domino effect, or something like that.

We got home from Atlanta last night. The whole visit was a little surreal. I had to keep reminding myself that we weren't going home, that we had no apartment anymore. We've been gone long enough now that part of me feels like we never even lived there. Sort of like how I have no clear memories of Kindergarten, just a few images and emotions that smell like glue and chalkdust.

Friday night we went to Dave and Buster's. For those of you that aren't familiar with D&B's, it's a restaurant/bar/arcade that's roughly the size of a Super Wal-Mart. It smells like onion rings and cigarettes and sounds like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard playing in the center ring of a circus. You have to be 21 to get in the door. I'm assuming because of the age restrictions (and liquor license), it's a place designed for adults to hang out. Which, of course (although I'm not sure why I'm saying "of course"), means that most the women are all oddly over-dressed. I spent a portion of the evening standing beside a woman in full makeup and one of those tank tops that looks like one strap has been cut off shooting zombies with a blue, plastic gun.

The visit was good though. And I'm glad we went. Even though it was thoroughly depressing driving by "The Arbors at Sandy Springs," which used to be "The Greystone Apartments."

i have to start packing again soon.

Yesterday I went to Bowling Green with Sara to visit the old office. Today John and I went to Camden to see my father-in-law. Tomorrow we're going to Atlanta to see our friends there.

This all amounts to, for me, final good-byes. Well, not final. These people aren't out of my life. But we're still leaving.

I walked around campus yesterday feeling a little disoriented. Could this really be my life? Am I really moving to California? Did I really even graduate college? It's the middle of August--shouldn't I be buying paper and folders in the back-to-school aisle at Wal-Mart? And Sara and I were kind of quiet on the ride back to Nashville. I wonder when I'll be in her car again.

The land around Camden looks like a swamp. Wesley took us to Bruceton, the town where he grew up, and these huge expanses of puddled fields and large-leafed ground plants surrounding dead, branchless, colorless trees lined the highway. How can something that looks so nourishing have so much stagnation and death in it?

I'm leaving the South in the summertime. The humidity has gone back up, now that Hurricane Charley has run its course. And everything is sticky again. My skin feels dry and flaky from my not slathering lotion all over myself after I shave. And, of course, I have to shave or my legs would suffocate.

The first time I ever saw Sara, she was wearing a Cats T-shirt and she looked bored. I was bored. We were in this weird meeting in our dorm during orientation week in which the RA's and the Hall Director kept trying to convince us that we were living in the best dorm on campus, referencing their own inside jokes as often as possible. Even though the dorm hadn't been renovated since the 70's. Even though it still didn't have air conditioning to justify moving to Kentucky in August. Even though it was painfully obvious no one liked it there.

The second time I saw Sara, I asked if I could sit with her to eat my breakfast when I saw her in the cafeteria. All I really remember about the conversation was that we talked about going to Barnes & Noble together sometime. (Going to Barnes & Noble would later become a social activity for us.)

The first time I ever saw Wesley, he had a mullet. We were at the Irish Parade in Erin and were all supposed to look for John's sister when the band went by. I don't remember anything he said to me. I remember what John was wearing. And who was standing down the street. I remember the fluttering feeling in my stomach, like something important was happening.

When I came back from New York, my parents' house looked drastically different because they'd ripped out the bushes in front of their house. They were huge, overgrown bushes that needed more room and a backdrop other than the house. I watched my dad pull what was left of their roots out of the ground with his new tractor. It looked as easy spooning the stewed cabbage my Grandma used to make out of one of her big, green and brass pots.

I wonder how long the roots of palm trees grow. What could hold those lanky, California palms in place? What could keep something so iconic from tumbling over, off the cliffs into the Pacific?

The field by my Grandma's house, where my life is being stored, is full of Queen Anne's Lace. By November, hay bales will be there instead. They'll sit there, spread apart, looking neat and clean, like a village awaiting the Big Bad Wolf.

pictures...instead of words.

We're home now.



Have been for a couple days actually.

The words just aren't flowing lately.

the end of an error.

The music last night was really nice. I'm listening to The Mathematicians on the laptop right now.

Last night while Lee's band was playing, I had to go to the bathroom. As I walked out of the busy dining hall and down the stairs, everything turned into an unnatural silence. And I thought, if this were a movie, something bad would happen to me now, while my husband is directly upstairs listening to Lee's band with about 60 computer geeks eating bad hotdogs and undercooked burgers. I'm going to be mugged or murdered or something during Lee's horrible stage banter.

Nothing happened.

On the way back, I found a bunch of Japanese girls hanging out and looking into the windows of the doors in the lobby at the band. They've been here all summer. They've lived down the hall from us for over a month. I don't know any of their names. I motioned for them to go in, which made them smile and giggle. They didn't come in until later though. I guess they needed to work up the courage.

They're going back to Japan today. One of them has hung out around us a lot in the past three weeks. I don't know her name. When John and I were leaving the party last night to go back to the lab, she and her friend were standing off to the side, near the door. Crying. I gave her a hug, which seemed to do nothing but make her cry harder.

We have to pack this evening because we're moving again. Going back home. Home is such a stupid word. How does it get away with being so ambiguous? I think we're going to dinner with some of the other counselors tonight. They're going home tomorrow.

When my alarm clock went off this morning, I could hear an engine idling outside, toward the main door. I imagined it as being a big charter bus like the one in which I first saw Dirty Dancing in high school on a trip to the Cincinnati Zoo with plush pink seats, waiting as tiny Japanese women pulled cumbersome luggage behind them, the cold breeze blowing their dark hair in front of their eyes.

It was probably just a garbage truck.

almost done.

I've taught my last class. Tomorrow we won't really have class, so I can just sit back and tell children what to do.

Not really. But it will be a lot easier.

Tonight the camp is putting on a little film festival, showcasing all the fancy movies these kids have been making in the machinima class. (If you don't know what machinima is, this might help you out.) There's even going to be live music. The health director Lee's band is going to play, as well as a band called The Mathematicians.

as shiny as the floor at miss hannigan's orphanage.

I now have even more pictures. Unfortunately, this batch just didn't turn out as well as the others.

me so weird.

I've put up some more pictures of NY. I don't want to put my whole face on the site at once though. Just a quirky design thing I decided to do. So these photos, three of which I'm in, are password-protected. The password is the make and model of my car, as one word. Like porcheboxster. Only not that fancy.

playing teacher.

I have two students this week, a seven-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy, who are hilarious. The girl, Emma, calls me "the lady" (even though she knows my name) and kept telling John not to yell so much in the gym when the kids were playing dodgeball. The boy, Kyle, told me at lunch yesterday that he didn't taste good because a jaquar smelled him and ran away, that he only bathes on Sundays and missed this week, and that he likes to be dirty.

There's another little girl here, who isn't in my class, whose name we don't know how to pronounce. When you ask her what her name is, she says "Jingle Bell." So we're calling her Jingle Bell.

in which I ramble and want not sweet cornbread.

I have a student this week, a seven-year-old girl. And I'm actually going to teach the general curriculum. This week has started out in a way that I would describe as normal, except that it hasn't happened to me before...which goes against the point of "normal."

I started reading Red Clay, Blue Cadillac last night on the train back from Grand Central. I just finished the third story. It's so different from the stuff I normally read, I'm not sure how to "judge" it. For example, one of the stories I read today was first published in Playboy.

Yes, I know. And Kurt Vonnegut is free to get his stuff published wherever he wants. It's not like I've read any of it either. Right. Right. For the articles, I know. I know.

It leaves me wondering though, are Southern women (the subject up for analysis) really that much different from other women? And if so, do I have it? Makes me wanna go around calling people honey. And now that I think about it, I kind of do that already. But not with a pot of decaf in one hand and a face like Naomi Judd. Where'd that image come from anyway? Have I ever actually met anyone who fit that description? My grandmother's name was Cordelia and she made the best buttermilk biscuits in the county, I'd be willing to bet.

On Friday, one of the campers (who I think is 15 or 16) was talking about the way Southerners talked and asked me about the phrase "it's gonna hit the fan," which he so politely edited for my camp-counselor, could-get-him-in-trouble ears. He knew what it meant...but somehow wanted to attribute it to rednecks in a saloon [because we had so many of those in the rural South] getting bored...or something like that. I don't know. It didn't make any sense.

And by the way, his Southern accent sounded like the very stuff headed for the blades.

third and final.

We slept really late yesterday, which was nice. But surprisingly uneffective.

We got to the Met around 4:30. We saw, of course, lots of stuff, including Picasso's "Gertrude Stein," which was probably my favorite thing there. As well as, as John put it, "our friends from France," "The Monument to the Burghers of Calais," which we saw another cast of at the Musée Rodin.


John sketching.
Musée Rodin, Paris, 6.5.04.

He had his sketchbook with him, too. And I told him he should finish his drawing, just because it was so neat that we saw the same sculpture twice in one summer.

He didn't though.

We walked to East 68th Street (where the Ricardos and Mertzs lived) and decided today, for sure, that we're going to Jamestown, NY, on our way home, after we're done at Niagara Falls, so I can go to the Lucy-Desi Museum.

And we had dinner near Times Square, just across the street from where they film Letterman. So. That was our last day in Manhattan.