Dancing Squirrels
Last night around 10:45 I threw on my green dancing shoes, some tan cords, and one of my two "Let's Get Nerdy" tees stolen from M$. Clara and Jessica and I were swing dancing by eleven.
It'd been a pretty awful day. It gets so everything reminds me of Max. Oh, that person has hair--Max had hair, too! The nightmares from which I'd awoken hadn't helped either. But dancing reminded me of the good things that are far too easy to forget. The way I could truly let go when swinging with Max, the graceful way she responded to my occasionally awkward spins, the way it felt to simply move as bodies demand while staring into eyes of a person for whom one cares deeply. The smiles, most of all the smiles. A fake white rose behind her ear (which I had cleverly placed there) at the dance we attended together days before she was killed.
I left with a smile and a figurative rose behind my ear. I had made new friends, people had liked my Nerdshirt* (as it has come to be called). There was swimming, good conversation with Kate about study abroad, and then sleep.
This morning I set off on a quest to find the Life Sciences Library. The University of Texas has more books than the Bodleian, I sometimes suspect, and they're spread out across the entire campus, in seventeen different subject-specific libraries.
That's when I saw it: a dancing squirrel. I swear, the poor thing must have had rabies. It was right at the foot of a big old live oak and it was climbing a foot up the tree, then jumping back off. Occasionally it would do a flip. I swear, the poor thing had rabies, or at best, some sort of ant problem. I tried to point it out to someone else who was walking by, but of course as soon as someone else stopped to look the squirrel started behaving [relatively] normally. The person walked away, and again, it started flipping like it'd been possessed by the ghost of Flipper.
It's times like this that I wonder if someone's trying to send me messages.
* I never got so many comments about this shirt at Virginia Tech. I guess it just shows how different the academographics (like that neologism?) are in Austin than in Blacksburg.
It'd been a pretty awful day. It gets so everything reminds me of Max. Oh, that person has hair--Max had hair, too! The nightmares from which I'd awoken hadn't helped either. But dancing reminded me of the good things that are far too easy to forget. The way I could truly let go when swinging with Max, the graceful way she responded to my occasionally awkward spins, the way it felt to simply move as bodies demand while staring into eyes of a person for whom one cares deeply. The smiles, most of all the smiles. A fake white rose behind her ear (which I had cleverly placed there) at the dance we attended together days before she was killed.
I left with a smile and a figurative rose behind my ear. I had made new friends, people had liked my Nerdshirt* (as it has come to be called). There was swimming, good conversation with Kate about study abroad, and then sleep.
This morning I set off on a quest to find the Life Sciences Library. The University of Texas has more books than the Bodleian, I sometimes suspect, and they're spread out across the entire campus, in seventeen different subject-specific libraries.
That's when I saw it: a dancing squirrel. I swear, the poor thing must have had rabies. It was right at the foot of a big old live oak and it was climbing a foot up the tree, then jumping back off. Occasionally it would do a flip. I swear, the poor thing had rabies, or at best, some sort of ant problem. I tried to point it out to someone else who was walking by, but of course as soon as someone else stopped to look the squirrel started behaving [relatively] normally. The person walked away, and again, it started flipping like it'd been possessed by the ghost of Flipper.
It's times like this that I wonder if someone's trying to send me messages.
* I never got so many comments about this shirt at Virginia Tech. I guess it just shows how different the academographics (like that neologism?) are in Austin than in Blacksburg.