clothespin

New games to play:

* dodge the pothole
* splash the rain puddle
* stump the librarian (not easy)
* close your eyes and listen to the library's revolving door, which you can pretend is either a) a chorus of whales, b) the soundtrack to an alien movie, or c) a long, whiny fart
* guess which one way the street goes

My upstairs neighbor just walked by with a McDonald's drink in his hand. I saw him out the window and caught him in the act of spitting on the grass out front. Right after, our eyes met, and then he continued on. Before this recognition, I was under the impression that you couldn't see in the windows during the day.

Guess I should stop walking around naked.

Reading 1984 feels like realizing you dreamed about the death of a family member right before it happens. Orwell's prescience is unnerving, to say the least.

Creepy quote-taken-out-of-context of the day: "It is the deliberate policy to keep even the favored groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another."

Loading groceries into my car, I hear a pre-adolescent male voice say, not impolitely, "Hey, can you tell me what time it is?" It takes me a second to find him, in the back seat of the car parked nose to nose with mine, along with two other boys, 10 to 12 years. A boxy two-door, the car is a badly fading and patchy black, with ripped burgundy seats and fuzzy dice drooping from the rear view mirror.

"Three twenty." I squint into the dark interior, then resume loading juice bottles into the trunk.

"Hey, my brother likes you," the kid says again, gesturing to the pudgy one of the three, who takes his baseball cap off and sinks lower in his seat.

Watched the movie "Frida" tonight. In it, her house was painted an azure that the Albuquerque sky turns at nightfall. Here, I couldn't even call the sky baby blue--far too weak for that. It's a whispy, bathtub blue.

I've tried to convince myself that I need to supplant the sky of my former location with the earth of this one, that is, replace my appreciation of the desert blue with moist green. The constantly sloping terrain is replete with foliage, and the mist hangs on it--sometimes through the day--just as dense. In Spanish, verde. Verdant. The green is, after all, only a chemical reaction away from the original light. 6H₂O + 6CO₂ --> C₆H₁₂O₆+ 6O₂. The leaves are part of the blue dome, hovering closer over me.

To get to the grocery store (on the other side of town), sometimes I drive through the winding central streets, titillated by the whir of tires over cobblestone. Other times I bypass the town and take the state highway, from which I can see an idyllic view of campus, all white spires and stately red dormitories, enveloped in the jungle of southeastern Ohio. I'm trying to make my own chemical equation: brick + green = blue + home.

No, I don稚 know what I値l do in the winter.

Before I went to Honduras for my first semester senior year, they explained to us how the rhythms of acculturation would take shape. The first couple of days are rough and tiring, followed by a 2 to four week "honeymoon" period where we'd love everything about our home. Post-honeymoon is a bitch, with depression, mourning for familiar things lost, and possible revilement of new culture (read: swearing audibly as a man tries to grab your breast as you walk down the street). In subsequent weeks you begin to appreciate the newness again, the hot, homemade tortillas on a Saturday morning. If we were to stay on for longer than a semester, we would see a sort of sine curve that gets larger with each interval, the pendulum swinging slower and more gradually.

After having lived in Denmark and England, I could verify the theory; it was putting words to something I'd already experienced. I now realize the pattern applies to anywhere you move, within your country of origin or out.

On May 24-25 of this year, Jamey and I volunteered for the CDTA, the Contintental Divide Trail Association. On a Saturday morning I helped build trail at Chain of Craters, and was assistant chili cook in the afternoon. After a short day's hard labor, the Association gave us tons of free shit--gourmet camp food, Coleman lantern key chains--and a personal tour of some of the petroglyphs in El Malpais National Conservation Area, NM. They just keep sending us stuff, and the lastest is a CD with photos from the affair.

CDTA photo

I respond to a three-year-old the same way I did to my seventh grade crush.