The Nonfiction Part

Today we read our Personal Intros for the class.  It was really exciting because my teacher is from Omaha!  We talked about it.  Since he didn't give us any guidelines for this assignment (write a personal introduction--one page), I did what I wanted to do.  As my first writing for the class, I wanted to make it incredibly good but I didn't have the time to edit it as much as I would have liked.  Here it is:

My Person (al Introduction)

Here I sit on my “can I get the cheapest one” firm twin bed in an apartment room that is slowly and cozily becoming my own.  I just moved in here.  I just moved in to this stage of my life.  In some ways it feels like my first week of college.  I’ve been here for a year, but I’ve never devoted all of my time to things I am in love with, until now.

As has anyone who has ever taken a class in the humanities or health education, applied for a customer service job, or taken advice from a guidance counselor, I have found it entirely impossible to tell anyone about myself.  Who am I?  How did I get to where I am?  Who influenced the person I am today?  What are at least two skills that make me special?  These questions lead me to one thing only: lying.  Lying prettily. 

The most I can do in the situation of this assignment is not to lie, but to give you a few scrawny details about my life.  I am Omaha bred and Alaska bound.  Recently I have been twisted by tightening feelings of homesickness and panic that I will never be at home again for an extended period of time.  My mother is an English teacher and frustratingly savvy.  My stepfather is a drummer and is always researching careers in hippie-dom.  Conrad and Dan are my little brothers—Conrad the sly one who talks like a grownup and Dan the green teen who hides his acne with his hair and taught me a new game where he pretends there is a mosquito on my face and then punches me.  As a family we dream along with my stepdad of salmon fishing in Alaska and starting a tradition of oyster stew on New Year’s. 

My father is difficult but in a boring way and sent me the same Valentine’s Day card two years in a row.  But we are working things out.

I am not a born-again Christian, but an all-growing, all-grateful one.  I believe in Evangelism but only a little bit.  A recent struggle in my life has been sticking to my Catholic roots while being highly involved in a Protestant church.

One thing I can tell you in earnest that has been a part of me all my 19 years is music.  Through it I reach that point of indecisive, luminescent, breathless exuberance like being surrounded by only clouds of a silvery-bluish color and feeling as if you are rising to an unknown but utterly happy destination.  Through it I plunge through ragged tendons of heartache down past my knees and ankles.  But it always rescues me again.

Aside from these details, I can only think to tell you what I’m doing as I write this—a less warped insight into my person.  My decorations are hanging out on the floor in a pile as they have yet to be hung up—figurines scavenged from dumpsters, a foam robot, a crossed out doodle I found in my best friend’s room, the ball of blue painter’s tape we peeled from the border on the wall when we repainted our dorm.  My laptop is hot on my legs and I have to pee but I have no intention of getting up to fix any of that.  I have gone back and forth worrying if having the window open in my room is really a terrible hindrance to the air conditioning in the hall.  There is a collection of Hitchcock tapes on my bookshelf that I have never seen, and a collection of books the shelves below that I have never read.  I am comforted by the smell of my roommate painting her toenails in the next room.

I rub my eyes for the two-hundredth time.  I take a sip of the lukewarm water on my nightstand.  I go to sleep.  I look forward to the morning.

First Things First

"This is in the wrong notebook with the wrong pen.  The wrong color too.  Writing is like answering my notebook's plea to be filled, to have its points asserted with pressure the way a pen does, to reflect something, anything, even if it is a reflection on itself.  Paper is good, pens are good.  The tools of so many years."

Last night, after reading a bit of "The Writing Process" for my Intro to Fiction class, an ambition pushed past my numbing tiredness and coughed this up on paper.  Peggy gave me the idea to publish stuff to Blogger from my class, so I thought I would only start with the first thing to be created since my first day yesterday.  I see a million things I could edit, but you get the version in the raw.  Kind of.  I think there is something better and more organic about that.

Choir is back.  As I listened to my friend's story of how she just changed her major to music and saw the earnest glisten of excitement and complete, relieved joy in her eyes, I thought of my toils last semester and of the feeling I got singing again yesterday--a feeling of purpose and solidity, a kind of rising up into the air with each inhalation at the end of a phrase, a connection with God where I thanked him with every gracious part of me for showing me my duty and place in life.  Not everyone knows that and I believe I do.  

The coffee is great and the catbird is chirping,

Kaitlin

In Two Month's Passing,

I figured it was time to blog again.  Well, I figured that a long time ago, but the summer found me somewhat constipated on the blogging front.  Whenever I miss a long period of time, I always feel like I have to recap everything, and then I get overwhelmed. That means that almost every post I make has a "recap" feel to it.

The other day, I joked with my stepdad about how he is a man of many unsolved mysteries, or, rather, unattempted ambitions, such as salmon fishing in Oregon or making oyster stew the family's New Year's tradition.  He laughed but responded with genuine trying words, and today we sat outside for a while planning a salmon-fishing trip for next summer.  As it turns out, the Kenai River in Alaska is a hot spot (or cold spot) for catching sockeye salmon, apparently the most delicious salmon in existence.  God never ceases to tickle my world with little signs, it seems.  I have been, bit by bit, shooting for Alaska next summer.  I hope to get a job singing in a chorus or something of that nature (haha, nature) in a city and camping my brains out the rest of the time.  Now my stepdad is working on fulfilling his fishing dream for our family, and the road seems to point to Alaska.  If I lived there next summer, I could easily meet them for a week and we'd all camp and fish together.  A lofty goal but one with a ladder.

I can't even try to describe to you what the summer has done for me.  Those of you who went through it with me have probably heard a portion of it in some roundabout way, or perhaps directly.  I can't even describe it in my own journal.  It's been an accumulation of people I've met, the biology class I took, the opportunities and avenues I've been dropped off at by some of the best companions I've ever known.  It's been the summer of a lifetime, and it's led me to strive for dematerialization at its very best. 

Another loft, but with God as my sturdy ladder, there's no way I can't reach it.

Breathing deep,

Kaitlin

The Old Man And The Tree

There is a tree across the way at the summer home.  It’s a forlorn creature that looks as if all its hands have been cut off.  But the wounds dried up long ago—but not in a healthy way, the round patches parched and no longer struggling.  A few twigs dangle off the limbs, the sullen, brown leaves are tufts of mangy hair on the old man who rides his bicycle up and down the street all day.  They do resemble each other, the old man and the tree.  Perhaps it is the reason they pass each other, the man with his methodical pedaling and the tree with its slow, stooped hunch to arid death.  The man would like to see a being like himself, lurking through time with him, watching the molasses hours with him.  When the old man stops his visits I will be convinced the tree is dead.

Almost Nothing Could Be Better

This is coming to you live from the porch of 1317 Anthony St.  It's early morning and rainy, a cat cuddling kind of morning much apparent to Tigger who is snuggled like a puzzle piece next to my blanketed leg.  What life has sparked from this porch and this house in the elementary steps of summer!--a brilliant kind of poetry and meaning festering in the corners of my mind, the house, Columbia itself.  I can't help but think that everyone is feeling this.

Even though only a few of my goals have been attempted, I feel no shame or disgust at the lack of commitment I so often have and am now having to goals.  I think goals in general are a way for me to get my butt moving, in an all-around way, or maybe to attack something specific for a while and then feel accomplished, but they aren't really a means to get themselves accomplished.  Kind of like the 10 Commandments.

This time that I have now-a-week is beautiful.  Even the stresses living on my own presents--ants, cockroaches, preparing more than one food item at a time--these things are fun.  They fulfill "living on my own"; those are the things I was excited about because it would serve as "see?  I really AM independent!"  Of course I am not completely.  But in all forms, I will never be.  

Even these stresses...last night I had a dream that I was in the supermarket with Amanda and she pointed out some bagels--packs of three.  And I was so upset, "packs of three?!" I cried, I was so worried when in real life I had bought a pack of six bagels, the smallest I could find, worried they would go to waste and I would waste money on them.  And here there was a pack of three, three bagels, all along.  How infuriating!  This was all in my dream, but I believe dreams reveal things, affirm things.  More reassurance that I am worried about running out of money for food.  Money worries me in a masked kind of way, in a way that I spend it fervently but grow increasingly panicked in spurts during the week, very uneven.  

Candace is here for a week--a week which is almost up, sadly.  I have placed on her the crown of inspiration to me and she never ceases to polish it on top of her now lushly stubbled head.  I am proud of you Candace!

I have decided that, for me, crushing is like sneezing: it pops up all of a sudden, builds to an intense climax, and resolves leaving me feeling refreshed and accomplished.  Although I never

 say "excuse me" for crushing.

Floating on the breeze,

Kaitlin