Somehow a whole week passed since my last post. Sorry. I'm not sure how that happened, since I'm thinking about the last week and it's not like I was all that busy. Busy, sure, but not too busy to tell you about it. Mostly I've just been lazy, I guess.
Here are some bullet points for you, since I'm still feeling too lazy to write an actual entry. I'm even too lazy to format actual bullet points, in fact, so just be grateful you're getting anything at this point. Ha.
-I e-mailed the head of the graduate department at my new school today to ask him when I'll be able to register and whether or not I'll be able to meet with an advisor or at least be given some recommendations of courses to take in my first semester. I got an automatic response from him saying that he is out of the country right now and his e-mail access is sporadic but he will respond as soon as possible, which is fine because for whatever reason I'm not freaking out about my lack of a plan (yet). But he spelled sporadic "spuradic", and secretly that kind of makes me happy because I've been a bit intimidated by his tone in e-mails prior to now. He's much less intimidating now that I know he misspells "sporadic". Not that I don't spell things wrong constantly myself, but it's reassuring to know that my superiors do it, too.
-I still can't believe I'll be on my way to UniversityLand in less than a week. I keep trying to envision living there, and I seriously can't. At all. I'll be all moved in and settled there in less than two weeks, and it still feels completely unreal to me. I keep waiting for someone to call me and say, "Oops, we made a mistake." And I bet that imposter feeling, the feeling that I'm weasling my way in somewhere I don't belong, won't go away any time soon.
-Last night was my last night of bartending. It was a perfect last night. I made good money, it was busy but not slammed, a bunch of my regulars were there early and fun people came in late, and even though we don't normally drink on the job I got three shots from my manager to celebrate my last night. I still can't believe how fast the summer went by. I could easily have done this job for another six months, I think, so I guess it's good that I'm leaving now before I'm burnt out on it.
-I have hung out with Phil a couple more times. I'm kind of sad that we wasted most of the summer avoiding each other after his outburst last month, but I'm grateful that we had the past few weeks at least and have worked everything out. I'm happy with the balance we're striking right now: friendly, more or less daily contact of some sort (IM, texts, etc.), but not so much time together that we're falling into that weird "are we dating or not?" place that we have fallen into so many times in the past when we've been in the same city. So everything is finally good. The boundaries are still a bit more blurred than I would like, but I'm finding it very manageable at the moment. Of course, I have thought this many, many times in the past, so we'll see if everything continues to be easy and nicely balanced once I get to UniversityLand. Generally, I tend to do better at maintaining our friendship on an even keel when we're not in the same city, and I also realized (and in some cases, re-realized) some important things last month when he and I weren't talking, so I'm hopeful.
-I had to take one of my mom's cats to the vet last week while she and my dad were out of town, and it turns out the cat has cancer. She has a big tumor in her chest, and there's nothing we can do to cure her so we're just keeping her comfortable for the rest of her life, which will probably only be a matter of weeks. Poor girl. My mom's really sad about it. And it is sad, we've had this cat and her brother and sister since they were born in my grandmother's flower box ten years ago. I'll miss her. And you know what's crazy? All summer long my dog has been particularly interested in this cat. He has been following her around the house, wagging his tail and sniffing her like mad whenever he sees her, etc. We have been joking that he likes her because he is tri-colored and so is she (she's a calico), but now I'm thinking that he has probably sensed all summer that she is sick and that's why he has been treating her differently than he has been treating the other cats. It just took us humans six weeks longer to figure it out.
-Oh, I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows! I actually finished it really early Thursday morning. I loved it. Loved, loved, loved it. I didn't even mind the epilogue, which is the part most people seem to be taking issue with. It seems that a lot of people don't like Harry as just a dad dropping his kids off at the Hogwarts Express, but I don't understand why people are mad about that. Isn't that what he always wanted, the whole entire time? He wanted nothing more than to be a normal guy with a family like everyone else, and in the end that's what he got. I couldn't be happier for a fictional character. I especially loved that Rowling managed to give us the whole wrenching emotion of Harry's death as well as the joy of his survival and defeat of Voldemort. It was pretty close to perfect, as far as endings go. I was a bit sad when it was all over, though. I think I got a bit TOO into the whole thing when I re-read the series. Here's a list of dreams I had during the week I read books 1 through 7:
-I was getting off a train at the Port Authority in New York (a train at the Port Authority, I know, I know, it was a DREAM, people) and I saw Phil walking the opposite direction holding hands with a girl that looked exactly like my imagination's version of Luna Lovegood.
-I had to track down Peeves and stop him from causing so much chaos.
-I was on the quidditch team and I was making out with some hot quidditch player in the locker room as we were getting changed for the game. And then I went outside and actually played quidditch, which was fun. That was actually a really, really good dream. I was kind of disappointed to wake up and realize I will never get to have sex with a quidditch captain.
Anyway, I enjoyed the entire series, I was very satisfied with the ending, and I can't wait to re-read the books by myself eventually and then with a kid or two some day. I have a feeling the books are going to be timeless classics.
-This is in contrast to the Babysitters Club books I found at the top of my closet when I was cleaning it out today. Somehow I think any potential future daughter of mine will only read those books to make fun of them, and I kind of hope for his sake that any future son has no desire to read them. Ha. I know I'm planning on making fun tonight when I curl up with one of the Super Specials before bed.
Cleaning out my closet was weird. My bedroom here at my parents' house looks nothing like it did when I was in high school. My brother and sister's rooms are both pretty much exactly like they left them when they went off to college, but a few years ago my room became the guest bedroom and now it has completely different furniture and everything that used to decorate my bedroom was shoved into the closet. So it was time to clean it out. I'd already gotten rid of a bunch of stuff from childhood and high school several years ago, but today I really purged and got rid of six or seven garbage bags worth of stuff. Most of it was actually old notebooks and work from high school and undergrad classes. I also got rid of a ton of old toys and stuffed animals. I think every small plastic toy made in China between 1984 and 1995 somehow ended up in my bedroom closet. It was ridiculous. I got a bit sentimental about certain things, but I made myself be pretty ruthless. I finally narrowed it down to a box containing all my old journals, two boxes of stuff from elementary school all the way through my undergrad years (mostly old notes and letters and awards) a shoe box of pictures, a box of stuffed animals that meant so much to me when I was little that I just couldn't bear to throw them away, and some decorations from my nursery that I kept more for my mom than for myself. To be honest, as I was sorting through it all I couldn't figure out why I was keeping this stuff. Possessions are so strange. As I was going through it all I realized that I'm probably never going to look through it again in detail. I sorted through it now, kept what is truly important to me, and probably won't look at it again for years and years. And yet I can't bring myself to throw it away. I can't throw away the stack of letters Phil wrote to me while I was away at college, or the scrap of paper where the first guy I ever dated wrote down his phone number. I can't throw away the stuffed elephant that I slept with every night for ten years and proudly took to Show and Tell in kindergarten. I can't throw away any of the journals I have obssessively written in for over ten years, even though when I read through the old ones today they mostly just made me cringe. I have these romantic ideas about some of these things: that one day one of my grandchildren will read through my old journals and smile at my 8th grade angst, that I'll put some of my beloved stuffed animals on a shelf in another baby's nursery someday, that generations from now someone will find the folder of old letters and say, "Wow, handwritten letters!!" But what are the odds that that will ever happen? Probably the boxes will just sit at the top of my closet here, and then someday when I finally have a house with storage space I'll move them to an attic or a basement or the top of another closet, and then someday I'll be dead and gone and some relative will go through the boxes and save two or three things and throw the rest of it away. But for now I keep typing daily in my personal journal, I keep organizing meticulously labeled photo albums, I save show programs and my favorite correspondence in a filing cabinet, and I continue to hope that maybe someday I'll have the time (and inclination) to fondly look back on my life and that maybe the pieces of my life will be a happy discovery for someone someday.
Whew. That all sounds really deep and emotional. And I guess it sort of is. But mostly I just love minimizing clutter, so I'm proud that I finally managed to narrow down twenty five years of life into about four shippable boxes. Keeping a journal helps, I think. When I have my written memories of everything, it's much less important for me to keep any other souvenirs.
Anyway, I'm off to bed. We're going up to our cabin in the mountains tomorrow, so I won't have internet access for a few days. I'll update again when I can.
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