so it goes

The good news is that the move is over, and the bad news is, waaaaaaaah everything is smaller and less private-er and dirtier and harder and I miss windows. But more good news: I am pretty consistently resilient (i.e. forgetful as hell), so I know for a fact that my new, cramped, foreign setting will stop feeling unusual within weeks, just as soon as my brain wipes the way things used to be from my memory desk. And also some good news is this collection of photographs. Look through them. Just do. It's made my morning feel much more pro-humanity than if left alone.

ready

Thankful, today, to have a desk job, because my legs can rest and the desk can serve as a chin prop in a pinch. In the home stretch now of a labor-intensive move, and so ready to be done and used to it already, and also really really jonesing for a vacation. It'll come.

unaccountably happy

I have been unaccountably happy this week. Maybe it's because of the infectious way one of our new summer student employees giggles. Or the drama and beauty of a week of roiling gray clouds and thunderstorms. Or the delighted feeling of aliveness I've been having lately, without any breaks for dizziness or malaise or anxiety. Or it's a joy hangover from last weekend's wedding and the bridal shower we threw for my future sister-in-law. There are FLOWERS everywhere. I certainly wouldn't have blamed me if I had been a big ol grump this week, because it's been a long hard one. S and I and some intrepid volunteers have been spending all of our free hours scrubbing and clearing the basement so we can move in next week. Thick black mildew, I'm not even kidding, and paint and dust and scrubbing, oh, eight years worth of gross boy out of the room and please do not get me started on the bathroom. It's getting better. I'll attack it again tonight. I don't know why I'm still so agreeable in the face of this. Our lovely, breezy apartment, the one I've lived in for a record three years and was the first 'home' for me and S, is a ruttin' mess. I've even taken down all the curtains. Fragile April would not have been able to sleep soundly or relax in an echoey, filthy, box strewn apartment, and if the fact that I'm taking this all in stride and still smiling isn't proof that I'm FINALLY getting my head screwed back on my body properly, I don't know what is. I even had to say goodbye mid-week to the kid at work who had been my nemesis for the past few months. Now who am I supposed to prank/tease/be teased by? Even this, and I'm fine. More than fine. I'm happy and I'm energetic and despite all of the hard work and transition coming up in the next week, I am excited. I can do this.

meant to be

There were some really beautiful things this weekend, chief among them getting to witness the bachelorest person I know (knew) turning into a soft, smiling smiling thing around his new wife. That, and my handsome husband in a groomsman tux playing silky saxophone during the ceremony, and later, dancing with me in a reception hall in Floyd, VA. Champagne toasts and macaroni and cheese and peanut butter pie and a warm table full of friends who make me laugh and who stand in a gazebo in the rain with me, and who dance whole-heartedly to Gangnam Style and who give out bear hugs to anyone who wants one and half of those who don't.
I have no reservations about this couple. She is pint-sized and fierce and he is bending down to meet her and they looked really, really happy and sure of their decision. I almost needed eclipse glasses to watch their first dance. That's clearly the way it should be.

stress

I didn't even really close my eyes until 3:00am because there is so much static in my head about the next two weeks. We have done 5% of what needs to be done to empty out and refill a tiny basement apartment. Our power is getting shut off and the landlord needs his keys back on the 31st and I honestly don't know how we'll have the time and resources to actually be intact when we get to that point. S works all the time, and I'm kind of flickering and not particularly hearty enough to bear the brunt of the move myself. And we're going to be out of town this weekend for a good reason, a good wedding, but it is yet another chunk of time that's going to go by without us having a safe home. So I was wide awake and buzzing for hours and hours last night. I'm going to have to keep my knees jackhammering up and down all day today to stay awake and am going to have to give myself allowances for more sleepless nights and there's going to be a level of stress/busyness/mourning over the next 15 days that will be at a code red, but will hopefully stay within itself so I can go about readjusting to a new smaller reality with grace when June finally gets here. I forget why we're doing this.

spilling better

I wonder what it means that I am perpetually in the mindset that I'm becoming more honest. I keep thinking, oh man, I never used to be able to straight out admit that/ask for that/open up my chest like that. I think it's kind of true.

being not easy going

I am becoming stringently anti-clutter. I think this happens to people when they move. Also, my practical side is expanding. I am willy-nilly throwing out/giving away things, even lovely things sometimes, if they don't serve a current purpose and aren't achingly sentimental. Maybe even if they are. I am not good with the past, because I don't live in it, and I forget it. I keep digital copies and throw out the originals.

We're moving into a basement that is full (really) of several decades worth of 90% (in my eyes) junk. Dusty, claustrophobic, almost hoarder-level junk. It is lighting a fire under my ass. Can you BELIEVE I used to self-identify as 'easy going?!' I am not. I am discovering pet peeves by the bucket full these days. Like TRINKETS. DAMNIT, I AM ANTI-TRINKETS. I married into a family full of them, but luckily to a man who leans away from the pull of acquisition in his genes. I am almost disgusted, I'm afraid to admit, by multiple sets of novelty china, and specialty bowls and pie plates and half melted candles. I think I'm becoming my mom? I'm fighting, not to eliminate specialness and beauty, but to make sure that the specialness and beauty is utilitarian, and doesn't sit unused and dusty in a basement for ten years.

I have a vision of how to make the basement hospitable, and it involves a lot of gently urging S's parents to allow us to get rid of as much as we possibly can, and consolidating the rest into a neat pile on one end that I never have to look at. And then mopping and dusting and shampooing the current carpet and laying new rugs and scrubbing the baseboard and BLEACHING THE FUCK OUT OF THE BATHROOM and hanging curtains to cover the cracked cinder blocks and maximizing the small windows by actually washing them, and rigging up some room dividers and and and getting rid of as much of our stuff as we can stand and boxing up everything we won't mind not seeing for a few years and organizing--militantly--what remains in big tupperware bins and particle board cabinets in our little corner and then keeping the interior of our bedroomlivingroomkitchen as clean and usable as I most possibly can. My face is red.

circumstance

We're at the end of another school year. I have hated finals week less this semester than usual, because my mind has been elsewhere and the spectacle is kind of worth the crowd. There was a guy in a giant shark costume running around in here.

Again two of our work study students are graduating, and again my heart tugs. We have a pretty great record here, for having students who tug my heart. These two graduating are just so glaringly good and strong and clever, and one of the reasons I'm glad to have known one of them is because I like being able to think to myself, I know a gangly, cheerful astrophysicist (almost)! and the other, because she is a ball of sweetness and generosity and spent this week handing out Hershey's kisses to the studiers out on the floor and I have a soft spot for people who are composed of one giant soft spot. It's been so nice to have them around.

good morning

This week I've been in on two surprise parties thrown by two people, for each other. Fortunately they picked different days.

So I baked cookies.

And last evening I spent two hours talking to someone I hadn't talked to in two years and that's the dumbest thing, ever, not talking to a kindred spirit for two years. Things change in the meantime, and in this case, it's going to be better.

I've found an almond-scented hand lotion I love. I am at least the third generation of this.

And my window of feeling like I am going to die after arriving across town on my bike has shrunk from 30 minutes to 10.

I've got optimism coming out my ear holes today.

over and over

I am in the habit of--without trying to--speaking in asides and parentheses and being a co-conspirator and interrupting myself and misspelling the word 'receive.'