Peut-etre?

In the midst of plotting escape numero dos from suburbia...horray for the Keystone Appalachian Trail Council. Question of the night: can I hike 12 miles of flat in a day? A long day? Am I nuts? Prior to two weeks ago's jaunt, I'd never done more than nine miles, well, to the best of my knowledge. I don't really remember the Sierra's trip, but I feel like I woulda remembered mileage like that. Not to mention going out with a trail virgin. Methinks nuts? Votes?

So it's breaking down like this...
Tuesday afternoon-hike in a few miles and camp
Wednesday-10-ish on easy elevation
Thursday-6ish. But only 'cause ya can't camp any further down
Friday-11miles. But dead flat. Like, less than 10 feet of elevation gained. Total. (God I love the Eastern Mountains)

27 miles in basically, 3 days, strikes me as a wee bit ambitious...Hmmm.

Stream of Consciousness

I've been poking around all night, feeling like I should sit down and write, but can't justify it 'cause I've got nothing to say. I'm sitting in my kitchen, and its ten till 12, I'm listening to Jason Mraz mix with midnight, and wondering how long I can get away with this before I pass out or the crazy cat lady next door starts complaining. I'm thinking about sitting and watching the sunset, and wishing I wasn't, but I can't get the sound of the rigging clanging and the geese and the seagulls and I swear I heard it get quieter as the light diminished. Maybe it was just me. Most likely it was just me. I'm sitting here trying to remember how the water does that slow dance, rising and falling, and like magic my breathing slows to match it, the world slows to match it, everything falls in time to the cadence of the quiet rhythmic heaving. I'm remembering all the other stolen sunsets, sitting and watching and wondering which was more beautiful, retiring the day, or just having the presence of mind to sit and just be. Be. Yes. Life is so cluttered, so rarely do I realize it, until things are splashed into my face. Like paying $75 bucks at the airport for the privledge of hauling all my worldly possessions from one side of the country to the other. Only to arrive home to more useless crap. I'm such a pack-rat, case in point for my pragmatism versus romanticism. How the fuck did I convince myself my third grade swimming ribbons mean something? Or walking across Virginia, emerging from the wilds of the Appalachian Trail and my mind to the top of some clear quintessential bald, pouring rain, to peer out upon civilization, only to realize, I have everything I need to survive right there. Sobering. Enlightening. I swear, one day I will through hike it. Or at least attempt. There, thus added to the neverending list of Peggy's unnamable pipedreams. Right up there with becoming an interpreter. Or a concert caliber musician. Its almost as if, if I make my passions known, I might just convince myself into acting on them. And that invites investing myself wholeheartedly. And that risks, well, more than I'm willing. I've talked myself into enough headless risk for a while, enough for my tastes. Off to California in a few weeks to commence/continue masquerading as an adult. I'm actually, contrary to popular belief, that shit frightens the crap out of me. In an intriguing kind of way, yes, but still. Scared. Shitless. Maybe its because I take on so much responsibility normally, but usually its nothing to life threatening. Not, you know, paying rent, food shopping, watching out for money. That is something very very different. Honestly, more than anything else, I think I'm actually finally ready to be in the same place with the same people for more than nine months at a time. I guess that's a constant battle of mine--lassitude, contentment, or wanderlust. I feel like I've basically been new for the past five years running. Yes, I've chosen that, sought it out, drempt about it even, but that doesn't make it less exhausting. Freshman year of high school, sure, I'll give them that. Sophomore year, not really new, but did the whole new friends thing after everyone graduated. Junior year I fled, and senior year same old story. And now the blissful ecstasy of college, but no, that can't even be good enough for me and I have to run away again. Don't get me wrong, I have every faith in myself and god knows who or what else that Russia will amaze. I know this. I know I will get so much out of it, and tomorrow I'll probably wake up reaching for the day I can leave the country. Sometimes it makes me feel like a turtle, with my house on my back. Only problem is its too small for anyone but me. I'm getting better at holding on to people through wrenching departures, but that too breeds a sick complacency. I get to thinking that the good people remain, the people I'm most close to, the ones that mean the most will make a point of sticking by me throw all my gallivanting. That's sick though, I mean, some of it has got to fall on me, leaving everything to fate is absurd. The only person that leaves pissed is me. Productive, check. I think I miss music, maybe that's where all of this is coming from. I haven't sat down and played for more than a month. I can feel it, feel myself quaking for it, but knowing that when I do summon up the courage to sit and pound and band and caress, it'll be highly anticlimactic. And I'll be pissed at myself for letting go of so much. I hate it that not caring never used to matter, I hate it that now that I've pinned so much importance to everything that I've discovered this year, I can't go back to being jaded, I can't go back to pretending. Nor would I want to. But everything requires so much more energy now, then skating by used to. But I'm not a bare minimum kind of child, I can't be, I hate myself when I am. That's part of why this semester made me so angry, because I was so swamped and confused and foggy and misguided and present and contemplative and free that school got put last, music kept me glued, but studies, yea, severely neglected. I hate committing to something and then seeing it shittily through. Like, whets the use of being there if you can't fulfill your duties, why bother. Out of my not so stellar GPA, I'm more possessed by my A- in Russian than anything else. More than my C in Spanish, B in Inventing America, B- in Logic. That A- killed the most because thats what I love, thats where my heart goes when my mind wanders, thats what I do with my brain turned off. Thats what I see devoting myself too, even over music, I'd choose it over that sanity. A big fat reminder of how much I don't have things together, how far I let things go, how much I let intrude between me and getting things done. Well done, Peggy, nicely done. I don't mind fucking up for things that I don't care about. But for things that matter, I tear myself apart. We won't even talk about performance anxiety and self criticism. I'm magically hoping that I'll come back from the Old continent next year and be the poised, self confident, witty, expressive person whom I attempt to exude. And most definitely not friends with my stage fright demons. Bah. I wish it would storm. I can feel the tension building in the air, hot and heavy, electric. Or maybe that's just me.

Backpacking

"Now I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves."
— Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring"

"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."
— John Muir

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
-- Wallace Stegner

I sit beside the fire and thinkof all that I have seen,of meadow-flowers and butterfliesin summers that have been;Of yellow leaves and gossamerin autumns that there were,with morning mist and silver sunand wind upon my hair.
--J. R. R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)


*sigh*

I'm clean and inside and BORED. I wanna go camp some more.

Well Said

Maybe you said it the best yourself, granted, I'm very badly misquoting you, "Its like the impulsive passionate run by instinct artist part of my brain is beating the analytical pragmatic one to death....Except they haven't quite figured out who's winning yet." Lord. If you only knew.

I can see it coming and damn it, I can't remember my brain long enough to stop it.

Cryptic. Yea. Cryptic covers up not knowing what the heck you're actually saying.

Layers

Written earlier on the train into the city...


Oh, the sliding tableaux of past lives that coming home always exhudes. How a minute is a lifetime, existence sucked into the void of memory, to be tasted, tossed about, twirled on my tongue. Rehashed to death. Relived. Regurgitated again, and rehearsed for next year's run. I often feel like my life is lived in layers, that at every single moment I carry with me the live action portrayal of every other single stolen minute. I see glimpses of these half remembered days trunslucently, with hard edges here and there nosing out and intruding on this supposed reality, but nothing more. And then, I wonder where the division betwen then and now really lies, if life continues pulsing and beating and dancing once my presence is elsewhere. Who am I to say that my perception is getting it right?

I'm on my way into DC, thank christ, I don't think I could've stood quite another minute of suburban perfection oozing at me from all directions. Not today. Not with grades in. I feel better already, just sitting on the metro, like I'm sitting straighter, freer. Like I can handle myself so much better, so much more affectively, on my to somewhere else. I wish it weren't so, really I do. I ache for the days when I could attatch meaning to places, and never think about it again. I wish I could be content, could satisfy myself that easily. I can't fathom the day I put down roots, I can't imagine any place ever maintaining good enough.

Maybe Russia will cure me of the restlessness for a while--a temporary treatment. Or it'll make life even more unbearably stagnant once the real world resumes.

I love people watching...More than that I love people watching me watch them back...

I am a horrible person.

Horray for prom. Horray for looking hot, almost totally thanks to the goodness and kindness of strangers. I and my bullshitting abilities kick ass. Horray for prom being done. Horray for being reminded of EVERY SINGLE REASON WHY I GO TO SKANKY BAREFOOT HIPPIE SCHOOL 3000 miles away from here. I spent most of the night hiding behind the snack tray(not like that. It was the right height to hide behind), or avoiding a procession of Ex's and squeaky people. But yes, I even danced sober. Hahaha, see? It is possible. But I did get some much needed catch up time with my boys. Granted, I'd envisioned brighter circumstances than playing duck and cover from his date, but hey, thats ok. I'm the queen of improv.

But yeah y'all. Don't ever stick me on seductress Jelous Girlfriend patrol. Because I will have way to much fun with it. Come now. Be reasonable.

Live Update

Two Days and 24 hours of sleep later...let the girlifying of Peggy commence.

*shudders*

Seeing as all my "girlie girl" friends (thanks dad. really.) are either unavailable, because they're still at school, or because i've been my malevolent bitter truthtelling self one too many times, I'm left brutally solo for tommorow night.

So. Plan of the moment. Clinique "free consultation" (heheheh, worked for us in Prague all those times, proc ne?) and then praying I can be in and out of Haircuttery in less than an hour and 30 bucks. Alas, not putting very much real hope in either.

An afternoon of the wonders of Windle running around Ellicott, and I'm almost re-convinced this whole hellish ordeal might just prove fufilling after all. But the specter of 10 hours of sobriety in the company of a crowd of 16-18 year olds who are totally obsessed with...their mutual bad-assdom...yea. Less than inspiring.

Thank crap I have something to wear. Totally the high point of the day.

Take THAT Bon squishy. I win.