Cracked Eggs, Crackpots, and things like Pork Patties

Cracked Eggs, Crackpots, and things like Pork Patties

This is one of those strange, unnerving moments when I realize with a jolt that I haven't said a word out loud in hours. My mind has been spinning away, as always-- mentally drafting this post to you, my lovely non-existent readers, having conversations with itself, replaying work last night at work-- but I haven't actually spoken to anybody. I've always been the type of person who can handle, even appreciate, long spaces of time spent in solitude. I think the reason for this is that I never actually feel alone.

I've had a couple lightening-bolt experiences this week. One is the realization that not all people think like me. By this, I of course do not mean that I have just now realized other people hold different opinions (No, I found that out years ago when I wore the Bush shirt my mom had bought me to school), but that the way they process things, they way their minds work, is different.

In my head, I am continually writing. Since perhaps age eight, there has always been a story being unwrapped, revised, and rewritten in my mind. It is my story, and I will be working on it until the day I die. It has always been like this, and I can't imagine life without it. I was rattling on to Mom about it the other day, assuming she knew what I meant because she is a writer too, and therefore had probably always had her own story going. She just gave me this confused look. "What?" I asked. "You're not writing all the time? What's going on, then? What do you think about?"

I was feeling sorry for the math types at the time of our conversation, particularly my boyfriend, and counting on Mom to join my little pity party for all the physics majors who were born and would die without a story. I had never imagined she could be grouped with them.

"I always have a conversation going," she replied.
"A conversation?" I questioned. "With who? Yourself?" I started sniggering.
"Ah, you know. Invisible friends. Bob, Charlie. No! Just a conversation. I'm always strategizing about what I'm going to do next, and how people will react to it."
"Oh. Well, what do the poor math people have, if they don't have a story or a conversation? I can't imagine just having plain thoughts. How depressing!"
"Maybe they always have an equation going," she suggested. "Maybe they're always thinking about time and miles per gallon and what percent of the workout they've completed on the treadmill."
"Oh," I said.

Still, I wouldn't want to go through life with only an equation when I'm all alone. I can't imagine they make very good company.

Of fall

But if I can't have summer, I'll take fall. Fall is good, too. A good time for setting new goals, new routines, thinking new thoughts and becoming a new person. Fall is also a good time for trench coats. I have just purchased another one, this one an amazing shade of red, to my mother's disaproving lack of surprise. "How many trench coats do you have now?" She demanded as I handed it to the cashieer. "Like, four?"
"No, Mom, I have two. Two."

It will also be nice to wear jeans again without enduring the predictable summer criticisms to the tune of-- "Man, you're wearing jeans again today? How can you stand it? It's like 90 degrees out. You look so hot. Wait. I mean, not like that!!"

And I haggled for an amazing scarf and matching gloves in Peru, which I am also extremely excited to wear.

Peru... I can't say I don't miss it. Isn't that strange? I miss my roommates and Spanish the most. I find myself talking to the dogs almost exclusively in Spanish, poor things. But nobody else wants to hear it. Part of me feels like there wasn't enough closure to it. My personality is the type that (pathetic as it may be) would honestly have benefitted from a full-flege debreifing, but there wasn't anything. We got back to Miami, and I went to bed without saying goodbye to anyone. The plane ride from South America had been unimaginably bad. Standing in line at customs once back in the States was a nightmare, as I continued to hold my head, trying to keep it from exploding. The feeling didn't let up for at least twelve hours, and one ear remained disabled for a few days. Add to that the stomache that had been lurking around the entire trip... I honestly thought I was going to die. But I made it back in once piece and, miraculously enough, still recieve e-mails from team, despite my shamefully antisocial behavior that last night.

Another part of my personality is this nagging feeling that there can be no closure to Peru until I've written it out of my system. And I of course know this is true. I wonder when this dependency formed, when writing became my first and only coping mechanism. I knew in Peru how important it would be to trudge through everything little by little, instead of letting it pile up, and I wrote faithfully each day, either to Paul or just myself. I haven't had the energy to go back through my notes yet, let alone post them here, but I'm hoping that someday soon I will.

So fall will be nice, and if not nice, at least good for me. In summer, it's easy for me to slip into a certain oblivion, to become comfortable on my own and intentionally avoid places where I might happen to see someone I know. Fall pushes me back into society, no matter how much I kick and scream. It'll also get me into a schedule, which I think I will appreciate. And there's nothing like that first cup of hot, homebrewed coffee. Ah, the smell of predictability and crunchy leaves. I can't wait.

Of summer

This might be the shortest summer yet. Peru was amazing, but it wrecked my entire sense of time. Usually by the time we hit August there's something inside telling you summer is almost over, some little time gague that has been slowly filling up since June. Peru shattered the said time gague, into which late mornings and sunny afternoons have traditionally slid so easily. But two weeks in Peru was two weeks of winter and clouds. It's tricky. The annual fireworks, too, are always a hallmark of the beginning of the end for summer, but for me, the fourth of July passed quickly and largely unnoticed in a socialist country. My sense of time, never particularily good, has been entirely debunked. I want my summer back.

Hey There Delilah

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbJtYqBYCV8

The past few days I've had a fragment of a song stuck in my head, and no idea where it was from. I went through a couple of my newer CDs today, trying to find it, but couldn't. Finally I googled the only phrase I remembered-- "two more years and you'll be done with school"-- and after finding and scrolling through the full lyrics, I remembered how I'd heard the song.

It'd been in Lima, driving back from a long day at a private school where we'd washed, scrubbed, and painted until we felt sick and light-headed from the gas-based paints and the turpentine they'd given us to get the stray green drops off the concrete floor. We were exhausted and, realizing we were still only halfway through the trip, it was hard not to long for home.

The phrase "a thousand miles away" resonated as we drove over dusty roads in a rickety old bus, looking through dirty windows at dirty dogs and a dirty gray sky that matched the flat land rising up to meet it in the distance. Children who would never be without lice waved and ran alongside the bus as we bounced by, thirty-six white kids in face paint and mime costumes whose hearts mourned with the acoustic guitar for the ones we'd left behind. Paul. Of course it'd hurt to say goodbye to him, but the feeling of unreality and excitement for the adventure ahead had temporarily softened the sense of loss, even as we counted the days I'd be in Peru.

Six days in the dust, speaking nothing but Spanish for eight hours out of every twenty-four, though, had burned through the illusion. I wanted home. I wanted trees and a real sky. The night before I'd left, Paul and I had walked the neighborhood until eleven, tilting our heads up often to admire the brightness of the stars. I'd marveled that in just a few days, I'd be seeing the same lights from an entirely different continent, with people I'd never met who spoke a language I'd only heard in school. Would I feel any different? Such romantic questions were a joke, I thought as the bus jostled on. There were no stars in Lima. I'd planned to walk outside each night to talk with them for a minute or two, whispering goodnight to Paul.

Ha. A few days into the trip I realized that my words would never reach the stars, that the clouds of dust hovering in the night sky had obscured their light for years, and weren't about to move now. Nothing here was the same, and it would be a long time before I'd see the moon again, especially from a square of clean sidewalk, surrounded by the strong, protective arms I loved so much.

"That song makes me miss my boyfriend," Noelle sniffed as we stumbled off the bus and started for our cabin, still dizzy and half-painted. "You too?"

"Yeah, I miss him." Dang, I missed him.

"Hey there Paul Miller, what's it like back where I come from? You're a thousand miles away but boy tonight you look so handsome, yes you do...."