(no subject)
I read the words “I’m going to take this year off from school” like a foreign language. I understand what it translates to, yet there is a detachment from their meaning, something that I can’t relate to because it is not native to me.
Today has been the sinking in of this decision, alternating between surreal glares at landscapes I won’t see through four season and joy when I tell people about reading for pleasure. Walking home tonight, I saw lit group houses on my streets with windows covered with books on used shelves. Now that I am slightly outside of it internally, I recognize the draw to this life. Buses to films, walking or hailing to bars with coworkers who have escaped the sprawling lawns of office parks.
We ash our white collars and stain them with cheap beer because we are bohemian tops, Gap bottoms. But it is not the same kind of scrappiness that awaits me in my sister’s plaintiff tone when she talks about her boyfriend’s cocaine habit. This is a real kind of working-class that these group houses have long disavowed and replaced with Roseanne and Archie Bunker. Can one lose their ability to play bourgie? I have paranoid fears of retreating to that world like some sort of queer Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Either that or fears I will become effete metropole, resenting those who love we amongst the box stores like a bloated-era Truman Capote.
But there is little alternative. The thought of another semester of papers and constant reading and no time for 4 servings of vegetables daily is not just daunting in that perversely pleasurable way. It’s almost inconceivable. If the semester was about having cigarettes outside the American Studies building, making plans with students and making jokes about Feminist Technoscience I wouldn’t need recharging. But it is more, of course. It is that plus the underlining, intros, conclusions, and thesis statements. Worse, it is that and the lonely Saturday nights that can come in which you secretly wish for company but outwardly convince yourself that you should Be OK With It Exclamation Point.
So it is partly running back, partly prepping to run forward faster in this year and, most importantly, when I return. It is a consistent working out, chanting “I will not become a townie” mantras, saying so long not goodbye to people down here who have been understanding, supportive and insistent I not leave their arsenal of friends.
Today has been the sinking in of this decision, alternating between surreal glares at landscapes I won’t see through four season and joy when I tell people about reading for pleasure. Walking home tonight, I saw lit group houses on my streets with windows covered with books on used shelves. Now that I am slightly outside of it internally, I recognize the draw to this life. Buses to films, walking or hailing to bars with coworkers who have escaped the sprawling lawns of office parks.
We ash our white collars and stain them with cheap beer because we are bohemian tops, Gap bottoms. But it is not the same kind of scrappiness that awaits me in my sister’s plaintiff tone when she talks about her boyfriend’s cocaine habit. This is a real kind of working-class that these group houses have long disavowed and replaced with Roseanne and Archie Bunker. Can one lose their ability to play bourgie? I have paranoid fears of retreating to that world like some sort of queer Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Either that or fears I will become effete metropole, resenting those who love we amongst the box stores like a bloated-era Truman Capote.
But there is little alternative. The thought of another semester of papers and constant reading and no time for 4 servings of vegetables daily is not just daunting in that perversely pleasurable way. It’s almost inconceivable. If the semester was about having cigarettes outside the American Studies building, making plans with students and making jokes about Feminist Technoscience I wouldn’t need recharging. But it is more, of course. It is that plus the underlining, intros, conclusions, and thesis statements. Worse, it is that and the lonely Saturday nights that can come in which you secretly wish for company but outwardly convince yourself that you should Be OK With It Exclamation Point.
So it is partly running back, partly prepping to run forward faster in this year and, most importantly, when I return. It is a consistent working out, chanting “I will not become a townie” mantras, saying so long not goodbye to people down here who have been understanding, supportive and insistent I not leave their arsenal of friends.