Reason Breeds Insanity

I don’t recommend this cold to anyone. There are some colds I have had that I felt better after it was over, like I got sick to get better; those I might recommend, but this this one is definitely a get sick to get sick, sicker, sickest cold. What is wacky is that I fell asleep last night at 8Pm while reading Vanity Fair and didn’t wake up until 730AM. The reading light, which could double as a dentist’s or proctologist’s light, that was turned on two feet above my face didn’t even wake me up until 3AM when I pushed it so it wasn’t in my face and then promptly fell back to sleep.

School is going really well, but I am so overwhelmed with all the work. I am excited about next semester because I want to teach two classes and take two classes, and maybe actually have a life. I want to organize my classroom the way I want it to be, and I want to take at least one class that I want to take.

Life is pretty good right now. Our house is nice and warm. Our cats are crazy, but I wish I was a cat so I could go down the stairs like they do, in and out of the railings. The dogs are fun, although Lily ate an entire Starbucks Frisbee the other day, and it has recently been a squirrel free-for-all around our neighborhood.

I love fall, it always makes me love life. I think fall is there to remind us that it can always get worse, then winter comes and proves it. Spring is there to remind us that rebuilding follows destruction, and summer proves that too much of a good thing ceases to be good. The leaves are finally changing colors and there is a bright yellow one right outside the window of the lounge. Our trees in our yard are changing, too. They are dropping their leaves right into our gutters, which we are going to clean this weekend. I am looking forward to climbing the ladder and crawling around the roof to get to all of them. What fun! I wouldn’t trade anything for the leaves, though, well maybe I’d trade leaf changing for Los Angeles, but I am sure I will stay in the Midwest forever, so I guess I can look forward to the leaves and fall and cleaning gutters.

I added music to my blog!!!! I don’t think you understand how amazing this is to me. I know how to imbed music into my posts, but I never new how to just have it playing on the blog all the time. (Mom-you turn it off by clicking on the pause symbol under the chicken playing the cello.)Yay.

Now that I have effectively wasted about half an hour figuring that whole thing out, I think I will go read a couple hundred pages of Vanity Fair!

Today is perfect. Windy. A bit cooler. The leaves are starting to turn. I picture myself walking along an endless, leaf-covered path. I am wearing my favorite jeans, worn-in-worn-out tennis shoes, my 17 year-old, thick, red, wool LL Bean sweater. It has a few moth holes from when I lived in the creepy apartments that have now been condemned, but they give it character. Strange that I would have had one article of clothing for 17 years. The leaves smash and crack beneath my feet. I walk slowly, as always, and I don’t lift my feet very high. I don’t drag them, though, because I can’t stand the continual scrape, scrape, scrape of the gait of feet-draggers. I’d be smoking a clove if I felt better and drinking coffee from my travel cup.

I have this love for fall because it postpones the inevitability of winter with its too cold, too windy days. For now, though, I sit at my computer in a room upstairs that we have designated Andy’s room, and the wind is blowing through the huge pine tree outside my window; it makes a soft whisper that I can’t understand. The curtain occasionally sweeps across my arm and brings with it the scent of autumn. Fall is my favorite season: bonfires, football games, crunching leaves, and lattes. For some reason, it seems like the comforts of fall make up for its unruliness, but when winter comes there is nothing except a continual barrage of snow, ice, and gloom. Don’t get me wrong, today is gloomy as well, but I can look out my window and see brightly colored leaves, and I can walk out the doors and crunch them instead of crunching snow like I am bound to do in a few months. Today is just gloomy enough to be mysterious, intriguing.

Days like today give me confidence. I feel like I can make it. I feel like drinking a beer later with friends will only make it better. Porter, thick and mysterious like the day.

You can’t trust people the way I like to trust them. I am sometimes such a child about how much faith I have in people. I keep thinking they won’t disappoint me, but it never fails that they do. I give people too much credit for being kind, loving, compassionate beings, but it turns out I am always let down. We listen to NPR and I swear I would love to go down stairs just one day and hear a story about someone committing some amazing act of bravery (not related to war), to hear of someone doing a good deed, or to listen to a story of warmth and love. I know NPR has its share of those types of stories, but they aren’t on first thing in the morning. What I get to hear is the voice of George W. Bush, telling us that it was his right as president of the United Stated to veto a bill containing universal health care for children—it was too expensive! Whatever jack ass! And I don’t mean like the movie—it was funny. I just keep thinking that some politician will come along who will restore my faith in the whole process, some colleague will come along who will restore my faith in graduate students ( I am sure there is one grad student who isn’t out for himself/herself), or one customer who isn’t in a hurry. I mean, shit, people just can no longer get along. Everywhere I turn there is someone else in a hurry. Someone else returning something. Someone else getting crappy with a waitress or a customer salesperson who cannot help the fact that they don’t sell fat girl clothes in the store at Old Navy or that the kitchen fucked up the food again. I love people, that is my problem with this whole thing. I think we were made to be here for each other and I am not sure why people insist on treating each other like doormats. Love, people, that is why we are here on this earth together. Love and compassion.

Because I can’t sleep because I drank a cherry soda to stay up to do my project that has been finished for almost two hours, I thought I would just surf the web to see what I could find. So for my second, probably nonsensical, post for the day, I thought I’d see what you thought of these websites.

Know HIV and AIDS

Youth AIDS

And, since I have nothing else to do, I may just go to bed!