Oh, why didn’t they tell me at birth, all prune-skin and piercing scream (I was the loudest in the maternity ward they said, a little foreshadowing for you,) that life would be difficult.
Some of my earliest memories are silly games, movies about dinosaurs and sing alongs, finger food, play doh, swing sets, infinite back yards, recess, all of these innocent moments that I miss so much. The clink of summer rec baseball bats hitting tee-balls. The smell of wet grass, the feel of mud in the creek, collecting tadpoles from fields of puddles after a long rain.
Some Sunday afternoons we would go to Fisher’s Bakery in Ellicott City and have donuts. Sometimes we’d just take a long drive to get me to sleep and stop screaming. Sometimes we’d go feed the ducks, though they had been spoiled early on by people who brought cake and pastries; no ducks wanted our wonder bread.
The first time I had Wonder Bread actually was at my own seventh birthday party; it was Victorian themed so I don’t actually know why Wonder Bread was involved. We all made little boxes with Victorian clip art, line drawings of cupid-lipped women with pin-curls and laced bodices. We had tea with sugar-cubes (another first, I stole more than were humanly necessary) and small sandwiches (perhaps this is where Wonder Bread came into play?)
I asked for it repeatedly after that, now bored of the usual wheat-bread and potato-bread fare. We never got it again though after that party, my dad preferred the family to stay away from white foods, and not in a crazy OCD way but more in a “my generation was the white-food generation.”
I don’t know where these tangents are going. Personally I’ve felt overwhelmed lately, school and travel and internship hunt and doctors and doctors and doctors. Driving takes a toll; my room is still mostly unpacked because I’m never there. The building smelled like a skunk in a chemical fire this morning, I’ve heard stories of students getting sick because of it.
I really miss home now, I’ve been looking at some Baltimore-based internships with the vague notion of scraping together a last summer with the bffs (best friends forever, lest you not speak Hollins-speak) before we all part ways for our wide variety of lives ahead of us. It’s almost devastating to think of the prospect of living through postcards and emails, those newsletter like family updates. That’s what we’re all doing, forming families and units of our own, and moving outward like starbursts from this little section of Baltimore.
I’ll be moving to the (people’s republic of) Chapel Hill after Hollins, this much has been decided. Who knows where everyone else will go.
I have a love-hate relationship with my computer class, taken out of desperation to get out of an econ class that I would undoubtedly fail. The semester is already overwhelming the first few weeks in; I can say with confidence my favorite things about school now lie mostly in the Writing Center. I feel my best when I’m tutoring, engaging students in conversation about stylistic choices, about “have you thought about this,” and “what if you put this here,” and all the tips, tricks, and mnemonics in between.
So I now am seriously considering teaching as a profession, though not on the collegiate path. I’ve thought maybe elementary level, but then again that’s so much foundation building and bureaucracy; from my few ventures back to high-school I’ve found connecting with the students is not as hard as I’d think.
In fact, I received an email yesterday saying that a certain advanced-creative-writing student had commented on my visits, listing me as who he thought to be the most talented of the alumni poets to come and read. The comment, an aside added to the end of an email, made such a phenomenally awful day so much better.
/end ego, insert abrupt ending.
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