Hello. I am still a bit mushy-brained by the aftermath of school. I will try and pull myself together today — this is my last day of work at the newspaper, and after that I will be able to focus entirely on the packing and the excitement.
STUPIDITY
I am updating my iTunes in a big way, and as I do I am learning things. Like that the name of the band is Galactic, and the album name is Ruckus, and not the other way around as I’ve always thought. Oops. Also, that I have a shocking amount of “bad” jazz of the synthesizer, Rippingtons variety, and that this dirge outnumbers the quality jazz muscle (wo)men like Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus and Quincy Jones. Which makes me feel like a bad egghead. I need to work on that.
SPEAKING OF MUSIC
My graduation party was all ska all the time, which was pretty cool since it wasn’t my collection of music. I was rocking the banana suit, eating fresh fruit on a skewer, and listening to punkish brass. Add a little coffee to the mix and I would have stayed forever.
A SHOUT-OUT
I was going to make a big complaint about this, but then I sort of decided I don’t really want to waste my energy. I will redirect your hypothetical weepy eyes here, and also just let you know that it wasn’t just that that kept me at home on Friday night. It was also the exhaustion, also the fact that I had to wake up and play hostess and graduate.
I did have a very interesting chat on the way home the other night about high-school friends v. college friends. Several people we know, people that I have met and come to love through Anthony, people that went to his high school, are still closest to the people they knew in high school, not college. These are very sociable people, not people who secretly prefer solitude nor are they people who are socially awkward or abrasive, so this really confuses the hell out of me. I am not knocking old friendships, I just don’t get it. Are they trying to distance themselves on purpose? Are they just genuinely not connecting with anyone? The whole point of being in a place on this earth is to connect with the people around you, and while it is equally important to keep those connections you have made in other places alive, it doesn’t make sense to save all your problems for some distant person living her own life who isn’t going to answer your emails or voicemails anyway. Because she’s all busy with her life. Although that doesn’t explain why I get more notes and email from my friend in Germany than the ones I’ve known longer who live a mere 90 miles away, but again. It must be a Colorado Springs thing. It’s cool, breeze.
I HAVE THE BIG THOUGHTS YET DO OT HAVE THE STAMINA TO ARTICULATE THEM
The above conversation was taking place on the drive home from our friends’ house. And I don’t mean that the way I mean it when I say “my house,” because you and I both know that my ‘house’ is a rented condo. I mean their house, as in, these friends of ours, of the same age, have purchased a house.
Um. I haven’t really processed this still, even though it was almost a week ago. It just sort of shocks me. I know people who are married, and I know different people who are having babies. And while these things are a big courageous step, once you add a 30-year loan on a morgage into the mix it just seems serious. You are serious adults now.
(Just remember, you get to decide what being an adult means.)
It just really puts your life — your take on adulthood — into perspective. These two guys have bought a house near Longmont and have begun to really settle down. I am about to move to a studio apartment in Portland to start the art again, and Anthony is going to Grad school in Eugene.
AND FINALLY
I started Chip Kidd’s new book last night on the stoop at 7pm. I had the book in one hand and Boggle (that great old vine zin) in the other.
It occurred to me that I started Cheese Monkeys just before entering college for what I thought would be an art degree. Now I am reading the book about the months directly after college, whilst I am in fact scrambling for a job myself, although not with an ad agency working in inks and a revolutionary 1961 non-photo blue pencil. If only. I think I could manage quite well there.
