Sunday, December 16, 2007

Oh the Irony.

Dead List Fall 2007, or otherwise titled, how Peggy got her groove back in three days or less!

Securely Dead:
-my laptop
-Gender in Latin America paper about Russia...yes I know
-Statistics Paper, in which I learn to write eight pages without any conceptual knowledge whatsoever
-Russian literature presentation about cognitive exile in the Master and Margarita, the one in which I get 10 minutes or less to prove to my father, in the audience, that my $40,000 a year education has in fact been worthwhile. 1-2-3 GO!
-Spanish Conversation presentation about superstititions in Czech Republic. 'Cause I'm a good circumlocuter. The best even, you might say
-Nine of ten reading responses.

Writhing about yet
-Russian lit paper on cognitive exile. Presently attempting to come up with three pages of quotations from the text to make it a ten-pager
-Laundry
-Music scholarship job, what?
-CO app to guide next semester...procrastination of choice

Alive and kicking, bohuzhel bohudik...
-Stats final?
-Gender take home final? I mean seriously...who gives a research paper and a take home final, and then bitches about the amount of grading you have?
-The monster that ate my apartment
-Figuring out how the crap I am getting back to Ptown in January...if you know anyone willing to put me up somewhere between Milwaukee and Portland, do let me know.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Absurdities

If I can look back on college, this my post-adolescent life ten years down the road, and remember weekends like this, I think I could be truely content in how I've spent the past few years. If I can look back next week and think of weekends like this, I know I could be content in how I've learned to spend time. If I can wake up tommorow, or I should say, in four hours, and laugh, I will have truely arrived at something great.

Saturday snowshoeing on Hood, on one magical sun-filled afternoon spent beneath the Oregon pines, climbing vertical hills like I've only ever daydreamed about, looking out on the mountains that I've only yet seen in my minds-eye. Talking and listening and talking somemore and laughing and not being pent-up drama. And more talking and laughing and smiling--I'd almost forgot how. And then getting marooned...its funny every weekend that I go up to the mountains, or out to the coast, or just plainly away I pray to get stranded. Pray to not have to come in for a good long time. And then when it finally happened, all I could do was laugh with joy at the absurdity of the situation. Long story short: we killed the van, and ended up waiting for a towtruck for a good 3 hours in the parking lot at the trailhead while the temp dropped down a ways below freezing. But for watching the stars come out behind the mountain, and seeing the face of the summit alive in the afterglow of the day, not to mention the gift of unencumbered time and getting caught up on the past few months with a good friend--for all of this I'd head back up there in a second. For that again I'd agree to spend the night up there, anything.

Cookies, holiday music, wine, and more good talk with camp friends Saturday evening, sleeping in past noon, waking up to snow and the luxury of dozing this afternoon. Crowned by truely one of the most amazing live music performances I've ever seen, and I am only feeling slightly bad for not even attempting to do homework.

My mind and my body are full and tired. I am learning again to say yes and damn the consequences. Because the moments when you forget all the hindrances of rationality are the ones that you'll look back on, twinge a little bit in the memory, but smile to yourself all the same. However absurd they seem in the moment.