Forty minutes, now.
Pungenday the Thirty-Fifth of Aftermath in the Year CUT
It is the twenty-third of November and my twenty-third birthday.1 These things are numerologically significant by Discordian reckoning, and they feel significant to me. Or, they do tonight, at least, on the large couch in my uncle's house in Carrboro, while the rain makes rhythms on the gutters outside and I keep glancing at my computer clock to check the number of minutes that have elapsed since I realized that it was technically the morning and spontaneously sang Happy Birthday to myself.2
I'm bringing back the footnotes, by the way, out of nostalgia. It's a sort of self-reference to my old ways of doing things.3
I noticed that not many comfortable things rhyme with "job" and fit into a Happy Birthday tune.
I'm staying in my fourth house this week, making my peace with my third and fourth cat in that same period. Cats are social, territorial creatures, just as we, and I like to think of my impromptu tour of North Carolina as a cat-seeing tour as much as anything else. I've cleaned out a greenhouse, attended a play festival, won the Question Game in a three-story stairwell wherein no two stories were alike, and driven a few hundred miles in between. I feel as though gathering the pieces of an intangible Triforce - not noticing each piece I acquire, moving on when I have what I need.
I'll cross my own path this evening when I head back to Charlotte, hopefully arriving in time to have a piece of my own birthday cake. I'm lingering here to visit the campus in its waking capacity, with the buildings full of faculty and the offices full of staff. I was there yesterday - Saturday - but the place was dormant, the only residue of life lingering in those places exhaling steam or excreting coffee and bagels.
This will be an important year, I think. My uncertainty as to how only underscores that supposition in my mind. I want this to go well.
We'll see.
1I suppose I ought to go ahead and add my age to my profile information now that I've let that little secret slip, eh?
2Eighteen, at present - that is, 2:16 - but the clock changed precisely as I typed "at present," bringing my fears to fruition and rendering that count an inaccuracy.
3That seems as though it ought to have been a footnote, somehow.
It is the twenty-third of November and my twenty-third birthday.1 These things are numerologically significant by Discordian reckoning, and they feel significant to me. Or, they do tonight, at least, on the large couch in my uncle's house in Carrboro, while the rain makes rhythms on the gutters outside and I keep glancing at my computer clock to check the number of minutes that have elapsed since I realized that it was technically the morning and spontaneously sang Happy Birthday to myself.2
I'm bringing back the footnotes, by the way, out of nostalgia. It's a sort of self-reference to my old ways of doing things.3
I noticed that not many comfortable things rhyme with "job" and fit into a Happy Birthday tune.
I'm staying in my fourth house this week, making my peace with my third and fourth cat in that same period. Cats are social, territorial creatures, just as we, and I like to think of my impromptu tour of North Carolina as a cat-seeing tour as much as anything else. I've cleaned out a greenhouse, attended a play festival, won the Question Game in a three-story stairwell wherein no two stories were alike, and driven a few hundred miles in between. I feel as though gathering the pieces of an intangible Triforce - not noticing each piece I acquire, moving on when I have what I need.
I'll cross my own path this evening when I head back to Charlotte, hopefully arriving in time to have a piece of my own birthday cake. I'm lingering here to visit the campus in its waking capacity, with the buildings full of faculty and the offices full of staff. I was there yesterday - Saturday - but the place was dormant, the only residue of life lingering in those places exhaling steam or excreting coffee and bagels.
This will be an important year, I think. My uncertainty as to how only underscores that supposition in my mind. I want this to go well.
We'll see.
1I suppose I ought to go ahead and add my age to my profile information now that I've let that little secret slip, eh?
2Eighteen, at present - that is, 2:16 - but the clock changed precisely as I typed "at present," bringing my fears to fruition and rendering that count an inaccuracy.
3That seems as though it ought to have been a footnote, somehow.