Memo to self
Sitting on the back porch at the start of a sweltering afternoon, August ninth, year of our lord two thousand and seven. This particular back porch is attached to my house in Tallahassee, Florida, where I live with my wonderful fiancée (soon to be wife November 3rd, year of our lord etc). I love her more than even warm summer days.
There are cicadas, and birdsong, and not a breath of wind. There are yellow flowers blooming on a potted plant we’d bought at Wal-Mart a month or so ago. There were some of these same things in Yokohama, last summer, which was a pretty exciting time as well. There’s a turf war going on between a cardinal and a scrub jay nearby. I’m drinking a glass of lemonade.
Holly and I just spent five days in a beach house in Gulf Shores, Alabama, on a white sand beach in the Gulf of Mexico. I went net fishing and participated in the capture of twelve fish, a stingray, and a blue crab. We deemed it prudent to release the stingray. We ate seven of the fish! The beach house was courtesy of Holly’s extended family, who party like this every year. At one point I met some police officers!
In a few weeks I will begin the Fall semester of graduate school at Florida State, where I will be studying Media and Communication Studies (whatever that means). I’m full of ideological fervor that demands practical uses for a person’s knowledge of the power of language. The other day I tried to explain to Holly what is so exciting to me about language and narrative and all that. Imagine a piece of art, or a technology, or a religion that humanity, as a whole collective, has developed since its conception. It has split and splintered, been shared or broken or fortified, but it is still the same work of art. Its importance to us, then, evolutionary or spiritually or ergonomically or whatever, is enormous. So hopefully I’ll make some sense of that over the next two years.
Soon I’m going to go pick up our kitten Chippy (we have a kitten!) from the kennel where he stayed, cold and alone and forgotten, for six awful days. I won’t blame him for hating us a little because soon, very soon, we will be having him neutered. I just can’t make myself be upset at a guy while knowing something like that.
Anyways, this is just a note to myself to record this moment in time. Life is pretty good. It is easy to forget this. I’m interested to see what happens next.
August 11th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
Amen. Keep living the good life.
I think you’re one of the only people who can make me miss FL (the gulf coast, really) just by describing it.