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June 27, 2005
On Vacation
I am on vacation.
The very idea sounds silly coming from a graduate student coming off a year's fellowship. It's all been a vacation, in a sense, since the day I left my "real" job and rode off east to become an academic-in-training at Syracuse University.
But it isn't a vacation, and this trip is proving that to me. This vacation, this very long drive across the country to the Oregon coast and back, is a solo, self-driven, self-orientated space of time in which I do what I decide at the monent within the context of a larger loose plan, and where I can change my mind and do something else without consulting anyone, and where I don't have to be anywhere specific until Wednesday. And while I am enjoying this, I am also realizing that I have changed in the three years since I made that eastbound trek, that the things I had in my mind to do as a result of that trip are not important to me now, and the things I want to do now were beyond imagining then.
So when I do get back home, to Syracuse, my focus will be different than when I left, because I see Syracuse as home now, because I see this academic vacation as a vocation now, because I whave work to do, and because a mind stretched to new awareness never regains its original shape.
Driving on.....
Posted by cageyer at 03:11 PM | Comments (2)
June 04, 2005
Where did May go?
It's June. How did that happen? It was just April, wasn't it? and then I remember that May came, and with it the last day of classes, for which I danced a long Snoopy dance, and then settled in to write the inevitablly painful and bad seminar papers, and then it was dance and then it was.... June.
I had promised myself last year, after circumstances kept me from doing so, that this year I would go see the flowers and the falls, that I would go to the Lilac festival (missed that, though I did have a wonderful evening at the Sarah Mclachlan concert with girlfriends), that I would drive to Ithaca and see the gardens at Cornell while the rhodies were in bloom (haven't been there yet), that I would see Buttermilk Falls and Chittenango Falls while the run-off was happening (neither). I also thought I would spend some time blogging all the stuff that I have wanted to write about but didn't fit an actual assignment, and complete some of the drafts I had started, and write to my family and friends. I guess I overestimate what it possible even in these days of leisure.
In a couple of weeks, I leave for a long road trip across the country and back. I hope the great expanse of the prairie will remind me, as it did three years ago when I came here, not to take my own life and its issues so seriously. I shed a lot of emotional baggage on the trip out here. It's time to sort through some more and have some fun exploring at the same time.
Meanwhile, now that it is June, I want to deliberately make some time, as Amy suggested, for writing. Every day, at least something. I'd like to start with a very overdue letter to my father, but if I don't just go ahead and mail the card, it won't make it in time for his birthday next week. So, off to the mailbox I go, and then I can try to sort out the writing.
Posted by cageyer at 09:32 AM | Comments (1)