Remember:

• Sounds and sights inside the airport. Harried people running to catch their flight, others confused, overwhelmed. The impatient, the expectant. The ease of seeing your name cleared or not, the familiar and fun jolt of the plane taking off, the jerk of it landing in the sunlight.
• Feeling at home yet alien on campus again, while walking around with a friend. Afraid to see people I once knew, but hoping. Accepting that while this campus was not affected by my presence and has since moved on, accommodating new generations of students with every new season, I have been affected permanently by it and will carry that with me forever.
• Navigating the metro again. The stink of piss, rotting paper and garbage, people, the rails, the stale air of the trains. Brings me back to summer, traveling, living.  We get out on 13th and U St, then run across the intersection to jump in a friend’s car.
• Laughing, and Cristal, dry and a bit tart, loud music, friends dancing. You do realize your dress is unbuttoned in the back? one of them say to me. Figures. But she helps me fix it, and the night goes on, the lights in the recessed squares in the ceiling dissolving from red to purple to blue and green.
• Teetering back out to the sidewalk outside, making sure a friend stayed put and drank the entire bottle of water.  Getting put in a headlock, grappling, and laughing about it. It’ll be a painful morning for that friend the next day. We all hug and say goodbye.
• Striding quickly back underground to make the last few trains of the night. The heavy girl folded over herself a few seats in front of us and across the aisle; when the loud splattering sounds start issuing from the girl, I insist we switch trains. Oddly enough, nobody else moves.
• After sleeping from four to seven-thirty in the morning, there is fatigue and detachment on the ride back.  Bereft of space and with the first book in the Dexter series, I do not sleep, but instead finish it and start the second.

Generally, it is a good weekend. I use Saturday and Sunday to recover, but alternate applying for jobs and working to break up the monotony.

Tomorrow is Chinese New Year; a friend mentioned quietly that it is the year of the Ox, which means good luck.  I hope he’s right.

Today:

• Awake from strange, dark dreams
• Eat breakfast quietly, a bowl of sugary, strawberry oatmeal and one flat, deflated pancake
• Apply for unglamorous jobs
• Watch the inauguration on CNN downstairs, in pajamas, while drinking tea and eating rice cakes
• Wander Publix, looking for ingredients for a pie
• Bake sweet potato pie
• Watch The Matrix series
• Gym, two classes: hip hop, mat pilates
• Sleep

Rinse, repeat.

I’ve been shamefully late in posting this, so forgive me.  Today it’s much more important that I balance my finances out, pray that more money comes in soon, and continue working on my other marketable skills.  Whoever thought that semi-forced unemployment was so difficult?

Anyway, the list:

1. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - J.K. Rowling
2. Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
3. The Stand - Stephen King
4. Darkly Dreaming Dexter - Jeff Lindsay

I’ve already finished Harry Potter.  Wonderful, as usual.  There are so many small details that now I get to go back and savor.

Also, I’m not sure that I’ll have time for #4, since The Stand is just shy of 1000 pages.  It’s quite a committment. Oh well.  Maybe once I’m done Watchmen, I’ll begin Dexter in between readings of The Stand, which, by the way, is already scaring the shit out of me.

It’s really amazing how quickly things change, even from one day to the next.

Once upon a time, the boy I was dating at the time and I were sitting on the couch flipping through the television, looking for something to watch. This was a fairly typical scene from our lives during the year and a half we dated. It could have been any evening, during any month. I don’t remember exactly.  If we weren’t watching TV, we did puzzles. Sometimes, to get out from under the watchful eye of the parents, we’d take long walks around the neighborhood. I look back at these times with amusement now, but no doubt there was something nice about the simplicity of it all.

(There are totally spoilers ahead for the Cirque du Soleil show, Kooza. Beware!)

Read the rest of this entry »»

News:

• New Year’s is kind of a bust. I am sick that day, and sick for the next three or so days after that. That night, however, we go to that club. It’s smoky and alluring inside–it has the potential to be quite a beautiful and sexy place–but it’s also a deathtrap. Had there been a fire, we would have all died. About an hour in, tired of standing our ground and being shoved, mashed, pushed, and elbowed into our little corner, we leave. Well, meaning we get in line for coats. Thirty minutes after that, we stumble out into the cool night. The New Year has come and gone, and now everyone is just tired and ready for bed.
• I get to the clinic on Friday after leaving work. I wait and wait, and they find that I am in picture perfect health. Absolutely nothing wrong with me, physically. They give me anti-nausea medication anyway to deal with choking down food so that I won’t have to go to the hospital and be fed intravenously, but the medication knocks me out. I only take it twice before feeling better, the stress of the last few months gone after a good 36 hours of sleep. Because that’s what it is, stress, rendering me unable to eat, drink, or enjoy myself.
• On the plus side, judging from the X-ray of my empty insides (completely empty, the nurse who took the images said, rather shocked. Makes sense, I told him, since I hadn’t eaten since Monday), my spine is perfectly straight and all my ribs are in order!
• I also cut my hair. The stylist, whom I’ve seen around Decatur in Starbucks or Subway once in a while, looks at my long hair and says, I suppose we’re not taking off much length today?  I tell her that on the contrary, we are. Ten and a half inches, to be exact, and now my hair is dark and shiny again. I haven’t seen it this healthy since well before my first day of ninth grade, when I’d dyed it a reddish brown. Since then it has been varying degrees of red, brown, and black, but never its original color (and so healthy!). 
• Saturday we see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It’s long, pretty, and meandering. We walk through Atlantic Station in the rain, ducking underneath scaffolding attached to the outside of the buildings like exposed skeletons.
• Tomorrow we are seeing Cirque du Soleil at Atlantic Station. We have nosebleed tickets and appear to be seated behind a pole or thereabouts, but I am excited nonetheless.

I suppose I should make some kind of list recapping the year, or trying to remember great moments or something. Maybe a New Year’s resolutions list or something. Well, next entry. Right now I’m at work, trying to keep my cool and not stress out about things (although I can feel my stomach slowly churning at the thought of having this one project left to finish by the end of this week). I do have some goals for this coming year, though, so don’t worry. I’ll put something up. And my reading list, which I neglected in December.