perspicacious?

I didn’t sleep much last night.

After a near-2AM bedtime, I was awakened at 6:15 to the sound of the walls falling down around me. Thunder storms in Georgia are sort of like the crazy aunt you rarely see: they don’t come around often, but when they do, they want everybody’s attention. Enormous, bed-shaking rumbles and sharp, abrupt snatches of lightning took up residence in my room early this morning, and I welcomed the intrusion. I smiled at memories of what it was like to be small and terrified by those sounds; it really did seem like the world was ending then. I love thunder storms now, and I love the rainy green-gray world they leave in their wake.

Especially on a day when I’ll be sitting inside writing a paper all day.

Yesterday we had our annual Stomp The Lawn festival here on the Ogle-quad. It was perhaps the most perfect day of 2010 so far–breezy, drenched in sunshine, and full of happy things for the residents of the Ogle world. Today my sister comes home from Spain. Tomorrow is my 20th birthday. I still feel 17.

Life is full of sleepless thundery nights, beautiful sun-soaked days, conversations that are worth having, and a whole host of wide open horizons. And papers to be written. Regardless of this last clause, I am happy to be alive.

“I found a place in a leaning tree
Over the soft water and the sound of secret things
Trembling beneath ribbons of painted pollen
Worlds of emergence and deep, gulping life
Fluttering gills and first flying leaps
Black bodies of tadpoles shuddering from my feet
and all the sideways solidity
of an old leaning tree.
Resentful feathered faces and curious craned necks
shivered across the sun on the water.
I saw you under their wings,
and in the surfaces of all the world in spring.”

It’s a good day for a poem.

Underneath my bed, words and pictures are piled up haphazardly, a stockpile of memories and things I could probably throw away. Lying on the floor in my room, I just reached to my right and found my journal from 2006-2008, with old letters and poems still shoved inside it. It’s hard to believe how far away from me all of those things feel these days, and how easy it is to compartmentalize entire seasons of my life in my heart so that I can barely remember the fullness of how it all felt then as opposed to how it seems looking back now. This is why I am always telling myself to keep up with my journal–things tend to seem so different looking back. I have friends whose journals would undoubtedly be on the level of a publishable memoir if said loved ones would keep their lives written down. My roommate Clair is one of the most tragic of these instances in my mind–just hearing her talk about her life is like watching a movie in 3 genres at the same time. She tells me she would rather live her life in the present than always be looking back to has-beens. In response I say that I want to read her life in the past tense, even if she won’t. Seeing as reading other people’s journals is not a socially well-accepted activity, however, she remains unconvinced. I mourn for the stories that are lost.

Moral of the story: buy a journal and write, write, write.

Today was the kind of perfect that can only come after it has rained. Pollen has been closing in on us for a few weeks now, putting its green-yellow fingers on everything in sight and floating in the air like a solid wall of pixie dust pummeling into your lungs. Yesterday, rivers of rainwater carried swirling streaks of green away from our sidewalks and windows, and the world breathed a sigh of relief. As a result, today was a collision of sun, wind, and rain puddles that made for unbeatable running weather. The hills that make me want to give up and go home on cloudy winter days were a welcome challenge today, although I wouldn’t say I did a lot of conquering. I just kind of cruised through 3.5 miles, enjoying the fact that I can still run at 3PM without having a heat stroke.

I am happy to say that running is still taking up a sizable portion of my life these days, even with no set goals on the horizon. I’ve been turning over the idea of running a full marathon for a week or two now, and somehow the thought of it doesn’t daunt me very much at all. After training for the half and running it in November, I remember thinking that there was no need to do another 13 miles; it all seemed a little excessive to me. But a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine (who does not even like running) informed me that he would be training for a marathon to be run on Halloween 2010, to which I responded “That sounds awesome. I want to do this.”

And that was when I realized I wasn’t scared of 26.2 miles the way that I used to be.

So, now I’m just thinking, and trying to find the coolest possible marathon to run sometime in Fall/Winter 2010. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. I hesitate to commit to the idea, mainly because the training runs will be upwards of 2 hour time blocks that I probably don’t have room for in my schedule, so I’m not promising anything yet. I will say, though, that if I can find the right marathon and sign up in the next couple of weeks, you just might be seeing some more writing coming your way. A first-marathon-training-experience would most definitely be written down.

Part of the fuel for my athletic fire is perhaps coming from the Defyance in my soles–and by that I mean “the new running shoes my parents bought for me.”

Meet the Brooks Defyance 3. They are my third pair of the same name shoe and they are my body’s best friend: no more nerves out of whack, tired knees, or unbeatable soreness in my legs. I have a friend who always tells me to run barefoot, but to me these shoes are the barrier between my feet and a world of concrete-induced pain. To the inventor of these shoes I tip my hat, and to my parents who paid for them I give an unlimited supply of hugs. Everybody wins.

Anyway, enough about running. Time for something new.

The Wild Streak is back! After months of winter absence, the first signs of summer sunshine have drawn it out of hiding. I spent several hours of my spring break putting in a solid bleach job and 3 layers of “wildfire red” hair dye, and yet it has still managed to turn a much tamer shade of orangey-pink in less than three weeks of washing. Nevertheless, I’m a fan of it and I have yet to receive disapproving commentary from any of the important people in my life, so I consider the Streak a success. In fact, the response I get from people is usually something like amused surprise mixed with mystified approval. I am okay with this. Plus, it makes me feel like summer is coming soon. Which is true. And that brings me to my next thought.

When summer comes, school ends. I know–please forgive me for blowing your mind. But really, the bittersweetness of that thought has been following me for weeks. As academic insanity begins to become a bitter reality in the Ogle world, it can be harder to look around and remember how beautiful the relationships I have found there really are. Papers and tests are suspended like storms over our heads, clouding out the sunshine of our happy college existence. Just last weekend, Amir, Clair, Sean, and myself were working through the painful hours of the morning trying to finish papers due in class the next day. Indoor camping trips and planet earth parties are banished until further notice, in favor of caffeine and a lot of wake-me-up-in-ten-minutes, 3AM naps.
However, in spite of all this busyness, I have really not been able to stop myself from thinking about how good life with the Oglies has been. Moments from the last two years rise up in me with sad urgency, and I just want to hug all the necks of the people I have come to love so dearly. I am not sure where I’ll be in school next semester–if the Ogle world is going to be my world anymore–but I do know that the people I met have changed my life for the better.

Disclaimer: this is not ALL of the Oglies. They are a big bunch.

Anyway. Summer is coming and I don’t know what she will be bringing, but I hope it is very, very good.

I think that’s where I’ll end tonight… it’s getting late. How is it that there are so many other things I wanted to say? This is long already. I guess that leaves room for me to say, as usual, “more soon.”