Y'all should....

check out my friend Keija's (pronounced "kay-yuh"..."z") blog: http://quarryheightsworkshop.blogspot.com/

She is an amazing writer and is getting her book published in the next year! Go her!!!

it feels strange

to blog right now! I'm at home, which is why I feel somewhat obligated to do so. Off to have coffee with Candace in a minute, which is probably another reason I felt obligated to blog right now--I always begin things when I have only a minute to do them...for some reason, it always feels like the perfect time!

Today's goals: gather all sources for research paper and make an outline with main points.

I win for most boring blog ever. I also win for blaspheming Thanksgiving break by talking about doing work...ew.

Yogie-Eyed

You know, yoga can be very sensual. Inhaling and exhaling, smooth extended movements, tracing your muscles with your hand to reach a pose, plenty of positions to choose from...think about it! Today at yoga, we had a male instructor. The room was so small that our mats were practically touching, and mine was directly in front of the instructor's. Every time we had a forward facing pose, we went through the awkward situation of trying to avoid each other's eye contact while experiencing that disturbing sensation of someone looking right past your left ear to the wall behind you. And all the while giving commands like, "Inhale and bring your arms up," "exhale into down-dog," "slide your right hand down to the back of your thigh...." etc.

My favorite pose has to be Cradle The Baby. Yes, Cradle The Baby. As we lowered ourselves to a seated position on our mats, the instructor told us to bring our left leg up to our chest and wrap our arms around it into Cradle The Baby. While I thought the pose was merely for a thigh/butt muscle stretch, the instructor and a few other people in the class couldn't help but...cradle the baby. As my mother and I held the pose, we watched the others rock their foot back and forth and gaze at it fondly.

I've exercised twice now. What other wonders does the new year have in store?!

as usual

As usual, I am thrilled that there is a new semester starting soon and a new chance to rock at life. I am so ready to nail all of my performances this semester and work really hard to develop them. And I finally know what I want to do after college! I have decided that I want to get a masters degree in performance. Yay! Although I really have no idea where to look. But that is part of the fun.

This next semester includes understudying Lauretta in Gianni Schicchi, usual University Singers concert, Brian Hartman's small ensemble Ars Nova, B MINOR!!!, and of course, ITALY! So many things to think about and be excited about. And hopefully studying some Bach with Ms. Harrell.

Also, I have gotten a bug inside me to tutor. I don't know how, and I'd love to get paid for it, but that is not the number one reason that I want to do it, or really any number reason. It's not that I've gotten a new wave of excitement to teach public school. Tutoring just sounds appealing to me, to really work one on one with someone struggling and (hopefully) see a difference. I might check out the Intersection, where my friend Jackie works, or Big Brothers, Big Sisters. Do any of you bloggers out there in Columbia know of a place I can help out once a week or so?

I can't wait till my brothers are grown up and we have a better relationship. They are already starting to get more fun, and I am excited for the days when we can all come home for Christmas and really talk and have a good time. Although I love coming home, most of my time here is spent on my computer or reading a book. Or eating, of course. This year lunch/brunch was hashbrown and egg casserole, "compote" cranberry stuff, or as Tom and I call it, "compost," french-toast egg-nog casserole, golden juicy ham, and...a Fat Tire? Yes. I can finally join my parents in a drink around the house.

Also, I got a Kindle for Christmas. wtf.

Reasons I am against Kindle:

-it's not a book

-like Taylor said, it will destroy libraries

-it extinguishes the whole book culture we have going on here. You can't turn a page on a Kindle. You can't underline and write in comments on your favorite part. You can't borrow a Kindle download from your friend and read their comments. You can't see a pretty cover (because we all know we judge books by their cover). You can't feel the pages and smell the ink. You can't slam it with satisfaction when you're done and stuff it in your bookshelf amidst other conquered works. You can't huddle with your friend around a Kindle the way you would your bookshelf and talk about what a great character so-and-so is in so-and-so's novel and then pull it out and lend it to your friend. Your Kindle won't show the dog-eared pages that you got stuck on, the ripped pages from when you dropped it on the kitchen floor, or the numerous coffee stains. Well Kindle, guess you'll be going back to my dad's hands where you came from, you God-forsaken electronic.

On that note, I've truly had a WONDERFUL Christmas :) and hope you all have too.

I am going to fake it till I make it.

Interstate

Welp, here I am, hitting the road to Omaha.  Going home for a week or so and golly, I thought to blog on my way out the door.  ?!  I'm taking with me the Journals of Sylvia Plath, so maybe I'll squeeze something out while I'm at home.  She was young; I'm young.  Correlation.  I hate to leave Dumas, especially knowing that there's no one there save my family to see.  I sure do want to see them, but my trip will most likely be cut short, seeing as this evening when I arrive will be the start of a slow nail driving into my brain until around Wednesday when I'll be completely insane.  

Maybe there's more of a correlation between Ms. Plath and me than I thought...

Old Habits Die

I wondered if I should blog tonight, and then I decided that yes, I should.  I'm sitting here in the living room with Kim watching "Make Me A Supermodel" on Bravo (one of the top 10 most watched channels at 1603 D) and thinking about doing my TDP homework.  People on reality TV are usually dumb, but I love it when you find someone that emanates a higher level of intellect.  Like you can just tell when they talk or move or interact with other people that they are more aware of the dynamics of life situations.  For example: Renee on a previous season of ANTM.  And I refuse to believe that it's because she looks like she's 30.

A lot of things in my life have changed and are changing.  Sometimes it feels weird to me even though I know it's a natural progression of life.  But when I step back and assess, it's very comforting to realize that the consistencies over the last two years (years of immense changes) have been U Singers and my individual voice studies.  Sure, there have been developments in those fields, and those developments are exciting.  I am more in tune with my study: theoretically, historically, technically, thematically, emotionally, professionally....so many ally's.  It feels very good and natural.  I'm sure it's what I was meant to do.

Now to do this TDP assignment, which I'll probably get a smiley face sticker on or something because my professor likes to make us do skits, color with markers, and watch Magic School Bus videos (not that I'm complaining about that!).  Two more days till break!  Good thing there's no milk in the house so I don't have a chance to make mac n cheese and then eat every noodle.

The Night (Final Draft?)

When Frederick woke up that morning, he wanted her.  He made his bed neatly and brushed his teeth for two full minutes, thinking about her.  He could hear Debussy following him around campus, as he refilled his pencil with lead, as he dropped coins in the slot and made copies, as he raised his hand in his Ethics class.  He chewed on his sautéed carrot slices at lunch and thought of her hair, rippling like the ridges on the carrot slices.  He scrubbed his hands in the bathroom and the soap reminded him of her clean smell.  Everything about her was clean and smooth, and he wanted it all.

Frederick grew up in a quiet home with a hidden mother and a timid father.  They were hidden and timid when he came home from the hospital, when he learned to walk, and when he moved on to the 5^th grade.  They were hidden and timid when Frederick discovered himself one Sunday alone in the bathroom during his 14^th birthday party.  Frederick hid his tears in Chemistry class when Selena Rodriguez came too close and he felt a swelling down below his belly button and Mrs. Matthews couldn’t hold in her laughter.  He also hid these tears from his mother and father.  He hid them in the locker room and hid them at home in his pillow. 

Somehow these tears forced their way back into Frederick’s body, because there grew a bubble of hate in his chest that only expanded as he finished his teens and moved on to his twenties.  As he learned to control his fevers, his hatred inflated.  He hated his desires, his filthiness—he hated Frederick. 

His parents were the same.  He kissed them goodbye before school and sat down to dinner with them at night.  The world was the same.  At restaurants, he would order scrambled eggs, but if you asked him what kind of eggs you should cook him, he would say he didn’t care.  But the bubble of hate was still growing.

When he met Leah, he knew.  He held the door open for her in the art building so she could hoist in a giant sketchpad.  “Thank you,” she said, and smiled at him.  He recognized her from his economics lab.  Her voice was deliberate and soft.

Frederick adjusted his backpack and pointed to the pad.  “Drawings?” 

“Yes, just a few,” she said.  “Not great or anything.”  He lifted the cover of the sketchpad at her nod.  An orange covered with beads of moisture.  A portrait of a woman—her mother.  He flipped to the back, carefully, sliding the thin paper between his two fingers.  The last drawing was of a naked man.  His private parts were shaded over with pencil. 

“Aren’t you in my economics class?” she said. 

He looked up and nodded.  “My name’s Frederick.”

“I’m Leah.”

Leah and her white dresses, her Christmas lights lining the walls of her bedroom, her habit of swinging her legs underneath her chair while sitting in class.  Once, downtown, they had passed a homeless man on the corner.  He had asked for some change, pausing the cigarette before his mouth, peering up at Leah from the depths of his tangled hair.  She mumbled in bewilderment, a deep red blush creeping up her neck to make her appear masked. Frederick grabbed her hand and hurried her away.  The frozen trees crackled above them, mimicking Leah’s rushed heels.  He gazed at her face—pure shock, beautiful shock.  She excused herself, embarrassed, and cleared her throat, dismissing the situation.  But he was entranced by her clean simplicity, much as a child and a music box.  He wanted to be that clean, with Leah’s help, of course.

He took her out that night.  Leah wanted Thai food and he didn’t complain.  After he ate the spicy Thai food he always felt full and spotless as if Leah were inside of him, fitting into his skin and pushing all the dirt out through his pores.  The booth was lumpy and frayed, and while Leah spoke slowly of her 2D design professor, her lips like slices of peach forming the words perfectly, she squirmed from the waist down.  Frederick coveted her tiny movements.  He couldn’t see, only felt with the tip of his kneecap, once, her smooth leg under the table.  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, and cleared her throat.  He thirsted for her.

At the end of the night, Frederick pulled the car into the dark driveway of her house.  Her father had decorated the roof with miniature glowing reindeer.  He made a sluggish ordeal of shutting the car off, taking the key out of the ignition, and unbuckling.  Leah sat still and intelligent in the passenger seat, her hands in her lap, placid as a Thanksgiving snooze.  He took one of them on impulse.  She had beautiful hands.  Her palms were plump and the lines defined.  Her knuckles rose smoothly like grassy knolls.  Her fingernails were tiny moons of silk.  They tasted of seasoned salt as he quickly kissed them, following her arm up to her shoulder as she looked at him, silent and motionless on the leather seat.  He paused in front of her face.  Molecules hopped back and forth between their noses.  He wanted to be clean, he wanted Leah to scour him inside and out. 

She put her hand to his chest and pushed him away.  One slow push.  His eyes grew wide.  His mouth was dry.  The click of the door handle, then her slow voice, “Not yet, Fred,” and she glided inside after she shut the front door, leaving him stranded in her soapy scent, his car filling up with foamy bubbles that overcame him.  The Christmas lights twinkled from her window.  There was clean, white snow all around.  He stepped out of the car and buried himself in it.  

The Night

When Frederick woke up that morning, he wanted her.  He could hear Debussy following him around campus that day, as he refilled his pencil with lead, as he dropped coins in the slot and made copies, as he raised his hand in his Ethics class.  He chewed on his sautéed carrot slices at lunch and thought of her hair, rippling like the ridges on the carrot slices.  He scrubbed his hands in the bathroom and the soap reminded him of her clean smell.  Everything about her was clean and smooth, and he wanted everything about her.

He took her out that night.  Leah wanted Thai food and he didn’t complain.  After he ate Thai food he always felt full and spotless as if Leah were inside of him, fitting into his skin and pushing all the dirt out through his pores.  The booth was lumpy and frayed, and while Leah spoke slowly of her 2D design professor, her lips like slices of peach forming the words perfectly, she squirmed from the waist down.  Frederick coveted her tiny movements.  He couldn’t see, only felt with the tip of his kneecap, once, her smooth leg under the table.  He thirsted for her.

At the end of the night, Frederick pulled the car into the dark driveway of her apartment.  He made a dramatically sluggish ordeal of shutting the car off, taking the key out of the ignition, and unbuckling.  Leah sat still and intelligent in the passenger seat, her hands in her lap, placid as a Thanksgiving snooze.  He took one of them on impulse.  She had beautiful hands.  Her palms were plump and the lines defined.  Her knuckles rose smoothly like grassy knolls.  Her fingernails were tiny moons of silk.  They tasted of seasoned salt as he quickly kissed them, following her arm up to her shoulder as she looked at him, silent and motionless on the leather seat.  He paused in front of her face.  Molecules hopped back and forth between their noses.  He wanted to be clean, he wanted Leah to scour him inside and out. 

She put her hand to his chest and pushed him away.  One slow push.  His eyes grew wide.  His mouth was dry.  The click of the door filtered into his ears after her slow voice did, “Not yet, Fred,” and she glided inside decades after she shut the front door, leaving him stranded in her soapy scent, his car filling up with foamy bubbles that overcame him.  He was suffocated by her long after she was gone.

It Hit Me

Music is like fiction.  It's all about tension and release.  Music isn't interesting if there is no conflict.  Even in Palestrina's music, harmonically perfect music, it's there.  You can't have music without the V, I.  You've got to have the cadence.  Conflict, suspension, dissonance, anticipation--all these things make music perfect.  

You can't have the relief without the tension.

Jane And Her Mother

She started biting her thumbnails again that day.  Her mother had long kicked her of the habit, she thought, but it crept back in as she paced in slow relay from the dresser to the bed and back again.  She was always slow, methodical, levelheaded.  Instead of ditching the bus with a cry and escaping to the mall after school like her friends, she came home to her mother and brother to pull weeds or set the table.  Instead of crying, she would steady herself and sit quietly on her bed until it passed.  She would do these things this evening after she told her mother she was pregnant.

She rehearsed in her head.

“Mom, I’m pregnant.”  Too direct, I shouldn’t start with the news, she wouldn’t even listen to me after that.  “Mom.  I need to talk to you.”  She’ll probably just continue watching the news and say, “…Yes…Yes?  Sorry, the news is on.”  Like I don’t know the news is on.

“Mom.”  I’ll sit down next to her on the couch and wait for her to turn the news off.

“Yes?”

            “I need to talk to you about something.”
            She won’t even raise an eyebrow, probably, since she would consider it proper of me to come to her with a problem.  She will probably feel proud of herself.  “What is it?”

            “Well…”  No, no, no, no stumbles allowed.  I can’t give her any chance to feel like this is her conversation.  “You know I’ve always been a responsible person, Mom.”

            She will nod but not say anything.

            “And it’s because of you, you know.  You taught me to be responsible and to take care of business.”

            A swift nod, probably.  At this point she is expecting the worst.

            “And you’ve always been there for me in times of trouble, you know?  You’ll help me through anything, right?  You’ll make it okay?  I’m pregnant, Mom, I don’t want to be but please can you just make it okay?”
            She stopped herself.  She looked down—her hands were clenched around her abdomen.  This is ridiculous.  She would never help me.  She didn’t teach me anything.  She didn’t teach me to be responsible and take care of business.  She would never be there for me in times of trouble.  She would never help me.

            She will hate me.

            She breathed in and out.  Walking downstairs, she didn’t hide her thumbnails.  She stood in front of the TV. 

            “Mom, I’m pregnant.”

This was an assignment on imagined dialogue.  Once again, I did it on my way out the door.  What is happening to me?  

Kaitlin

Uncle Rob

My mother’s brother.  He’s the one that would be missing at Thanksgiving some years, and the table would be a decibel quieter.  For years, he’d bring a friend to gatherings—Stacey.  We all loved Stacey as kids.  She was loud, inappropriate, wrestled with us on her hands and knees.  A perfect match for Uncle Rob.  He was all those things—except he didn’t wrestle.  He was aloof, sidetracked most of the time.  We realized when we grew up that he usually didn’t know what to do around the youngers.

He and Stacey would cackle together and she would chide him like a wife of decades, but no, they weren’t together.  My little brother asked her once, “Why don’t you live in Chicago with Uncle Rob?”  She and Gramma hooted and Stacey bent down, put her hands on his shoulders, and said knowingly, “Would you want to live with your Uncle Rob?”  Conrad’s nose squinched in his laughter, “Ohhh, no way!”

It was in our early teens when we were allowed to learn that Uncle Rob was gay, and everything made sense.  His elbow-nudge jokes with my mom that made her sob with laughter, the solid way his gut hung over his belt, his vowels and elongated s’s and emphasized t’s…of course.  We nodded solemnly to our parents as they told us to not to discuss it, Oh no, we would never.  And at that point, we never would—it was a satiating, correct puzzle piece to our secret, starved wonders about our Uncle Rob.  He had been a smoker for twenty or thirty years and spoke in raspier tones each Christmas.  He celebrated his choice of Fiji water that one year at the ranch and never passed up a fart-joke opportunity.  A conversation with my Uncle Rob was a kind of unholy privilege that you received secretly every two years.  It made sense that all of this unholiness would culminate in such a fact in our Catholic minds—Uncle Rob was gay.

And we loved him.  How could we not?  In spurts he would tell us jokes or hug us and absentmindedly give us candy.  There is a picture of us playing Monopoly that I keep in my journal.  I am about 5 and Uncle Rob is thinner.  The look on my face is crazily gleeful because Uncle Rob was there, playing with me.  He was my special uncle.  I remember finding this picture in a baby album a few years ago.  It was right before my mother and I were supposed to fly up to Chicago to stay with him during college visits.  I was nervous about the trip and about what kinds of things I would find at Rob’s apartment.  So I picked up the picture and stuffed it in a book.  Why I did this is still unclear to me.  My attempt, maybe, at creating a history with Rob, a loving, endearing childhood friendship that never existed.    

I know, I know, the last paragraph is weak.  I wrote this today right before it was due and I had to scurry to print it off and get to campus on time.  That is the worst way to work and unfortunately the way I do many things in my life.  Maybe this semester will be a turning point on that field for me.

Family Woman,

Kaitlin

Forward

The gang was trekking to Alaska.

Well, it was not really a gang, rather a gang of something, a gang of superiors, a gang of spirituals, a gang of the eclectic searching for experience.  They all wore backpacks, except for Lucy who wore a crocodile purse, and in them they carried tools.  Benjamin a hammer for the way he liked to make squirrel stew, Micah his mother's face on a coaster she had made, Gabe a recorder to summon the blessings of heaven.  Marge carried used loose-leaf because she could only brew her words on scrap paper, and Clint carried an old baseball from the days of his father.  Lucy carried weapons--a shark's tooth, a switchblade, a rifle.  The others whispered about broken glass and how the bag was a real crocodile in disguise.  They were all seeking souls, seeking fulfillment of a life, as they would find, that only allowed them to carry the selected necessities.  Of course, the necessities they carried now would change over time.

I really want to develop this.  I see Lucy here as a great character.  There are so many things left unspoken for in this blurb--what more about Micah?  Gabe's name connection?  Why the weapons?  Why the scrap paper (thanks Peggy)?  How admiring was Clint really of his father?  These things are all tools, but tools for what exactly?  And what are they really seeking?  A new beginning, perhaps.  And all because the instructions told me to write for ten minutes, mimicking Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried."  

Digging,

Kaitlin

A Phony Pose

There was a picture of my brother Dan on my old phone that always confused me.  The upstairs of our house looks like this: you walk up the stairs, and to the right is my mom and dad’s room.  Across from you is the bathroom my brothers and I share.  If you venture down the hall to your left a bit, the end of it splits into three rooms—my room, my brothers’ room, and the office.  I took this picture at Dan’s request.  I was standing in my room and he in his, and he stuck his head and nothing else around the corner of our two rooms.  The picture is merely his head floating in a sideways manner—not floating, maybe—rather, like the Romans defeated him in battle and stuck his head on a stake in the wooden trim outside their bedroom, as a warning to any foreigners and as a boasting to any natives.  I suppose, with the Romans, it could also work vice versa.  It doesn’t help that imagined battle cause that his tongue is stuck out and his eyes are googley.  Dan, at 11, ingeniously and unknowingly brought the ancient world into this piece of writing. 

He is always doing things like that—things that I have a hard time believing because he has been considered semi-dull-minded by my family and I (and his school) since his birth; things that probably aren’t even true.  Not that Dan’s knowledge of ancient Roman culture even has the merest possibility to be true.  But in that moment, through the savvy glimmer in his eyes and the placement of his tongue; the pale Sunday afternoon sunlight shimmering through the window of the office in the background; my brother’s illegal Myspace page pulled up on the screen of the desktop, or some other site equally forbidden to my brothers; Dan almost seems as clever as a college professor. 

I remember taking it and laughing at the ridiculousness of this pose that he threw together at the last second before the shutter snapped.  Ever since then I have always done a double take when I scroll through the pictures on my phone.  That phone is in the trash bag beside me now.  Soon the picture will be solely in my mind, but no less phony.

This was our assignment to describe an image we had in our minds in great detail.  I guess when I started writing this, it ended up a lot more substantial than I had planned.  I've never been able to write about descriptive details without pulling some sort of hidden meaning from them.  I can't wait to learn more about how to start a short story.  Off for a great weekend of camping!  I'm also hoping to do some writing out there.

Not laboring on Labor Day,

Kaitlin

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

Some More Summer

I'm sitting here at my kitchen table!  Isn't it amazing.  Having counters, tables, outsides and a new security.  I love home.

All I can think about is in about a week, when it will get hectic and wonderful.  Club Drage 2008 begins in T-minus 8 days!  I can't wait for just eating eggs, writing on the white board, playing the piano, and sitting at the table together.  I also can't wait to retreat to my room when things get too crazy.  Not that I am predicting a time, but I just want something to happen so I can quietly perform the simple action of just going into my room and BOOM being alone.  I half expect a tiny chorus of angels quietly humming Mozart's Requiem in the corner of Hoops's bookshelf while I celebrate staticky solitude.  

The white board will be a signature of our household--despite it being present in households and dorm halls worldwide.  Every morn, I shall scrawl--with the glorious ease of dry erase markers (don't you just love them)--the word of the day, today's weather, and something creative, like a quote or something.  We're also going to try to memorize a Bible verse as a house every week, so that will be up there for viewers as well.  So exciting.

I am making it a point to write a lot this summer.  Even with this potential...probable...change in major, I can't give up my writing.  All I'm thinking about lately is singing--rather, all I'm thinking about focusing on lately is singing--and then last night I watched "Becoming Jane" and fell in love with the image of writing once again.  The good thing about falling in love with this image is that there is actually substance underneath it that I can fall into, plush, luscious...pluscious....substance.  These flawed--or desirable--notions of pure, passionate love that Jane Austen has recently impregnated me with can be abated by the fact that it's gotten my pen moving again, in a creative fashion, something more than just journaling.  It feels wonderful.

Keep me accountable for my goals this summer, dudes:

-exercise daily or at least every other day

-read---an amazing amount

-write (both fiction and song)

-learn a piano masterpiece

-learn a voice "masterpiece"

-Project Vocab--sticky notes 

-eat healthily

-Season and Trilogy Summer! (Lost, Grey's, Office, Matrix, Indie, Anna, Jones, Star Wars, Godfather, Arrested Development, 30 Days)

-watch the rain on the porch with a silky cup of coffee 

-celebrate beauty, life, earth.

Looking up,

Kaitlin