june blues in september
(not quite from june, but close enough in spirit. those boxes are still unpacked.)
by mid-june i was pounding out a paper i’m quite proud of, getting over a shitty quarter of teaching, doubting my place in academia, wanting to recuperate in los angeles, and dreading madison.
what i wish i had was a photo of my kitchen table at 3am: the sudden garish light of my kitchen on a stack of books, notebook, and diet coke. the table is pushed against a window i generally leave uncovered (un-blinded?) and open to the street so that i can hear and see the neighbors and strolling folk three floors below. at 3am i pored over foucault, agamben, and documents about iraq to the soundtrack of andrew bird and sufjan stevens. every 20 minutes my gaze turned to the window, to dim streelights and dark windows across the street.
for a week i read for and wrote this paper, the semi-monotony of work and thought cut only by early morning and late night trips to the gym. i’d drive the same route to the gym, downhill on aloha, further downhill along 23rd. ‘armchairs’ - my theme song on these empty, winding streets through capitol hill and montlake.
andrew bird - ‘armchairs’
I sighed a song that silence brings
it’s the one that everybody knows
oh everybody knows
the song that silence sings
a lot of catching up to do
the engine on my ability to be social has reached its end, i think. charm, the grease of this engine and in low supply to begin with, has run dry.
at a party thrown by my cousin and her bf, i managed to avoid speaking to two childhood friends (among other guests) i hadn’t seen since middle school. when i voiced some concern over my lack of charm or social grace, especially with folks i hadn’t seen in so long, said my cousin, ‘well i guess you have a lot of catching up to do.’
i suppose. where does one start?
i didn’t start. i ended the night flipping through a family album on the host’s coffee table. it was easier to passively consume other people’s memories — with captions! — than solicit them 20-questions style and have to piece them together myself.