| Quotables |
"Only I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. ... I felt
very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
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"On the surface, it sounds irresponsible, but to flourish in a rapidly changing world, you actually need to make more mistakes. Fail quickly. Fail often. If you do something and it
doesn't work, just recover in a hurry and try something else. ... Help develop a culture that is willing to fail its way to the future."
-- Price Pritchett, Culture Shift |
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"There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction -- every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour."
-- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar |
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| a saturday spent in Kirksville |
| Sunday, August 9, 2009 |
On Saturday, I slept way later than I had intended; I had had a stressful few days and I was absolutely worn out, so it did me quite a bit of good to get the extra sleep. However, 12:40 in the afternoon is a bit late even by my standards, so I got up and around just as fast as I could so as not to spend the bulk of the day shut up in a hotel room.
First I went up to the JavaCo and blogged from there. Around 4:15 or so, I got antsy and thought I'd better start making the rounds if I was going to take advantage of the day. I secured the electronics in my trunk, grabbed my camera, and took a walk around the square (you can see plenty of those photos on Facebook as well). With Samantha's help, I managed to find Stone Creations, the hometown-type craft store at which I've found a number of Kirksville souvenirs, including the "Best Of" and "Friends" key chains I made for Rachael and myself. Only it wasn't Stone Creations anymore, it's now a place called Tranquil Seasons... and they were closed. They closed at 4:00, people... on a Saturday afternoon.
A store on the town square in a college town closes at 4:00 on a Saturday afternoon. They were closed altogether on Sundays and Mondays, so there would be no chance of getting in and seeing the place, maybe grabbing a souvenir for old time's sake. That was another thing I noticed whilst I was there last weekend: very early closing times, and many businesses that were closed altogether on Sundays (with the occasional Monday). Hell, some of the pubs up that direction even closed by 10:00 or 11:00 p.m., and I have to think a lot of that has to do with summer hours and the student population being nearly non-existent this time of year. I just can't imagine them keeping those hours when the town is full of college kids, especially the bars.
From there, I made the rounds: Toons (now called Wrongdaddy's, and which was also closed until the end of the month, presumably geared toward the students' return); the Wooden Nickel, Too Talls' Two, Sarah and Rachael's old house on W. Hildreth, which had received a makeover in the form of some new siding and possibly new windows as well; and the new eight-screen movie theater on the square -- "new" to me because I'd only been there once, and that was in 2002.
Once dusk arrived, I wondered just what exactly I was going to do with myself. The original plan, of course, had been to catch the summer play, but it had closed the night before, and I wouldn't have been able to get to Kirksville in time to see it (I'm not even off work until 6:30, and the play had an 8:00 start time). Toons was closed for another three weeks; the JavaCo closed at 7:00, which meant I couldn't hang out in there all night, much as I might like; and the grease at Pancake City tends to go a long way. So I sucked it up and did the unthinkable on a trip like this: I went to see a movie.
Funny People was the only thing playing that I hadn't seen and had any interest in at all, and honestly, my interest in it wasn't that great. But I went to see it, sans AMC discount, sans the know-how I'm used to at the old theater I used to work at... and it was a phenomenal movie. I found myself glad, as it progressed, that it appeared to have a really long running time, because the emotion of the weekend was starting to get to me, and this was a really nice escape. Turns out the film has a two hour and thirty-five minute running time, which is looooooong for a comedy, but it worked really well, and if I'd written it up on Movie-Popcorn in any kind of timely manner, I would have given it an A-.
It was just past eleven when I got out, so I headed back to campus for a late-night visit. This time, I was able to camp out in the Sunken Gardens for a while, now that the wedding was long over and I didn't have to compete with anyone in that respect. Let me tell you... I had almost forgotten what the ambiance was like in that place at night. Every insect in the world is calling your name, the breeze whispers to you through the trees like an old friend, and a kind of peace completely envelopes you, one that I remember from my college days but that I thought was long lost to me as an adult. The time I spent on the quad and in the Gardens that night proved to me that you can go home again, and when you get there, you may just find that that's where your heart has really been all this time.
Next up, my last day in Kirksville, and why I was so antsy to get on the road already. |
posted by N.T. @ 1:12 PM  |
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