Noncommittal Noises

The morning after I graduated high school, I left on a plane bound for Alaska. Since then I have seldom been home: two weeks before school starts, two weeks at Christmas, two weeks before the next adventure.

So part of coming home involves various appointments and waiting in outdated, drab waiting rooms, reading outdated, drab magazines. Dentist. Gynecologist. Optometrist. Open your mouth, legs, eyes.

The questions invariably arise once I am vulnerable to their probings. Just graduated college, huh? English major? Huh. Whatcha gonna do with that? Teach? I make muffled, noncommittal noises. Stall. Lie.

Make an appointment for a year down the road. Wherever that road leads.

Metafiction from the Blood Donation Chair

I  give blood while watching a crime drama about vampires. The nurse is needledeft, and gore pours from my arm. Coiling lines of red wrap my wrist. Crook of my elbow looks unreal, the hole in my arm, my blood - the nurse guards my wan face, drapes a white cloth over the elbow. I still feel the hot, tubed blood trailing down open palm. She has brought me a soda, so that one hand is cold and dewy, the other, on fire. A vampire bites into the white hollow of a sleeping woman's neck. Control is key. Bleeding to death would be so easy: replace the pint bag seven times, and I am a sheet. An old man stops in for coffee, can't donate now because of his medicine, but he's a pint away from having donated thirty-nine gallons. The vampires escape, of course. I wonder if they take phlebotomy classes at their local community college. Watch as the line between saving life and taking it approaches asymptotic. A lone vampire steals into the shadows behind the police chief's house. Watch the bag of my blood fatten. Remember not to stand up too fast, and be sure to grab a cookie on your way out the door.

El Blog Rides Again!

Many moons and many miles from my last post, here I am again to blog. Since that sleep-deprived swan song I wrote in the limbo between abroad-life and life-life, I have come a long way.

Allow me to summarize the past year and a half: rounded out junior year by living in a garage-apartment with Rebecca, or How to Survive in Suburbia and Share Recycling with a Family of Four When You Drink Beer; moved to Goshen, Indiana for the summer to live with the love of my life, Clayton; dressed as an Amish girl for a predominately Amish catering service (breezy dresses + desserts); moonlighted once a week as a weed-puller, cow-coaxer, veggie-picker, tomato-tickler, professional food-eater at Clay Bottom Farm; rollerbladed my way from danger to mediocrity; roadtripped from Ohio to Maine; learned how to read maps; embarked upon my senior year at Davidson College, which involved a lot of Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and coffee; visited Clayton in the lovely, lake-y Madison, Wisconsin; wrote a collection of poetry in my first year as a working artist; and, hot damn! completed undergraduate studies.

So now, along with my fetching Bachelor of Arts degree, I have copious amounts of spare time, undreamt of since the days of middle school summer drudgery. You see, I have a job lined up in Saint Mary, Montana, at the Park Cafe, outside Glacier National Park, but I will not be leaving for another thirty days or so.

I am resurrecting El Blog because writing in times of great change feels good. Actually, writing always feels good. I have been haunting local libraries since coming home, trolling aisle after aisle of information about parrot-training or science fiction featuring vintage 1970s covers, teetering up to the checkout counter with a  tower of books, staying up into the wee hours of the morning, forefingers and thumbs propping eyelids open, because dammit! it is time for some pleasure reading.

All these trips to the library not only make me consider library science as a potential course of study (which might appease the scientific hive mind of the family), trips to the library make me want to write. I get into the blog-mood, narrating my bike ride back from the air-conditioned recesses of the stacks... On the tee-ball field a young boy zings one into the great unmown, the pitcher, an older man with cigarette dangling from mouth, lazily turns to follow the trajectory, reaches into the white plastic bucket of baseballs, launches another. A miss. The blue of North Georgia summer sky is endless, grass still green, sun just getting hot. At the dentist, the bank, the same pronouncement over my wandering ways: You shore don't tend to stay in one place fer long, do ye? And I, No ma'am, no sir, sure don't. It is June. I am home. For now. 

Let this blog be a chronicle of my foray into pseudo-adulthood, and let my roots not grow too deep. Not yet.