010.

Christmas was magical!

Today has been great, too, but for different reasons. It's one of those pleasantly melancholy days that makes me think of folk music in minor keys, sung very softly.

I'm enjoying it.

My love for Maude and my hatred of creepers.

Today, I learned that I can safely drive over 30 miles in my '94 Buick once my gas light comes on. I sometimes think that she is the true love of my life, because who needs dream boys? She does everything I ask and more, even when she's only supposed to get 25 miles on E, and that would be on a good day.

Those who know me well or who have had to wait for me to find them because I took a road the wrong way and didn't notice, or I got trapped in mazes of one-ways or even found my way to the wrong city can attest to the fact that I honestly lack a sense of direction. It's uncanny. I have gotten lost within two blocks of the house I grew up in, and it took me nearly an hour to find my way home. My first week of school here, I got lost trying to find my way home every day for a week straight. Today, I started looking for a gas station once I'd driven 15 miles on empty, got off the highway at 25, got lost, and drove frantically until I reached 32.

So Maude helped me out considerably, happily burbled down some gasoline once I found a station, and delivered me safely to work, where I got creeped on no less than four times in a half hour, by four different individuals. Another thing you may already know about me is that I attract creepers the way honey attracts flies (and bears.) Something about smiling and eye contact . . . I might just start cleaning my teeth with my knife or something instead.

Three of those individuals creeped (crept? I think it's one of those words where both are correct) over the phone, which might lessen the blow slightly (or would it make them worse?) but the one in-person creeper was worse than most. He stole a line from the Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides, and told me that I was "the most naked person with clothes on" he'd ever seen. I did not call him out on stealing a line that isn't even a pick-up line and would never work to pick a girl up any way, but instead opted to dash away.

It is finals week and creepers have found me again, but at least my car loves me.

I am unprofessional.

I work the front desk at a hotel which, coincidentally, also happens to make reservations for guests at other hotels when we're booked. In the evening and on the weekends, I am the only one here. This particular evening, we are booked and so the evening went insane.

While it was busy the whole time, the real gem of business (busy-ness) occured as all three of the phones behind my desk were ringing off the hook at once, two people were on hold, all wanted lodging for the night but did not know where and therefore needed some talking-through, and in addition I had some in-person reservation-makers patiently waiting their turns and one very impatient family who didn't end up staying long enough for me to find out what they wanted. They did stay long enough to knock over the plant I keep forgetting to nurse back to health.

Our bellperson was attempting in vain to vacuum the lobby before his shift ended, and laughed companionably every so often at my earnest but clumsy attempts to restore any sort of order to my workstation. I had three piles of paperwork and kept putting sheets in the wrong piles and glaring at them with frustration in between dispensing quality guest service. I proceeded to drop a stapler on my foot (on my foot!) and then it went missing altogether, and the coffee upstairs which I am charged to make fresh each hour was fifteen minutes unfresh. The horror!

So with patience, I finally made it through all the people milling about in front of my desk, sent them off to their designated hotels armed with maps, directions, and parking passes, got the plant set back up and chatted with the bellperson as he vacuumed up the dirt from said plant.

Then came the crucial moment. The most persistant and annoying phone began to ring, and as soon as I'd answered with "Med-Inn front desk: how can I help you?" the other two began to ring simultaneously, and a few stragglers came in and sat down on the furniture. I directed the stragglers in turn to the cafeteria and the trauma/burn unit, finished my phone calls, and just as the elevator reached our lobby and dinged itself open, I threw my hands in the air and kind of yelled at my bellperson "I hate the phone!"

Off the elevator strode some guests from Poland just in time to hear my outburst. They will be staying here for the next month or so.

I think that perhaps there are times when I seem unprofessional.

Opinions.

When I talk lately, all I ever seem to voice is my own opinion, a story involving myself or how I feel about something. It makes me feel terribly selfish when I catch myself, but what else do I know well enough to talk about? I don't even know myself very well, but talking about myself kind of helps me sort through it enough to start keeping bits and pieces for good, and maybe notice other parts that need some change. I don't like to assume that I know how another person will take information, and I suspect that acting on this may end up making me seem more flighty than I am.

Selfish feelings aside, what more do we have than our selves? Do we even have those? We, as individuals, are excessively fickle. Our feelings are temporary, we shift friends, jobs, homes and opinions. We lavish our infatuation on people while it lasts, but even love -or maybe what we mistake for it- runs in fits and riddles and is often overlooked and pushed aside. Is it anything we can recognize?

I feel like love itself is simpler than we think it is and what we make it out to be. It may just be that basic thing which connects people, and the prospect of that connection is within everyone.

I haven't quite wrestled away my coffee addiction, especially considering that it's finals week. It has been noted, however, that coffee does not equal sleep.

On that note, I'll get back to actual work.

Form.

When it comes to the poetry I write, I am a slave to my form. It's all rhyme and rhythm, and I feel in a way that the writing should be measured by the meaning one can drive into a skeleton of a poem. This isn't to say that I have a form in mind when I start writing, but as I write I find it; for instance a rhyme scheme and number of syllables per line. Even my streams-of-consciousness and free-verse-type-poems follow this pattern, and the only irregular poems I've written are ones that I really enjoy but were written very angrily and not easily recreated.

This being said, I am starting to think that my poems are too similar to one another, at least in form if not in topic, and although I like them I would like to improve. So could improvement happen by trying to remove or pay less attention to some of the form? I guess we will see.

005.

I wonder when exactly people stopped entertaining themselves and were more content to sit and be entertained by other things. More importantly, I wonder how. Mostly, though, I am just thoroughly disappointed with the way I spend my time and am in some way vowing to be a better human being (via blog, ironically enough.)

Bonfire sunrises.

Bonfires are some of my favorite things, and the ones that last all night are even higher on my favorites list. I enjoy stars, and I enjoy sky, and most of all I enjoy the dawn. The moment just before you see the sun, when you can see that glow so similar to an afterglow but just the opposite, feels like it builds for so much longer at sunrise than its dusky evening counterpart.

Morning has a certain tension that night lacks, suggesting the unknown. From there, the chill can only go away, but at night it settles. Sunsets might feature colors that are nearly always beautiful, but they're often no more than pleasant endings to bitter days. Even though the aesthetics of sunrises are kind of hit-or-miss, I haven't seen one without that feeling of promise.

I think we all need more sunrises.  

My problem with beverages.

Periodically, I will realize that the majority of what I'm drinking is only one type of beverage. When I was running cross country, I drank a ton of Gatorade. During the summer I more or less only drink water. Last winter I drank mostly tea, due partly to Michigan chill and partly to my affinity for hot beverages which involve boiling water and pretty containers for preparation. There have even been times when I catch myself drinking nothing but milk, and all of those options are pretty harmless and perhaps even beneficial.

About a month ago I found myself drinking only coffee, which has happened before but not quite to this extent. I would have some before school or work, more at school or work, and accompanying lunch or dinner or whatever meal happened to be next. It was also my main means of social interaction. I am nearly  always willing to meet friends for coffee. I will even meet people who are not friends for coffee. It was after a day like this when I finished off an entire pot of coffee by myself while studying in the evening that I decided I should probably adjust my intake.

I did very well until this week, and actually even did well this week until this morning, when my awesome boyfriend who lives an hour away met me in our hometown and took me to the ineffable Roxy Cafe for breakfast. I, of course, ordered coffee for my beverage and then proceeded to allow the coffee girls to fill up my mug each time they offered.

I justified a cup of gas station coffee on the ride back due to the obscene hour during which I'd be driving home, and then made some when I got here. I am currently enjoying one perfect cup of coffee with just the right amount of cream and zero sugar, which is how I prefer my coffee on any given day. Again, I find that I should adjust my intake.

Enjoy my MS Paint representation of coffee drinkers:

I worry that I am a slave to coffee, and therefore a masochist because I love coffee. It has some beauty beyond its its lovely taste due to the connection it establishes between people, but the way that everyone assumes that everyone else drinks and/or needs coffee does kind of put me off. Yet I enjoy it too much to actually give it up or take any sort of stand against those who refer to it as "my coffee," or "your coffee (i.e. "Don't talk to me. I haven't had my coffee yet," or "How would you like your coffee?" when coffee has not even been ordered.). 

This being said, I suppose we should all be grateful that I'm not yet 21 and able to fall into phases of only drinking alcohol.

The Day upon which my Dress Became a Shirt.

Today was one of those days that I didn't mind spending on my own. It was cold and lovely, and of course is far from done, but I'm generalizing since I'm writing a blog post before the end of the day.

One of my favorite people spent the night at my apartment, and this morning after we ate breakfast and parted ways (she goes to another school), I figured that it would be a good day. I can feel winter coming, which makes sense since it's November in Michigan, and which I enjoy because I look forward to winter all year. Despite my knowledge of the seasons, I decided that I would wear a dress. After all, it has long sleeves, so of course it's warm enough for wear in November, right? [Wrong.]

There was frost on my car and since I never get up and out early enough to warm up a vehicle, I had to combat those icy opaque designs with windshield-washer-fluid and rolling all of my windows down. My drive to school was very brisk. However, I got rockstar parking in the first row of parking spaces. Despite the knowledge that I had many garments warmer than my dress in my trunk and despite my knowledge of the current temperature further illustrated by my drive, I figured I'd be fine in the past-fall-but-certainly-not-winter weather. Life goes on, as did my day.

I got 100% on my analysis of some Spanish poetry (written in Spanish), turned in an excellent physics report, read some Steinbeck and had lunch with a friend (yay friends!) and then I went to my car to get my computer. I foolishly hoped that perhaps the sun had come out, or maybe it had grown warmer, or even that I had suddenly come into my own with some newfound Northern traits which would enable me to withstand the cold, but alas.

None of these had taken place.

Once at the car, I fished some jeans out of my trunk, got in the passenger side and proceeded to put them on. During this brief process, the boy who drove the SUV parked next to me reached his vehicle, sent me an odd look, got in, drove away, AND another boy driving a red station wagon promptly took his spot, sent me another odd glance, and then went to class. I don't change that slowly. I think this all must have happened within three minutes.

Thus my sweater-dress became a shirt, and more people have seen me change than I'm comfortable with.

001.

One blustery autumn evening, there was a girl sitting at her desk with a cup of tea. She had just lit a eucalyptus-scented candle and was daydreaming about flying kites. The task of finishing a math assignment kept her vaguely engaged, but most of her energy was directed at keeping a young orange cat from curling up on the paper she was writing on. A nearby laptop was playing some wondrous music by the former band of her ex-boyfriend's brother, and soon she gave up on keeping the cat off of her notebook and began to use the computer instead.

A friend procrastinating in a similar fashion told her over an instant message that blogs were a good form of further procrastination. The girl bitterly remembered a time long ago when she had begun a blog and failed at keeping it up, and then thought brightly to herself that she should take this opportunity to start another one; new and greatly improved. Not only would this give her an excuse to stop battling the cat and doing homework, but she could take it as a challenge, perhaps even update regularly, and prevail.

Thus, this blog was born.