of Bell’s Amber out of her bag.  And Petey tossed me a pack of Marb Lights and a very patriotic lighter.

“Somewhere there’s a place where your intellect means more than your degree.  But this life is temporary.  What matters in the end are smiles and laughter, sharing the good times with all your friends.”

Instead I am twenty-two and the decades weigh a ton

Another year, another birthday spent in New Orleans.  I have to say: I am lucky to be surrounded by so many awesome people.  I was a bit apprehensive at first about this group coming down here to work for two weeks, but I have been all shades of impressed with their work ethic, their enthusiasm, and their care.  Wah wah wah I sound like a Halmark card, but really, this week has been awesome.  Last night at dinner, Team B-Sassy made a delicious feast AND three cakes in honor of my natal day.  It took me a few tries to blow out all of the candles; maybe I really will put down the pack sometime soon.  Then last night as I was readying myself for bed, someone came in and said, “People downstairs have questions for you.”  Of course at first I was bitter.  I don’t feel like making any more executive decisions about this trip.  So I begrudgingly went downstairs, and there were the boys with a bunch of flowers for me.  Seriously sweet.  I’m not used to this level of sap.  But I loved it.

In other news, the semester ended just fine, thank you very much.  I passed geology with a 2.3.  This is a fun fact considering I walked out of that final confident that I had answered nly about 16 questions correctly, and headed straight to the liquor store to get myself a remedy for the end of semester woes.  When i got the email from my prof that said I had passed, I was working through a waking hangover, and nearly emailed him back with, “PRAISE JESUS AND ALL THINGS HOLY!”  Luckily, I restrained myself.  I passed my Jesus class.  I passed my Islands class.  I wrote more poems this semester than I have in my whole life, and i learned some sweet new moves in a canoe.  Thank you, Albion College.  I have one semester left.

And that one semester left may be what weighs a ton.  I’d like to say that I’m anticipating lots of fun, just enough studying, and late-night road trips.  However, I also know that I will be working my ass off for at least two of my classes, and expending most of my energy into completing a good thesis.  If nothing else, I will walk away on graduation day knowing that I really have learned valuable skills in my major. 

I also know that I need my people.  I need to have conversations that challenge me, that push me beyond this anxious discontent in which I have been wallowing for the past year.  Someone [pretty awesome] on this trip has challenged me more in the past week than I’ve been pushed in a long time.  I am so grateful for this shift; I deserve more than who I have been.

Enough of the hardly introspective bull.  I have to get my act together, clean some bathrooms, pack my stuff up, shower and ready myself for evening in the French Quarter.  It is my birthday, after all.

I’m driving through a snowstorm with my windshield wipers off

Thanksgiving.  Misgivings?  I realized early on that this Thanksgiving break would be the first time I spent more than 2 nights in my bed back home.  I don’t fit in my bed at my parent’s house.  They don’t turn on the heat because they have an electric blanket on their bed.  The hot water heater hardly lasts through a whole shower.  I am cold  when I go home.  I am uncomfortable when I go home.

I avoided home-home for as long as I could: coffee shops, dinners with friends, babysitting, parading about the suburb.  But on Saturday night, I went home after the coffee shop closed.  I had spent the last hour preparing for my TFA interview.  When I got home, I was still reeling from the prospect of teaching a lesson on the proper use of the word “literally.”  Geek.  Anyway, I let it slip to my parents that I had gotten through to the final interview.  My dad, per usual, feigned indifference.  My mom spewed off some nonsense about the program being totally bogus and how upset it made her to think I might be part of it.  Then she stormed out of the room, and I watched the last five minutes of some nondescript football game with my dad.

I don’t remember the last time my own mother made me cry.  Here’s a good woe-is-I moment: my 27 year-old sister has been suckling at the breast since the day she left our mother’s womb; my 18 year-old brother is nearly failing out of his first semester of college.  Fuck.  Really?  I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders.  As if I don’t expect enough of myself, those expectations are compounded by this overwhelming sense of responsibility for my parent’s pride.  They know they’ve fucked up.  I am not fucked up.

My drive back to school was interesting.  A big winter storm is sweeping across the state.  I’ve become an incredibly timid driver.  That’s not to say that I don’t curse at the assholes and idiots around me.  But I’m scared of the snow.  It’s stupid.  I’ve driven off the road into a ditch in a snowstorm before.  Just last February (super life secret spoiler alert/I’m more proud of this than I should be), I set my cruise control when there was fresh, wet snow on the ground, shimmied up in my seat and peed in a cup.  Fearless.  Anyway.  It pissed me off that I couldn’t drive faster than 55mph.  I don’t think the roads were even that bad.  I need to reclaim some fearlessness in my life.

It’s three in the morning.  I’m sitting in the Denny’s in Marshall.  I’m with two good friends.  It’s the end of the semester.  We stayed in the library until we got kicked out, then came here in hopes of reuniting with our favourite waitress and completing some of the work that’s been looming all semester.  Last year, I was awesome at coming here and buckling down.  Unfortunately, they’ve since acquired wifi.  “Come in for a free byte!”  Oh, so clever.  So, instead of writing a paper about the identity of Jesus via the gospels according to John and Luke, I’m pretending like blogging somehow enchances my brain function.  I think it does.

I’m on my third giant glass of Diet Coke, and my second tiny glass of jellybean-dust water.  I already ate some toast, and now I’m ready to write some poems.  Or pretend I’m hallucinating.  Or wonder where the creepy RV outside went.

Diet Coke and a pizza, please.

Buzz, I’m going through all your private things! You better come out and pound me!

Stranger things have happened, I suppose.  But I woke up this morning around 8AM, thinking that an early morning shower–two hours before my first class–might rouse me into a fit of academic joy.  Not so.  I took my shower, bleary-eyed and sleepy still.  I’m lucky I managed to lather, rinse, repeat without too much struggle.  I got out, combed through my hair with my fingers (as I’ve been missing my hairbrush for months and am both too lazy and cheap to go buy a new one), and got back into bed.  Big mistake.  I fell into a deep sleep, dreaming of driving on a snowy 127 with a car-full of near-strangers.  I woke up at 10:30, halfway into my first class of the day, when my roommate came back to the room for her shower.  Shit.

I think I’ve only been to about 23% of my geology classes since the second exam of the semester.  I like to think that I’m smart enough to have this whole pass/fail thing all worked out.  I got a combined 200 points out of a possible 200 points on my first two exams, missed almost all of the classes leading up to the third exam, and managed to add an extra 59 points to my exam grade.  That makes for a total of 259 out of 300 available test points.  Hey.  I’ll take it.  I just emailed my prof to confirm that I am still in the passing section of the class, and as it turns out, I am still lazily lingering between a 2.3 and a 2.7.  Ha.  Oh, how I love the core requirements of a liberal arts degree.

You know how I know it’s been a rough semester?  When people ask me what classes I’m taking, I consistently struggle to name all four of my academic classes and the one that I forget changes each time.  Woof.  I’m really not sure what I’ve been doing all semester.  I thought that last year was the hardest year I’d have during college, having to face not only a domestic violence situation in my house but also having to deal with the college’s fucked up judicial process.  But no, I managed to pull of better-than-decent grades last year, and still came out relatively unscathed from that horrendous scandal.  So what’s my problem this time around?  Lack of motivation?  Classic senioritis?  Boredom?

I suppose I’m experiencing some combination of all those factors.  School seems more and more worthless, which makes me feel more and more like an asshole for having the privilege of being enrolled at and paying out the ass for a great four-year institution.  I’m just glad that I have my thesis to work toward, because without that, I might slip into an irreversible self-loathing, creative-writing-major depression.  Hmm, interesting how the punctuation there can change the meaning.  I find the work toward my thesis rewarding.  Rewarding in the same way that I find building projects rewarding.  Isn’t that strange?  This weekend, I helped a contractor put up drywall at a community center in town.  There was a small team of us working.  We were efficient.  We were good at what we did.  The walls came together easy-peasy, and by the end of the workday I felt entirely refreshed and proud of the work we had done.  And that satisfaction of a hard day’s work toward a tangible end parallels how I feel when I write a poem and, in its first drafts, it feels rightand good.  Like piecing together a structure, watching walls go up sheet by sheet and knowing how to use all of the tools–the rotozip for trimming out windows and doors; the keyhole saw for electric boxes; the electric drill for adhering wallboard to studs; the t-square for making the perfect cut–so, too, do my poems come together.  I finally am beginning to feel confident in my work, knowing that I have been taught the craft and have been trained to properly and effectively use all of the tools.  I’m not scared of power tools; I’m not scared of poetry.

And that’s where I’m at, sitting in the recently re-opened lodge, watching snow fall and sipping yet another Diet Coke.  I’m avoiding innumerable academic pursuits, and hoping that hours of introspection and selfish writing on the first snowy day of the season will rouse me into an academic frenzy sometime soon.  The semester is quickly drawing to a close,  and still I sit here wondering what my fourth class is.  Surely I have something due three weeks ago.

Oh, and because I’m fairly confident you’ll read this:  Shout-out to Danit.  Your reading rocked.  You rock.  I’m looking forward to having you back on campus next semester.

I want to free from my feet from the broken glass and concrete

And just like that, it became the end of October of my senior year.  I might wonder where the time has gone, but I know: too many hours spent laughing until 3AM instead of doing homework; too many weekend nights spent drunk into the morning; too many early classes skipped; too many petty arguments about why the dishes aren’t getting done.  And all of this excess, this is my reality.  I’m not sure how I feel about it.  I’m caught in this liminal state, a familiar hurrying along and desperate slowing down.  I can’t get out of it.  I know that in just a few more months, I will be kicked out on my doorstep, expected to perform some great act of adulthood with a diploma in my hand.  And what is it all worth?  I’ve learned a lot.  I’ve lost myself.  I’ve met wonderful people and made great memories.  And this is when I slip into a self-pity dream sequence a la Saved by the Bell.  So I’ll quit there.  But just so we’re all on the same page:  I’m terrified about what happens next.  And don’t tell me it’s normal and to be expected.  This is not a shared experience.  I am so melodramatic.

Let’s focus more on a good story.  Over fall break, I visited my family in Mandeville, LA.  I had not seen them since my last week in NOLA this summer, and a week after I left, Laura popped out baby Anna.  I had to get back to see that baby before she got too big and lost that charming quality of a baby-baby.  So, I purchased a cheap plane ticket on a whim and got myself down there.  It was strange and wonderful flying into Louisiana.  For the last leg of the flight I stared out my window and watched as our flight pattern followed the Mississippi River through wetlands, great bald cypress trees jutting out of the swampy terrain.  The sun was bright, and I finally understood some tidbit I’d learned in my rocks for jocks class about meandering stream systems. 

Once I landed, I grabbed my carryon bag and walked my long legs full speed through the terminal.  I needed to get to Mike’s car, get across Lake Pontchartrain and hug the transplanted people that make this place feel like home.  We drove across the Causeway in rush hour traffic.  The flow was steady and a thick layer of fog was settling over the lake like steam rising off of gumbo.  Mike and I chatted the whole time, silly stuff about whatever interspersed with a few useless Family Guy references.  He’s such a kid at heart.  I was anxious, though.  I just wanted to see my little dude, Andrew.  He turned four this summer while I was there, and we got to spend nearly every weekend together.  We got to be lazy together, playing Indiana Jones on XBox while his parents cleaned the house.  They overfed me, insisting that I was working too hard and getting too skinny.  I cherished these weekends, feeling home in the midst of a chaotic summer.

When Mike pulled into the driveway, Andrew was sitting on the low front porch.  His feet were outstretched and his hands were clasped, prayerlike, in his lap.  He had a little grin on his face, anticipating our arrival.  Before the car was in park, I opened my door and stepped out.  Andrew ran from the porch and was in my arms again.  He held me tight, I held him tighter.  I closed my eyes.  He whispered in my ear, over and over, “I missed you so much, cousin Katy.  I missed you.  I love you.  I love you more than all the sand on the beach.”  And this is what keeps me coming back, this unconditional and perfect love.