to cradle and then live without
Life here is at once entirely and nothing as I imagined. Some happenings, in disjointed list form, because it's about all I can muster:
- Walking constantly, everywhere, buying Metrocards and getting off the subway at all the neighborhoods I've never been to and the streets that sound interesting, spending too much money as I buy fruit and jewelry from street vendors (like the one at 112th and Broadway with his decrepit Chevrolet with the gargoyles artfully arranged atop it, selling wooden bead necklaces next to Goethe)
- Butler Library everyday, crawling stairs to obstructed lofts and cutout nooks, wandering through the cavernous stacks and feeling the strangest mix of completely intimidated and totally at home.
- Meeting Mark on the steps of St. John the Divine, wandering inside the cathedral to read Greek tragedy, the walk hand-in-hand, hip-to-hip down Amsterdam that makes me fall in love all over again
- School stretching me and challenging me in ways I didn't think possible but feeling myself learn so much and grow with every passing day
- My crazy Sociology of Health and Illness professor, with his Buddy Holly glasses, fascination with social epidemiology, and constant references to smoking
- My tiny room with its gigantic double window view of Broadway and TREES
- Elise, the precocious eleven year old fiery haired daughter of faculty members that I'm responsible for every Friday afternoon, who asks with the most sincere curiosity about my Butler reading for Philosophy of Feminism and coaxes me to the playground in Morningside Park, "even though we're both too old for it". Seeing myself in her, sometimes a little more than is comfortable.
- Getting my dream job yesterday as a Research Assistant for the Barnard Center for Research on Women
- Being a staff writer for The Columbia Spectator, roving around the neighborhood with my newly purchased Moleskine journalist's notebook always at hand and learning AP style, doing it because I've never done anything like it before and hell, I've never done anything like this before so why not?
- The Met for free!!
- Wondering why I didn't do this earlier
(My own) pictures will come, I swear.
- Walking constantly, everywhere, buying Metrocards and getting off the subway at all the neighborhoods I've never been to and the streets that sound interesting, spending too much money as I buy fruit and jewelry from street vendors (like the one at 112th and Broadway with his decrepit Chevrolet with the gargoyles artfully arranged atop it, selling wooden bead necklaces next to Goethe)
- Butler Library everyday, crawling stairs to obstructed lofts and cutout nooks, wandering through the cavernous stacks and feeling the strangest mix of completely intimidated and totally at home.
- Meeting Mark on the steps of St. John the Divine, wandering inside the cathedral to read Greek tragedy, the walk hand-in-hand, hip-to-hip down Amsterdam that makes me fall in love all over again
- School stretching me and challenging me in ways I didn't think possible but feeling myself learn so much and grow with every passing day
- My crazy Sociology of Health and Illness professor, with his Buddy Holly glasses, fascination with social epidemiology, and constant references to smoking
- My tiny room with its gigantic double window view of Broadway and TREES
- Elise, the precocious eleven year old fiery haired daughter of faculty members that I'm responsible for every Friday afternoon, who asks with the most sincere curiosity about my Butler reading for Philosophy of Feminism and coaxes me to the playground in Morningside Park, "even though we're both too old for it". Seeing myself in her, sometimes a little more than is comfortable.
- Getting my dream job yesterday as a Research Assistant for the Barnard Center for Research on Women
- Being a staff writer for The Columbia Spectator, roving around the neighborhood with my newly purchased Moleskine journalist's notebook always at hand and learning AP style, doing it because I've never done anything like it before and hell, I've never done anything like this before so why not?
- The Met for free!!
- Wondering why I didn't do this earlier
(My own) pictures will come, I swear.