My Grandpa

The world seems so much more empty when the people you grew up with have died. I'm rattling around in it.  I meant to write....weeks ago - no, months ago

Late with end of summer post...

I meant to post an "end of summer wrap-up" but I'm late. No surprise! I think my goals for summer were to learn Spanish, study for my doctoral exams, and make some money.
I stopped studying Spanish halfway through the summer...hablo espanol un poco...pero...  I'll get back to my livemocha.com training when I have time.
I have studied approximately 30-40 hours per week for 15 weeks...for a 17 hour test.
I made NO money this summer. The THREE jobs I had did not work out- I quit my research job, thinking I could count on the other two, but they did not come through for me. One job decided they didn't need me this summer after using me for 3 years, the other job kept saying they'd start me soon...and my start date is now sometime in September.

Right now, I'm trying to get my two classes going with lesson plans AND ETC. as I'm readying for the beginning of the exams next Monday. I have panic attacks all day long- ALL DAY LONG- and can't sleep. I'll be so happy to get the exams over with. My god.

What is remembered versus What is remembered.

You remember every moment of the before and I remember every moment of the after.
After- your plane landed in Atlanta and we pulled off at every rest stop to buy candy and to kiss on the picnic tables. After- you couldn't let me go in the aisle at the grocery store. After- we drove all night from New Mexico and still you reached for me at 3am.

After- we bought a mattress together, and a Christmas tree. After- the deserted beach in Puerto Rico and our towels hidden in the crevice of a rock. After- we moved from one bed to the other in the cabin on the lake.  After- the lights on the canal at Christmastime. After- the beach at Santa Monica, the fires burning on the pier to ward off the cold, even in August.

After: The honeywine, the menus in Deutsch, the Orthodox chapels from the train windows- all of this.

After- the what remains. The hotel across the bay from Manhattan. The bitter melds with the sweet until they are the same. Everything after. The after. The veins that map across my hands. The bottles of pills. The ashtrays. The living room rug. Monday trash days. This is what I keep remembering.

Tomatoes, late summer

Tomatoes,
      late summer,
           care of.
This entry addresses the incredulity of summer heat in late July, how the tomato leaves crisp and curl into themselves to escape the sun's afternoon glare. The veins on the backside of each leaf standing out brown and hard, a rigid backbone.

I had a garden once. No, before then. In the days where the summer months stretched like a lifetime and the sunflowers grew above even my mother's head. In the fall, I would be asked to write, What I Did Over Summer Vacation, and I would write, I picked tomatoes every day. I picked them from the vine, and then I picked them where they'd fallen to the ground. My mother boiled and skinned and mashed them, spooning them over limp, pale spaghetti noodles for dinner. The garden tomatoes multiplied like rabbits. They spilled like waterfalls from emaciated parent plants. They grew mercilessly. I could hear them at night through my window, being birthed. I could hear the older fruits plopping to the ground, swollen and disappointed with their own weight, splitting open on the packed ground beneath them. I picked until I stank with the smell of rotten tomatoes. The air in the house weighed down with the smell of boiled tomatoes. The kitchen counter crowded with cloudy jars of skinless red fruit.

This entry concludes with an appeal to water your tomatoes in the morning, not at night, so as to avoid mildewed plants. Pick the fruit regularly. In addition, keep the soil beneath your plants free of leaf debris and fallen fruit, which may encourage disease. Perhaps you have a young daughter who could be instructed in the care of tomatoes, in the late summer, in your Arkansas garden.

Decisions

Reallllly having trouble deciding whether to keep this blog or not. I think about it daily and try to decide-

I have too much to say
Not enough to say

Running vs. The Knee

I have managed to run TWICE in the past week.  Once for five minutes, once for eight minutes. It almost scares me to do it, and I concentrate very hard on making sure my form is perfect.  The knee has twinged a time or two during, but hasn't hurt afterwards at all. I was afraid I'd have to give up running, right as I'd started it up again. I'm thinking that my dad had bad knees, though, and always ran anyway. I don't quite remember.
Mornings I spend studying for my comp exams, which consists of reading and making 5-page long outlines. I think I'm doing okay- especially because I dream about names and dates. haha! Have had only ONE comp exam nightmare...so far.  Afternoons are for working on publications. My god, I write sooooo slowly. The Margaret Sanger article is fantastic, though, and so interesting to work on- I think maybe I'll be done in a week or two.
Still waiting to hear about a summer job. I need one...now!

Here's a picture of my desk this summer, so far:

Summertime

I've been in the weirdest funk since the end of the semester. The semester ruined me, I think.  All I want is to sleep and sleep and sleep.  Eight hours is not enough, and I fall asleep for a couple hours during the day also.  Sometimes I can't get off the couch or out of bed. Weird, weird, weird. However, I've been exercising regularly and getting a lot of studying done, yay!