After A Life

My Grandpa died yesterday. My last living grandparent and I feel a whole lotta nothing about it. I feel like I'm rooting around in my purse trying to find something that I KNOW is in there, it's just hidden under all the other junk. I will be sad about it, I just don't know when. He died two years and day after my father's stroke and exactly three years after I went on my first date with one of my boyfriends, I know this because I asked him and I have a thing for anniversaries even when they're so egregiously irrelevant.
School is wearing me down. I hate having to write papers about things I don't care about. I hate discussing things that are intangible. I hate that I don't thirst for knowing the way I used to, that everything seems mildly boring when it's not towards a goal. My graduation is so inevitable that I am resentful I have to work for it. The droning complaints of a 21-year-old girl. Sometimes I look at the wide-eyed freshman, still blinking from the womb, and wonder how long it takes before they become as jaded as me.

I read a sign this weekend that said "In order to buy cigarettes, you have to have been born on this day in 1989, or earlier." 1989? Shit. I am so old.

What It Feels Like

So we won the National Ultimate Frisbee Championship. I am split as to how to feel about this: at once like it's no big deal, because this is our third year in a row and we worked really hard and a national championship is just a national championship and a lot of people think frisbee is "cute". However, at the same time, it's one of the biggest accomplishments of my life. I feel overcome with pride for myself and my team. Not only because people thought we weren't going to be able to pull it off this year, but also because we wanted it that bad. But, now, coming back to school and reality after a whirlwind weekend in Ohio in a world where Ultimate is all that matters, I feel quite empty. Quite tired and apathetic. Two weeks and college is over. I have no tangible grip on anything right now and I"m tired of being preemptively nostalgic, but it is what it is when it is it. I'm trying to hold onto too many things. I think that if I relax my grip a little, I'll let their little hearts beat and I'll come to a certain peace about my amount of control in the world. I could afford less control and more flexibility, then maybe I wouldn't find the need to say goodbye with such pomp and finality. Regardless, I'm a national champion for life, and that's something.

How Embarrassing

I was crying in my car in a parking lot on campus and a guy taking out his trash saw me because I was sitting under one of those bright, tall lamps that casts an orange glow and probably lit up my face like a jack-o-lantern with tiny rivers and even more probably scared the hell out of him. How embarrassing. For the both of us. Me in a moment of weakness, he in the middle of a routine task, accidentally stumbling into someone else's private moment. Crying in your car could be the lowest form of isolation. But, then again, I also think crying is one of the best forms of release, a lot like guffaw laughs and sweating. If you get enough out, everything resets.

I leave for Nationals in, like, 8 hours. If you had asked me, I never would have guessed I'd be doing this.

No Pause

Most people do (and I have) started a blog at the beginning of a journey: new job, grad school, going abroad, or some sudden turnstile in their lives that necessitates public relief. I am starting this at the end of a series of journeys, one being college, another being school in general, a third being childhood because I feel the need to be dramatic and look nostalgically at my childhood not yet gone and maybe I'll just let all those children in the rye tumble headlong over that cliff. I saw Pan's Labyrinth last night, which is certainly about the end of innocence and is probably the darkest movie I've ever seen. When I said that, all my friend's said, "Well, have you seen Schindler's List? Have you seen The Pianist?" Yes, I've seen those movies, and although the Holocaust is definitely, and dare I say obviously, dark, there's something about uncharterd territory that makes the impression deeper. Not to say that I've become inerred to the Holocaust. But maybe I have. But I'm not interested in the subject anyway right now. Watching the movie (which is in Spanish, Spain's Spanish) made me come home and pick up Love in the Time of Cholera in Spanish and try to read it for the five minutes before I fell deeply asleep and I was surprised to realize how much I remember. German does not enter my brain in that way at all. Subtle resistance.

I've started listening to Joanna Newsom a lot again and I'm reminded of one of the first times I remember coming across her on my iPod and gratefully pressing repeat over and over. I was in Riga, Latvia on a weekend trip from Berlin with the European Union class and I got up early to finish looking at the occupation museum and the market in the east part of the city that fit into five airplane hangars, one for dairy, one for meat, one for baked goods, one for produce and one for sundries. Five whole airplane hangars. And then I walked along the river and I was somewhere between incredibly happy and incredibly sad--like my whole body was just my eyes, looking on. "Some mornings the sky looks like a rose." That night I saw the prettiest sunset I've ever seen behind an iron bridge on the river, I still swear the whole thing was purple, and I thought they got prettier closer to the equator.

One of the biggest bummers of college is you can't take baths. My friend lives in her own room in a professor's house now and I think that would be the best use of an hour one of these days.