living out of boxes

ain't nothing but a number / decade of choice.

The record is beginning again.  I turned 28 on Sunday. 

I started really thinking about the changing of the number a week before.  I was waiting in line at my favorite big box bookstore when this tiny blonde girl with wire-rimmed glasses told the clerk, "Thank you for the words you said."  This was right after she had said she wished she could be like the clerk because she wants to be grown up.  When she is, she explained, she wants to be a teacher that teaches either K or pre-K.  The clerk asked her if she was in K or pre-K.  No, she said.  She is in first grade. 

You hear a lot that people wish they were the age of a kid again, but I never do.  I, like this very certain little first grader, just wanted to be grown up, and spent my whole adolescence looking forward to that freedom.   I can remember walking around my first semester of college and turning random corners, delighted that I was the only one who could choose them. 

And, since it is ten years later, I try to remember this so I won't find that I've taken my open exercising of free will for granted.  On my birthday, I talked to Isaac, and mentioned these ten years and my decade of adulthood.  He disagreed with measuring it like that, saying he felt like I've only really been grown up since I've left the Midwest, age 25.  That take on it is a bit more forgiving...whatever, it's all arbitrary anyway. 

Another part of this delight of choosing what's around me is finding art - things other people have made or thought about that I can infuse into my own.  Here are two from the past day:
-poetry:  Poem for my Daughter Disparaging the Gossamer Depictions of the Women of Certain Southern Texts by Adrian Blevins.
-music:  The Shepherd's Dog, new Iron and Wine album.  I'm not even going to waste wide world web space expounding on how ridiculous I got about this coming out on Tuesday.  I'm going to appeal to concision, instead, (ha!) and just say it was completely worth all of the anticipation I had...a gorgeous blend of folk and psychedelic rock.  I'm still dreaming about it. 

L:  collage and Iron and Wine lyrics from the song "Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car"

R:  drawing and Iron and Wine lyrics from the song "Peace Beneath the City" (which nicely contrasts the above-linked poem).

designing my own sketches of Spain.

In the last couple of weeks I've taken on a second job for the sole purpose of raising airfare dollars.  I have a couple of domestic destinations that I hope to reach before the end of the year, but my extra toiling is expressly going toward airfare for a trip to Spain over the upcoming winter holidays.  I haven't been out of the USA for three years, and that's made me itch pretty bad.  So, now, with a destination in sight, I have a plan.

I'd been thinking I definitely wanted to check out Barcelona (that's where Americans have to go, right?).  But in a travel essay I read this week, I learned about el Camino de Santiago, a 500 mile path that's been traversed by pilgrims traveling across northern Spain for the past 1,000 years.  I've measured between the days I have off and the mileage I'll be able to get in, and I'm going to do a leg of it that will take about a week.   I am very excited.

drawing of an Antwerp-influenced Dutch tile (238) from 1000 Tiles .

anniversaire

I am so overwhelmed by the repetitions of everything in my life.  From visiting with old friends to revisiting letters that only come out of the cigar box they live in on nostalgic occassions .  And this month for me repeats many past days by hitting all sorts of anniversaries.

Two weeks ago I kept on thinking over and over, it was a year ago that I was in New Orleans for the first time.  With a group of public interest-leaning-law students, which, at the time. a year ago, was a category I was still in.  I guess I'm still public interest-leaning-in-general now.

Monday was my Mom's birthday.  Today is my brother Mark's birthday.

Sunday the baby I used to babysit (who isn't a baby anymore) in Madison, Nicholas, turns three!

And next Monday is my ex-boyfriend Isaac's birthday.  He turns 30!  Which means my adult life is a decade old.  Isaac's birthday is the first of many ten-year anniversaries for me since I was there on his twentieth.  It's crazy to start to get older. 

Tuesday April 10th is J. Jason Groshopf's birthday.  He'll be 28.  In Milwaukee.  Happy Birthday Jason! 

And early May marks my ten-year high school whatever.   I feel like that's a totally built-up one to note.
Even so, you should believe that wherever I am now...Durham, NC, I'm thinking about the dates during these weeks, and concentrating on my life before and my life now. 

A year of law school alone has been enough for me to get over.  This whole year afterward has been one big celebration of relief that I've needed the whole year to process.  It's taken this much time so far and will probably keep taking more.  It was not my cup of tea, and I'm letting myself take time differently. 

Along with most other living beings, I seem to take spring as a metaphor every year.  Nine springs ago, Isaac and I were in New York.  And for some reason, every spring since, through blossoms and warm breezes, I am somehow taken back to that April.  Walking down Christopher St. aimlessly, looking for scrap art supplies in the trash, channeling the gypsy art in my blood.   

In the forefront, a bit brighter than that spring, if not just because of chronology alone, this spring in North Carolina is making quite an impact on me, too.  And maybe it's hitting me harder this year because last year, my first in NC in the spring, I was cooped up in an office. Studying substantive law (that is as good as a giant, organic cheese puff on the map of my brain now) and unable to resolve the new buds on trees and take a deep breath of pollen, which I hear wasn't as bad last year.

another anniversary of my life.

Ten years ago today I was in a really bad car accident in Lake Geneva, WI.  My senior year of high school I was driving home with friends - Jordan Buck, Aaron Buck, Jennifer Howell, and Karin Carlson.  It was snowing out, and really difficult to see.  On the curve of a highway heading out of Lake Geneva, a car came across an opening in the median and hit Jordan's hatchback head-on.  For some reason I sat in front, wore my seatbelt,...and didn't die. 

living out from talking boxes: the news blog

I don't know if you found the mid-term elections of this week interesting, but I didn't.  So,  those out there skipping the two-party square-dancing had to really search for the news.  Here's something I would've missed if I cared:

a deadly rare tornado,
and a death-row hunger strike.

And even the aftermath of the mid-term elections wastes more space while,
and a reversal of Herman Wallace's conviction?

And, adding to all of that, actually blogging about mid-term elections would be square-dancing around square-dancing.  (that's 1992-Ross-Perot-debate-sounding lingo)

free to drive.

Did you know that I love to drive?
You probably know that about me. 

passing the mile markers becomes a meditation of sorts.

I felt the same way when I was on a motorcycle trip with my Dad across Canada three summers ago, but hours spent driving make for a nice opportunity to sit back and look out.  I love the stretches of driving part of a roadtrip. 

We returned our rental minivan tonight, and I was very sad to give it back.  The folks at Hertz never asked where we were going with it, so it was a funny moment when they asked what the mileage was at the point of returning it.  We very casually answered that it was at 9931...We hadn't covered too much more that 3,300 miles.  that's a lot of trips to Algiers and back, right?