Graduation, redux

I had a dream last night about graduation - a dream in which, just like at my real graduation, I left every event early, and completely failed at packing up my stuff, and didn’t get the photos everybody else got, and generally kept missing out on things. But in my dream I wasn’t sick - I just kept being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When I wanted to pack up my stuff, I went to the wrong room - when I finally found the right place, my parents had done it all. When I decided I wanted to get my photos taken  just like everyone else (in my dream, a process that involved a manic photographer and some really bizarre poses in front of a shifting background), I lost my place in line. I kept getting lost and confused about what time it was. I don’t remember actually graduating.

And this made me very upset. It was one of those dreams where I woke up all sad and agitated and angry, not even sure of why until my dream started coming back to me. And what’s interesting about that is that, while I was actually graduating, and feeling like shit, and missing festivities, and not saying proper goodbyes, I didn’t feel very upset at all. I sighed and said it was a pity I was sick, but mostly I just felt apathetic. Endless gratitude towards my parents and Alex, without whom I would have been an unpacked, overwhelmed, incredibly lonely mess. Annoyance with my body. And that was it. No fountain of tears, no ecstatic moment of glory, no gutwrenching ache of goodbye. Just… ‘well, that’s over, I want to sleep now.”

But now that I’ve revisited that weekend in my dreams, I think I’ve gotten the chance to work through some of my mixed-up emotions about leaving a place I’d lived and breathed and cursed and loved and beat myself senseless against for four years. And leaving all the people who’d been right there with me, doing more or less the same thing, without really being there with them for that crucial moment.  It makes me sad and agitated and angry.

Of course, maybe dream-me just really, really wanted a portrait in front of a psychedelic green background. Anything is possible.

Things I did today:

 Applied for two jobs
Bought local kale and honey
Cried for an hour
Recovered
Ate rhubarb coffeecake
Wandered around a used bookstore for an hour before buying a $2 collection of James Woods' essays
Started cold press coffee (life without an electric kettle, my friends!)

 Not in that order.

Empire State of Mind

This blog is getting revived because I appear to have a complete inability to think about things without writing about them. Which meant that during school, my classwork was all I thought about, which was fine. But also means that now that I'm out of school, I stand the very real risk of not thinking about anything at all.

Out of school... I've always thought of that phrase as signifying freedom, something like out of jail, out of prison, led out of slavery, etc. But now I'm thinking that it's more akin to out of sugar... out of eggs... out of money... out of time. Not that I've been set free from something, but rather that I've used it all up...

Well, we'll see. Anyway, out of school for now. Yes. I graduated. On Sunday. I am no longer a Davidson student. And that should be very earth-shattering or, at least, odd, but I've met it with more of a "meh" and a shrug of the shoulders.

Also, a shuddering, hacking cough, because I got sick the weekend of graduation and therefore while everyone else was crying, drinking, and hugging each other, I was drinking ginger ale and trying to stay upright. Struggle city: Population, me.

Actually, my current location is upstate New York. Near Cooperstown, aka the home of the baseball hall of fame. I'm working for a summer opera festival as their new general admin intern, where as far as I can tell I will be juggling an awful lot of mail. I learned several years ago that it's a bad idea to blog about work, so that is officially the last thing I am going to say about my job.

Instead, I'll pretend that this is still a travel blog (and isn't this the sort of thing where, if I pretend it, it's true?) and say that this part of New York is beautiful. We're on a lake - Glimmerglass Lake, which led Alex to rather reasonably ask if I was working in Fairyland - and it's lovely, surrounded by low rolling mountains covered in trees. This is one of those parts of the east coast that help you to imagine what it must have been like when it was all forests, trees from Maine down to Florida and inward towards the Mississippi... back in the Shenandoah Valley, even in the forested mountains you can see the wide expanse of farmland that fills the flatlands. Here, every lawn looks like an island, a meadow hacked out from the pervasive trees, and the overwhelming sense is that if you turned your back for too long everything would melt invisibly back into the trees that surround you in every direction.

There are other lakes, too, a few miles in any direction - at least that's what it seems like. On my to-do list: visit the Fenimore art museum, visit the Finger Lakes, go kayaking, find a road I can jog on without getting hit by a thousand cars.

On my more immediate to-do list: buy coffee that isn't instant.

Toodles.