The Way It's Been

There is tape all over my room.

Pieces of masking tape, dangling from when we tried so hard to cheaply shlack the Christmas lights to the purple walls without having to buy 3M Command tape. No matter how many wads of tape we slathered across the wires, they fell down eventually. Now our walls are littered with the left overs. And Lis's loft ladder and the corner dorm floors and our dresser drawers and sometimes I wake up with a ring of tape around my wrist...and the whole room is like a tacky, crude pointillated painting of the enhanced imagination of the youth suffered during claustrophobia.

The tape is maybe an accurate representation of myself...of my mental habits lately. I've been sticking to things that aren't new or exciting or invigorating. I've been grappling to things that are constant and always there for grappling--budgets, factual regurgitation, to-do lists, housing Management. Worrying. Analyzing. It's a chronic cycle in my life--the intellectual stimulation persists fervently for a month or so, always leading up to something big, always in preparation for something--and feels like it could never leave!--and it dwindles like it could never (I always think it could NEVER), and it spirals into me like what I thought was impossible, and it settles viscously somewhere in the lower part of my gut to reveal the things that are always there for me to think about. And those things are a big, bland bore.

But like I said. It's a cycle. It'll come back.

I have this seemingly innocuous symptom--maybe of some mentally clogging virus--where I can make the greatest, most incendiary conversation with notable people, and I am relaxed, and it comes naturally; but eventually, when I get to the point where I truly care about what they think, how they see me, when I am conscious about keeping up this conversation--this is when I choke. And I can't think of a damn thing. And I force it. It happens all the time. I'm afraid of it. When all I really have to do is find the security and serenity I had in the first place with these people, when I didn't care about the image of me flashing before their eyes, when they weren't expecting or depending on the conversation. I just have to reach that point again.

I guess I'm working on it.
Maybe it is all part of the cycle.

Epithetically,
Kaitlin

In The Room (Garage)

Turns out the Pentagon is interested in this spanking new material that absorbs 99.955% of light that hits it.  It's called "Blacker Than Black" (kind of like how Keith likes his coffee).  According to a commentator on NPR's "Good News, No News, Or Bad News?" it is Bad News if they start using it in warfare and the President says to Iraq, "We're gonna get some blacker than black on you!"  Yeah.  I agree.

I am sitting here listening to NPR--something I used to do every Saturday last summer.  It's a trip--to sit here and listen...just like sitting at Montclair's front desk from 8 to 3 and having my coffee and bagel from Bruegger's while soaking in world news and This American Life.  

Speaking of This American Life, the host, Ira Glass, is totally coming to Mizzou the day after my birthday.  And shucks, I'll be in KC.  Experiencing other home-related things such as my mother.  

Now I am listening to a broadcast of Carmen.  There is just something about classical music that calms me and makes me thank God for my classical training.  I feel like I understand so much more about music because of the classical appreciation I have built up.  I learned the most interesting things in the Medieval Music lecture yesterday.  I never realized how much influence the Catholic Church had on EVERYTHING.  Such as the power of three.  Such as the "devil's interval," the tritone.  I also learned that a "musician" was considered someone who THOUGHT about music...and people who played it were just crazies.  

My morning is great so far.

Just around the riverbend,

Kaitlin

It is a usual occurrence for me to develop elaborate, bordering-on-impossible plot lines for every mildly amusing or odd scenario I find myself a part of.  Example: today, I finally got ahold of the manager at the Comfort Suites in Schaumburg, and after a hot-toned explanation of my exasperating situation with my camera charger, she informed me that it was already sent and signed for--at 34 Albany Drive in Columbia, MO.  

I don't live at 34 Albany Drive?

There are no worries here.  But I got to thinking...what if the person at 34 Albany Drive isn't in my choir posse?  Is it one of my fates that I trek to their house (preferably in a snowsuit with a canteen and some beef jerky)--not merely to reclaim my camera charger, but to meet them and talk to them?  I could end up changing their lives, or they mine.  Someone could even film it.  Kidding.

An ingredient that this awesome time of my life needs is schoolwork and learning--I've taken a bit of a break and I think it's time for me to get back into the swing of things.  I can feel it in my bones!  A yearning for learning.  I love the feeling...

like that one time, Keith, when what I wrote about being human affected your thinking...it was such a powerful feeling.

I need another one of those.  That means work.  Which is fulfilling.

Where in the world is,

Kaitlin

Elderberry

When I see old people waddling down the street in complacency, I feel almost like I should bow down to recognize the great things they've done, the experiences they've had, the life they've shared with the world.  They are like plump vessels of knowledge just passing by like it's no big deal.  Think of all the things they have lived through.  They've all been like us--and they survived.  It is reassuring to think that probably, because of how my life is now, even if I don't make it as a journalist, I will still probably grow old and get to putz around in all my knowledge of life.  

Or maybe I won't.

As the crow flies :), 

Kaitlin

O! What A Beautiful Morning

I love being awake in the morning.

When I got here, my favorite thing about college was my tiny coffeemaker.  It still is. 

Sip-sip, 

Kaitlin

Title!

Materialism on the Internet is so easy!  And affordable!