de·ject·ed

–adjective depressed in spirits; disheartened; low-spirited

Synonyms
downcast
miserable
glum
gloomy
droopy
downhearted

Post-Collegiate Wisdom,

"Even for me, life had its gleams of sunshine."

"...it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it."

"I still felt as a wanderer on the face of the earth."

"He made me love him without looking at me."
-Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

"Its strange because sometimes, I read a book and I think I am the people in the book."

"We accept the love we think we deserve."

"I feel infinite."

"I don't know if you've ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you exist. Or something like that."
-The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky)

I need to rename this blog.

Because today is my second full day as a college graduate.

I no longer have the neon sign I always imagined hung over my head and declared to the world that I was a "student". I no longer have a to-do list that is dozens of items long.

Last night, as I was going to bed I tried to come up with an idea for what I could do today. I knew I was going to watch a lot of things on Hulu, but usually when that's my plan I feel a little bit of guilt for not writing that paper or not doing that research. Even on vacations, there was always something academic I should have been doing.

Not anymore.

I woke up and my father asked me if I was looking for a job today. I said no, because I can do that tomorrow. And its true, I don't have any more deadlines. At this point in my life, the only person who is going to be affected by my procrastination is me.

I feel a lot like a deflated balloon.

There's another image for you.

Soon to be Post Collegiate Thoughts,

Its raining, and I'm probably heading home to my island after graduation. So, Billy speaks to me.


Now I drive my Downeaster "Alexa"
More and more miles from shore every year
Since they tell me I can't sell no stripers
And there's no luck in swordfishing here.

I was a bayman like my father was before
Can't make a living as a bayman anymore
There ain't much future for a man who works the sea
But there ain't no island left for islanders like me

You say goodbye.
I say hello.

Hello, hello.

My Viking Soul is Unsettled

This morning, at 2:22 AM my first thought was that my feet were cold.
Then, I made a mental to do list for the next few weeks.
Then, I briefly considered how much easier my life would be if distances didn't need to be traveled.
Then, I thought about Norway.

I thought about how really Norway shouldn't mean to me what it does. I don't think it is literally possible to love the ocean because my ancestors did. I don't really believe that my lungs could want to breath Norwegian air or that my feet could know the feel of the roads in Farsund any better than the roads in Staten Island.

But somehow, tonight with morning creeping closer and closer I thought about Norway and I cried. Its been too many years since I have slept under a down comforter that smells like the sea. It is the first place I felt my comfort zone stretch, and now I want to go back to feel that way again.

When I'm writing, sometimes images occur to me that make perfect sense but I realize don't seem all that logical. I am fond of saying, for instance, that in the last week of July I feel like a stretched out rubber band. I don't know why that comparison seems to illustrate everything I need to say. I really don't even know what its saying exactly, I just know that its true.

I like when I stumble upon images in songs that seem to resonate so truthfully with me. When I find them, I tend to wish I had written them. In Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut says that he wishes he had written Our Town. I haven't found the book I wish I had written yet, but I do wish I had written the words to this song.

Circle me,
and the needle moves gracefully,
back and forth.
If my heart was a compass you'd be north.
Risk it all,
cause I'll catch you if you fall.
Wherever you go,
if my heart was a house you'd be home.

Its at this point in almost every semester that I begin to take notice of all the work I have left to do. The tasks I need to tackle and the papers I still need to write. The mountain of work seems daunting and unconquerable, especially teetering on the edge of a vacation.

What makes this even more bizarre is that its the last time I will do any of this. It is the last time I will feel the end of semester panic.

And this time, I will take some advice that my mother so lovingly passes on to me:

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Its almost four, come on

I hate not being able to sleep.

More than that, I hate feeling tired, but not being able to sleep.

I also hate knowing that the world (read: this campus) is not going to recognize that I had trouble sleeping and its going to march on. Relentless, with lots and lots of noise.

Tomorrow morning, after I forget to keep trying to fall asleep and jerk awake before chapel and hurry there in what will inevitably be wet weather, I will think, "I should have slept more last night". As if thinking that will somehow improve the little sleep I did receive.

I suppose its okay though,
because the reason I can't sleep is I just can't seem to stop thinking about how happy I've been lately.

The Simple Truths,

After four years here, I am a glutton for laughter.
I expect the greater part of everyday to be spent in the company of excellent people.
Weekends like this one make me smile.
Yelling the loudest means you're right.

And the simplest and greatest truth-
I will never settle when it comes to friendship ever again.

On weather patterns and playgrounds,

Today, it is fifty degrees and misting. Our windows are unlocked, as Kurt Vonnegut predicted they would be, and you can smell something that reminds you of spring in the air. Its not quite spring yet, but it will be soon. We are anxious and the trees are anxious to clothe themselves in an appropriate fashion and smile at the sun.

However, on days like today when it could be snowing but isn't, I think about Brooklyn. I grew up there, in the back alley behind our apartment, and in the winter I would run from one end of the alley to the other, dodging cars and thinking my small world was gigantic. My grandmother and I used to crouch down together in the minuscule garden plot in the spring and she would tell me that Tiger Lily's were her favorite (because they were named after her). In the summertime I would sit on the porch and watch the Chinese children run by in their backpacks, swinging my legs and drinking ginger ale, thinking about nothing (a skill I have since lost).

It was in this time, this junction between winter and spring that I always liked best. For some reason the smells of wet earth and shimmering sidewalks always reminds me of afternoons at the playground. I would wear a rain jacket and my grandmother would hold my hand as we walked the streets to get there. At the park I could go on my own, safe within the peeling black bars.

Brooklyn playgrounds, when I was a child, were better than anything I have ever seen or imagined. I remember towering slides which would turn molten temperatures under the sun, so hot that you flew off as soon as you got to the bottom. I remember swings able to go so high and so free that you could close your eyes and lose your place in the universe. I remember spinning things that my father would turn, and turn, and turn until I couldn't walk straight.

But more than anything I remember something I called, theTowers. They were nothing more than columns of wood, painted red and faded to a warm pink, stacked next to each other with no space in between. The columns started high in the middle and slowly got shorter and shorter as they went out, with the result looking like a pyramid. I could climb all the way to the top and my grandmother would yell my name followed by something in Norwegian.

I would close my eyes, stare at the sky without questions, and become the queen of the world.

These features have disappeared from playgrounds now, even the Brooklyn ones. I think something great has been lost, but I am not a child anymore.

I never dream of flying, but I wish I did.

The bird girl saw the wings upon the jay
and thought that she would like to one day fly.
The colors of her wings would sure be grey
and never to the air were she to lie.
There is no other joy upon this earth
that she sought after with such a foolish heart
as when she thought of sky so near the hearth
and of the form she'd take, so sweet, such art.
So if you see this dreaming graceful girl
and if her eyes are lifted to the sky,
do see if wings out from her back uncurl
and flee from her to let her dreams abide.
Her feet were never meant to be kept down,
she finds no place in city, land, or town.

Another Pile of Wisdom,

"There is no way an unassisted human brain, which is nothing more than a dog's breakfast, three and half pounds of blood soaked sponge, could have written 'Stardust' let alone Beethoven's Ninth Symphony."

"I feel and think as much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone."
-Timequake (Kurt Vonnegut)

"I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease."
-Note From Underground (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

"Life is so dear, dear heart. Live it with gallantry."

"So little time, dear, but what there is is sweet. I hope you are getting some sweetness in your busy life and that you feel at home in the world."

"Don't sink, boy. Fly. That's an old lady's advice. Fly."

"It takes a broken person to heal broken people."

"Life is a feast but we are only human, we're not tapeworms. The world is a paradise but there are mosquitoes."
-Pontoon (Garrison Keillor)

"They don't how, but they do know how to forget, and little by little they put aside the burning summer in their bodies and all they have is rage."

"I have shouted to God and the Virgin but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a God can meet passion with passion?
She says he can.
Then he should."
-The Passion (Jeanette Winterson)

Once Upon a Time,

The books in my life have been numerous and varied.

Days like these when I have important things to do and I will do anything to avoid them, I think about the books. The books that have come to me and then we have parted in teary goodbyes. Most of these books are piled in various places in my basement on the island. Some of them are on shelves, most of them are not. Some of them prefer the windowsill where they can soak up the sun and become yellowed with age. Some are in dark corners where they ponder their own existence.

The characters in these books have left their pages and found spots in my head. They became friends and I loved them. Characters do not leave you, they just fill you up. They make you a bigger person.

Its days like these when I start to feel the weight of all the characters. When I try to let myself out but they all seem to stand in my way.

Is it possible
for the world
to look this way
forever?

A year, and some other undetermined length of time ago when I was living in a different part of the world, I woke up early. I woke up in the dark and got dressed in the dark and then I got on a train to another place I had never gone.

I drank hot coffee that left a singed spot on my tongue. I drifted in and out of sleep while some walls flashed by my windows. I ate yogurt out of a ceramic bowl and drank more coffee until my hands refused to sit still in my lap. Then, the sun rose.

The sun rose and I pulled out my camera and recorded France flashing by. I hunched my shoulders and tried to hide from the eyes of my fellow passengers, humbly self-conscious of stealing these images.

This morning I watched these videos again. France flashed my on my computer screen. Life is funny.

The Key to My Success,

I realized, sometime last week or sometime in the middle of the night when most realizations come, that if anyone were to ask me, "How do I DO college" the advice I would give would not be what I would expect.

It would have nothing to do with study habits. It would have nothing to do with learning to live with someone. It would not apply to finding the library or sucking up to your professors. It would, in fact have nothing to do with anything exclusive to college.

It would be - find a way to get free coffee. Exploit that as often as possible.

I miss sunshine.

If I wanted to run away right now, I would run away someplace where it never stops being summer. I would run until I hit the ocean. I would lay down in the sand and roll myself until I resembled a chicken cutlet.

This is my idea of paradise. This is my idea of retreat.

Right now I am going to go upstairs and I am going to lay in the dark and play music that reminds me of summertime. I am going to keep my eyes closed long enough that I can forget where I am and hopefully believe completely for a few seconds that I am in my sun soaked paradise.

Then, I will exhale. I will open my eyes. I will hopefully have satiated this desire.

I'm a little bit worried.

This worry isn't like my always present worry. The worry that never leaves me. The worry that tells me each and every moment what could (and probably will) go wrong. That worry has a very specific flavor that I have had to recognize and understand isn't leaving.

This worry is something new. Its the more fleeting kind of worry specifically tied to an event or state of mind.

I'm worried because I have so much. When I look at my life I'm crippled by how thankful I am for everything I have. The repeated mantra of my prayers has been an unending stream of thanks. I'm worried because I feel like my life has reached a crossroads. The point right before the climax of the novel that says, "And then our heroine saw that she had all she ever wanted."

I'm worried because some part of me knows a narrator is saying in some dimension I cannot perceive, "Little did she know..."