Revival

I've had this blog for so long that it's had several lives. I first created it for a PE class I was taking at the local community college when I was sixteen. We were supposed to keep an exercise blog...

Those entries still exist on here somewhere.

I liked that class because it got me into biking. I never biked very seriously, I don't think I ever went more than ten miles, but it's still an activity I really enjoy.

The second life of this blog is so embarrassing I don't really want to talk about it. Lets just say it was a project, and it was badly planned. The end.

The third purpose of this writing space was to record what happened during at writing program I went to over the summer. The program was at Bryn Mawr College and it was largely due to that program that I ended up going here.

The things that I've used this blog for have meant a lot to me so I couldn't just kill it, even though I haven't touched it for over two years. Because this blog is old, I'd like to use it to write about old things. I really like old things. I like old buildings, old stories. I love old books. I horde old books. Today I found this beautiful little blue copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems.

I don't really know what will come of this. I'd like to write about people, just short biographies. I want to write about the stories of history, that's what's interesting to me. I like feeling the weight of what has come before, little echoes all around. It settles on you like a mantel and fills the emptiness of a space. I want to write about that.

Fourth of July and Naked Women

Happy fourth of July everyone. Two days late. Our fourth was fantastic. We had draft conferences during the day. My piece for this week is very experimental and I had so much work to do when I left the conference. I eventually rewrote the second half and added three pages, bringing it up to fifteen. I'm pretty pleased with the end product, but on Wednesday I was still freaking out.

The fireworks almost didn't happen because there were supposed to be thunderstorms and there was a tornado watch. But we went anyways. For some reason. Because we're insane, probably. I have honestly lost my sanity. After spending fifteen minutes, in the pouring rain, talking with two of our program advisers (our PAs are so great, I love them all) about crucifying people, I turned to them and assured them I'm not usually this crazy, or this talkative.

What was I originally talking about? Right, we got on the bus and drove to this other town I don't remember the name of. It was pouring rain. We went to this baseball field with the rest of the town. Now as someone who usually just goes to a friend's house and blows shit up for fourth of July, the idea of having a community event was sort of a novelty. We hung out on beach towels and huddled under umbrellas and I vaguely remember kissing someone's snow cone. Because orange is the bastard child of red and blue. After a while people got so miserable a bus load went home. I stayed. Because I'm insane. At that point trying to stay not soaked was pointless. I got completely drenched, when I got home all three layers I was wearing were soaked. But it was grand fun. I had a ball. Maeve and D showed up, we played the ninja game* with the science people, I found out the science PA is actually nice and not the spawn of satan, I swing danced with Mary Kate in the rain, I tried to learn some bizarre country line dance thing and totally failed, I got really hyper and did planks in the mud. The fireworks, when they finally did happen, were spectacular and so loud they made my ribs rattle. And we swam through the rain all the way home.

Yesterday we had class and in the afternoon went the Barnes Foundation. Basically a homage to Renoir. Specifically Renoir paintings of naked women. Sexist, but I did okay. There was a lot of other incredible paintings. Some great Picassos, a Gaugain I really liked, some of the Degas charcoal sketches that were beautiful and a giant Matisse mural. It was fun. Not nearly enough time. I rushed through the first floor and didn't have time to get to the second.

I love this environment. You can hang out in the common room and people will come up to you and say "read this" and then you talk about what they're doing and word choice and mood and style. The atmosphere of creativity is intoxicating. And the depth of discussion in class is great, yesterday we spent an hour and a half talking about four poems.

I have now seen three toads but have not seen a toad threesome.

* - unless you were at the Federal Way debate tournament a year and a half ago, you should not know what this is.

Post Coital Toads

I saw a groundhog today. It was awesome. I dropped my pen and said "What the fuck it's a groundhog." And then it scampered behind a bush.

It's been a while hasn't it, what have I been up to...

Friday we went into Philly. Crazy town, I had a very good time. It's sort of like Seattle, but bigger. And older. We hung out at Logan Circle and walked on King Tut's face. For lunch we went to Redding Terminal Market and I had surprisingly good phad thai. And Marion (she's French and I love her) and I stalked a guy who looked like a turtle for twenty minutes.

Friday night we had movie night and watched Robin Hood: Men in Tights in one of the lecture halls. It was grand fun. We had popcorn and massive amounts of candy. We've been watching a lot of movies lately. Philadelphia Story and Rocky Horror and Robin Hood and The Breakfast Club. The library here has a better selection of movies than Hollywood video does at home. I've sort of become the movie pimp of the group because I'm there pretty much every night renting a movie. I think the librarian hates me.

Saturday we went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Absolutely amazing. It's humongous, in two hours I only got through one wing.

Sunday I hung out and did basically nothing. No, we stenciled t-shirts. That was very fun.

So many other crazy stories that I wish I had time to tell. I'm having so much fun, it's sort of unreal, how much fun this is.

I got giggly yesterday. I don't remember the last time I was giggly. It was crazy. The things that came out of my mouth. At dinner we had a long discussion of how sweet potatoes are actually carrots in disguise. And jerk chicken. We ingested the jerk. And how disliking sweet potatoes doesn't make you racist.

Tonight it was decided that because I haven't found my prince charming (gee I wonder why) I imagine amphibians having sex.

I can't decided if I'm hearing thunder outside or very large trains.

The People Here are Crazy

There was a thunderstorm last night and I was way too hyper to do much of anything.

What did we do yesterday....

Tour of Haverford college. Nice place, I loved their library. But I like Bryn Mawr campus better.

Topic conferences to get comments for our first draft. D liked mine and had really interesting things to say about it. Things I hadn't really ever focused on when looking at my own work. Like character motivation in relation to description. Is something described in a way that relates to how this character thinks, not just because it sounds cool. And the use of adjectives in relation to the tone and feel of the scene.

Today in class we talked about truth. The first thing I said was does the truth matter. No one else has been in my English class.

Last night we had an open mic night. It was really cool to hear other people's works. Our MC was one of the Urban Studies profs and she said "If I pronounce anyone's names wrong, tell me. And lets welcome J.C." J.C. is one of the Creative Writing Profs, she's really cool. She got up to read her poem and said: "That's not how you pronounce my name." The other Urban Studies prof read a poem in the same accent as Tia Dalma from Pirates, I forget what it's called. But it was awesome!

We're turning in the revised draft of our first piece tomorrow. I have spent the past twenty four hours thinking about four pages. Today I played with two paragraphs for an hour. I wish I went over the rest of it with such a fine toothed comb but my patience is not that good. Oh well, I'm pretty happy with it. I think if I add any more to it I'll kill it. So - enough!

The people here are nuts. The science people officially hate us, we've been banned from the third floor lounge. So we're going to steal their DVD player and watch Rocky Horror.

At lunch we were talking... about racism! That's right, the Urban Studies kids were talking about it this morning. And we were talking about racist ice cream and then Paloma (she's from Bolivia and she's awesome) said "I have a friend who's bi-curious." And Ruth said: "So he's like ice cream?"

They've also come up with new ethnicities. Like 'Blasian' which is a black Asian. And 'Blew' - a black jew. And decided, that since I'm like two drops Hawaiian, I'm Asian. Don't know how that works out.

This afternoon an actor named... something I forget, came and did a part of her one act for us. It was amazing. She was like... five different people and there were a lot more in the rest of the play. Her British accent was beautiful. The play was... the Sangryia Tree, I think. I don't have my schedule with me.

Tomorrow we're going to Philadelphia.

The Science People

I love camp, I just heard the best dirty joke:

A hippie gets on a bus and sits down next to a nun. He asks the nun to have sex with him. She says no and gets off the bus. The driver asks the hippie if he wants to know how to get the nun to have sex with him. The hippie says yes so the driver tells him that if he goes to the cemetery on Tuesday night she'll be there praying to God. All he has to do is dress up as God and she'll do what he asks. So the hippie does and the nun says she'll have sex with him but it has to be anal sex so she can keep her virginity. Afterwards the hippie pulls of his disguise and says "Haha, I'm the hippie!" Then the nun jumps up and says "Haha! I'm the bus driver!"

I love it!

I'm having so much fun. The people, so far, are really cool. They're fun to hang out with and really inviting. Some are really quirky. A few of us went into to town to go to Starbucks tonight. My mocha was 2.76. What the fuck people. Really. Earlier today we had a "mapping the community" exercise where we talked about what we want the group to look like and how we want people to treat everyone. And everyone was really... sincere. Which was cool. And I actually felt more connected to everyone afterwards. Which was cool.

Class this morning was really intense. Everyone was very into the discussion and it seemed very fast paced to me. But I can see how much I can learn and that's exciting. I really like the book we're reading.

We have the first draft of our creative piece due tomorrow. I'm sort of satisfied with mine. It's good enough for now, but has some work still.

We're having fun, the science people (who are very antisocial with everyone else) have taken over the third floor lounge. So tonight while they were downstairs watching the Disney Cinderella the third floor writers and the fourth floor kids and some other people took over their lounge. They were not happy when they came back. We also asked if it turned out okay for Cinderella. And insinuated that they've been capturing the squirrels and using chemicals to burn the hair off their tails.

I don't think they like us very much.

Other news: US women's soccer beat Brazil 2-0. Fuck yes. And I'm in love with Madeline Kahn.

Maybe I like this place

You know, I might really like it here. It's pretty damn cool. Day one was fun.

Got up, took a shower, went to breakfast. Food, unfortunately is all the way across campus and is the farthest thing we have to walk to. And they put spicy stuff in their potatoes. WTF. I was very annoyed. The rest of the food is pretty good. I'm still alive.

We have our first class at 9:30, which sure as hell beats zero hour. They're in a building across the street that looks sort of like an obese cottage. Very cute, just large. We go in, past stairs, to the left into our lecture hall. Everyone sits in a circle in a very strange chairs. My teachers are... really, really, really awesome. I'm not awake enough to come up with more interesting adjectives, but they're really cool. They're very laid back and are just as interested in listening to us as talking. We had seminar for an hour where we discussed last nights reading and basically said... whatever we wanted. We're reading really cool stuff. Then we had workshop with writing prompts. Oh yeah, there are the most brilliant window seats in the lecture hall, they're about two feet deep, made out of marble-y looking stuff. I saw a chipmunk out the window. It looked like a normal chipmunk just had its tail straight up in the air like it was constantly being electrocuted. The prompts, like everything else so far, are very open ended, but I liked them. After we discussed what wrote and gave constructive-ish criticism.

Then lunch. More food. Some questionable. Then... Topic conferences, that's right. I really liked this. We have two profs, right, we signed up in the morning to meet with one. I met with D, who's very cool and easy to talk to. And we just talked ideas for twenty minutes. We have a creative piece due on Wednesday and we talked that around. It was really helpful and I came out feeling a lot more sure about what I was going to do.

We did our reading and wrote the paper for tomorrow in the afternoon, had a tour of the computer lab and did a group journal exercise. The sunsets here are gorgeous and I saw a good bench to watch from I just didn't get a chance to get down there.

Tomorrow: Go to library, buy postcards (not at the library)

Arrival

It’s very bright here. I don’t think clouds exist. Except on the nametag on my door.

Red eyes suck. Slept maybe three hours. Have no idea what day it is.

The airport was fine. I sat at the gate next to a woman in a black trench coat who texted “crazy about u” to someone then read a wedding magazine thicker than half the books we read for English last year. I sat next to her and read ‘The History of Homosexuality’ in the Stranger. We did not converse. Speaking of the Stranger, I recommend checking out this week's Control Tower, it's hilarious.

The plane was a bucket of bolts, it’s a miracle we made it. The little TVs flipped down from the ceiling and we watched the safety movie in English and Spanish. The little TVs flipped back up. And back down again. And we watched the safety video again in English and Spanish. Then I listened to the two old guys next to me compare a kidney transplant to fixing a car. I was slightly worried. And went to sleep.

Got completely lost on the way here with Mr. Taxi Driver who barely spoke English. But we made it. Everything is made out of stone and the first thing I thought of when I saw it was Jeff and how he’d love to climb the buildings. The dorm is very dusty and the creaking of the floors is louder than our violin section. I’m in room 306 on the third floor, which is probably bad because I’ll have to make a conscious effort to be social. Which is not my forte. And there are only three other people up here in my class, the rest are below. But I'm actually pretty pleased about it, I get lots of space.

The people are alright so far. One of the girls on my floor is from Bolivia, she's really cool. Another girl is into Wicked and Broadway, so we'll have something to talk about. I'm one of three people from the west coast.

East coast people are interesting. They're very... hardcore. They seem to be really into everything they're doing. Where as, in Olympia at least, we're mellow about everything. And they all seem pretty conservative - I've already got a couple on my list to not bring up politics around.

Now the people running the program... they're my kind of people. The coordinator is awesome, and everyone else has sort of the Evergreen vibe. Without the Greener vibe. If that makes sense.

Oh, there's file sharing here on itunes, so there's all this music from other people. Lots of Spamalot and... for some reason, all the Brandenburg concertos.

There are little gold plaques on my window frame that say things like: “Caitlyn Clark ‘07” and “Linda Claire Bush ‘85” and “O.T.E. loves M.V.” The last is by far the most interesting.

Have to go do reading for class tomorrow. We have a segment from the Woman Warrior. Now I'm glad I read that book.