Anyone wanna move to Woodville?

Also,

I mentioned in the previous one,

me, Russ, Paul, Rick, Mom, Grammy, Grampy, Tahoe, and Waffle stayed at Rick’s fam’s old lakehouse in Woodville over the past three days.  I canoed around by myself; sometimes Waffle held a station by a me.

I paddled around and imagined moving to the lakehouse after college and just living there for a year. My body would become formed by the simple chores of the land. I loved watching my skin change from the past few days of sun (not in a tan way, in a… Vitamin D, radiant health way). I could read and read and write and write, work some job and save up money, then  move to a city at the end of the year. The only thing is the windows are pretty scary. Mom installed big windows, she likes those big windows, and I imagine myself opening my eyes in the middle of the night to find some man standing outside, staring at me (not in a bella luna way). Living by myself could bring up a lot of paranoia.

lower case

Today my thoughts rolled like an octagonal wheel.

I don’t think I want to be a counselor. Splitting people’s minds all day might make me sick of myself. It’s needlepoint reminiscent somehow. I know it’s necessary for someone to do it, but since when have I been necessary?

You know what sounds great for post-graduation life? Hanging out in someone’s apartment. Wearing wacky clothes. Staring at bare pantries, just getting by, being in a band. Minimal, fleeting. Stuff would be cool, because we’d all be friends, me and whoever is there, and maybe I could sponsor a child with his/her picture on the fridge.

my future

http://www.maniacworld.com/Alfa-Romeo-Sloth.html

Gypsay

Eating brownie/cake currently. Cakey brownie. I made a plan in my head as I embarked on this baked endeavor, that I would eat it and stay up until 2 am writing away. I never thought I would favor the cake part over the frosting part, but that’s happening right now.

My improv friend Logan said that him and other improvers are probably going to live in Chicago… That could make another neat future.

Or Seattle would have Sara, lushness, coffee, Pacific Northwest Ballet open classes.

Or I have yet to see New York City since my mom talked about how dirty it was when we visited when I was eleven.

Or I could be a gypsy.

How old are you? Millenia, sir.

I wish that actors lived in caves, emerged to act, and then went subterranean again, never revealing their names or actual identities. Or that they walked around in disguises most of the time (or acted in costume and make-up that made them look drastically different). Something where nobody knew who they really were. I guess this idea is the banishment of celebrities. I suppose I can’t really enforce this to the entire earth, but I thought of it today like, “If I were an actor, this is what I would do…” I would be a mysterious woman, invested in the study of life and its people, embodying that beauty in pieces (plays, films, whatever…), and preserving my art, my self, from the public eye. This is to say, “Hey, you, you who watches me… This art is about you, not me.” So I would shun fame.

~and unrelate~

My Counseling professor (Counseling is a course, I’m not being personally instructed in one hour weekly sessions)  makes the priority of his lessons self-reflection. I like that partially because I could use that in deciding what I do with my life next, and also because it makes it, well, an easier class… Last Wednesday, he commenced the class by asking us to imagine where we would be in 2013. I wondered what he thought looking at us as we all sat there with our eyes closed.

I first registered slight surprise that I would have a future. (see: slightly faulty serotonin receptors.) After moving past that, I started to imagine myself living in a flat in London with Waffle. Flannery lived nearby somewhere. In the morning, I worked at counseling practice, overall part-time. I would be out by the afternoon to grab lunch in Covent Garden with Flann and then go to band practice. Walking home from band practice, I’d pick up Indian for dinner and be greeted by a tail-thomping Waffle at my flat. I’d take him out for a walk in a park. Back home, darkness falling, I would work on writing and drawing up graphic novels. A few hours later, after a soak in the tub, Waffle and I would curl up and fall asleep in an enormously cooshy bed. The bed was a real luxury imagined in there, since I’ve mainly slept on rather monastic things throughout my life. I imagined more forward into that life, where Bible studies and gigs and ballet classes would reside. I could suddenly tack on a conclusion to this… But I just made some brownies from scratch for the first time ever, frosting included in the ‘from scratch’, so I want to leave. I guess I mentioned the imaginal exercise, because it joined in the tide of my restarting. I’m going to keep consciously imagining happy futures instead of settling into the faulty serotonin receptor wasteland. And it’s not that I ever lost optimism that the entire universe would work out okay… It’s specifically myself deemed purposeless in a world full of purpose… so in fighting, I want to imagine specific futures for myself.

Obituary, Continued

So what do I want to do before I die?

I went walking with Waffle, sat down in the field with my spiral-cover journal, and began writing about this.

There’s a supra-goal, first of all, that in whatever I do I minimize my negative mark on the world from that process. I don’t want to leave paths of smoldering forests, voluminous piles of trash, or emotionally scarred people (see Ms. Van der Vat, unstable choir teacher of American School of the Hague). I can already see how modern living sustainably is very possible. It gives me some guidelines in daily living, but of what actions will this daily living be made?

The Peace Corps has been in my head since my junior year of high school. That would take up a few years of my life, living in a village and teaching some kind of skill, blending into the folks there.  I would like to make my own clothes, grow my own food, play musical instruments and record things, write stories, combine my love of writing and drawing in graphic novels…

 

Apparently, that love of writing isn’t flowing here right now. I suddenly feel really bad. I hit my head earlier… I was trying to do inversions, which is sort of like a brief hand-stand in modern dance, and I did one where I felt my weight pass beyond my hands so that my entire body was flipping over itself… I felt an incongruous lack of panic… My vertebrae crackled as the top of my skull whacked the carpet in a perpendicular way.  The rest of me fell to the carpet, and I lay very still, my body angularly drawn in like a crumpled spider. Then I got up and tried a few more inversions before deciding that ceasing would be wise. Now I feel kind of dull. I wonder if I have a minor concussion. I wonder if I’m sleepy because of it. Are you supposed to stay awake if you have a concussion? Then again, it could be the hour, and it could be natural, head-injury or not.