blabracadabra

= the magic that ensues from a deluge of talking.

sorry for the lack lately, things have been unusual.


how unusual? perhaps they start by being undescribably so. mostly i'm depressed b/c i wish i had done something else with my summer. i blame Mongolia and China for this. after spending such a short amount of time in such beautiful and stimulating environs, it is hard to return to my home in Kentucky and not fill with consuming regret. and regret is one of my top least favorite feelings in the world. i'd say "an itch you can't scratch" and water-logged shoes are pretty close behind.

i've been seeing doctors to try to sort out some nagging pains in my legs and stomach. that hasn't helped things, i suppose. i've always harbored some vague suspicion i won't live beyond 40, but feeling like it is worse than thinking it.

early mortality is ok, once you learn to accept it. you just learn to think about things differently. for example, i'm 21 now, past middle age. that means i feel even more entitled to go out and party than a normal 21-yr-old, because i'm also going thru a midlife crisis. (what this means in actual practice is that i party half the amount a normal Miami girl does (while wearing twice the amount of clothing, i might add), get drunk maybe half that time, but can outdrink most of my friends. considering my size, i have an astounding tolerance. go figure.)

speaking of freedoms, i registered for classes this morning, and found out most of my classes fall on tuesday/thursday. which means, amazingly, a four-day weekend. that is, if i decide not to take Elementary Chinese. the thought of taking Mandarin in a formal educational setting is exciting and terrifying at once. i fear reliving my high school French days, when the awkward pedagogical stylings of one Madame Keegan made me drop out of French classes before my time. i love learning French now, and still speak and write at an acceptable proficiency, but i hate to think of that happening to my mother tongue. the very idea of studying it brings me back to Sunday afternoons cooped up by the window of the language building on the UK campus, wishing my Chinese School classes would be over so i could go home and play in the yard.

on my list of classes for the fall?
-Cultural Studies of Power and Education
-Human Development and the Learning/Educational Environment
-Studies in Educational Issues
& Senior Sem (or, as i'm lovingly dubbing it, "The Extraavaganzaa." or "XG" for short. kinda like exegesis. haha, oh stop it.)
+ possibly El. Chinese
(that's 17 credit hours, 5 of which are to the intense wrapping up of my senior thesis, another 3 of which are a capstone. is that too much for a senior year? sounds like i'll be needing the 4-day weekends!)

i found a guy who's starting a media collective in LA and wants me to work with him. i'm considering it, having no other really exciting things in my life right now. only problem is, he wants me to go in the fall, which means i won't get to finish this thesis 4 years in the making. i always get commitment-phobia this time of summer, though, so i'm feeling highly at risk of flight. i get this way too with a job that's almost done. when i'm getting to the last page of a term paper, that's always the hardest one (after the intro paragraph) to sit down and write, because i know i have the necessary words in me, it seems pointless to do it just to do it. i suspect i prefer to leave the last pages off, rather than finish them. isn't that more seductive anyway? the welcoming openness and potential of halfness, rather than the rigidity and futile arrogance of mistaken completion.

i've been reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (the pre-Oprah's book club version, thank you very much). i'm loving the suggestive implications on human nature and the tension between nature and nurture. it has me wondering if everything we are, everything we do, the way we think, if our primordial unarticulated languages are indeed inherited. if perhaps, nothing is really possessed or uniquely "ours." if we are only mirrors reflecting endlessly into ourselves.

i am 21 years old, my own kind of middle-aged, but i am still afraid to grow up. the idea of going to grad school, or possibly getting a job, is terrifying. i find myself envying all the high school graduates, like my brother, who get to experience college for the first time. i've realized that college itself has become a new kind of security for me, that i will miss the familiar buildings and people after every summer. Summer itself, like Childhood, seems to be a constructed concept. no longer will i experience the clear divisions between school years by the blissfully relaxed laziness of Summer.

unwittingly, i have styled my life after the movies. this week, i painted the nails of one hand a sunny, daffodil yellow. the other hand, an icy, chrome-like blue. like the priest from Night of the Hunter, it seems i've polarized myself into love/hate. or i guess in my circumstance, sunny/cold. it seems i only have two options in these last days of Summer vacation.

BLABRACADABRA!
-stefan!e