| 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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| ten years hence |
| Saturday, August 1, 2009 |
First things first, I suppose.
I'm coming you to live from the Washington Street Java Company, probably the most well-known hang-out in Kirksville. You wouldn't know it in the summer, apparently; it's 3:22 on a Saturday afternoon as I sit here typing, and there are three other visible customers seated and two standing at the counter. A girl in a yellow headband and braces just served me a roast beef and colby cheese sandwich with tomatoes and sliced cucumber, a side of carrot sticks, and a bag of BAKED! Lays original. While she was at it, she charged me $1.35 for a can of Coke, and I have, officially, seen everything.
I'm sitting in the front window.
This was always where Sarah, Rachael, and I sat when we came here, which wasn't often; we only came here together a few times. As I remember, they were all after I graduated, the last one was during the winter months, and I remember thinking it strange that they would want to sit so close to a frosty outside-facing window. Now, seeing it open in the middle of the summertime, I couldn't resist taking our old seat. I might move when I need to plug the Netbook in, but it tells me we have nearly three hours of juice left, and JavaCo's summer hours flyer says they close at 7:00. I'll have to find Stone Creations before then anyway.
There is a rubber tree on my right that's probably older than I am.
It's so strange, but not, when you think about it, that I never spent much time here when I was a student at the University. I never really had any money, to begin with, nor did I have a laptop with which to occupy myself as I not buying coffee -- which I don't really drink. Come to think of it, with all that and Coke running upwards of a dollar per 12-ounce can, it's really no wonder at all I never hung out here in college, is it? :)
JavaCo, to me, is a place to relax. I see people working on their laptops, studying for who knows what, since even the summer blocks are over with for now. But since I see it as a place to relax, it's especially strange, but not, when you think about it, that I never really came here much as a student. For one thing, I was never relaxed when I went to Truman, and that's particularly true of my first year here, so of all the times in my life, that was when I could really have used a place to retreat to. But I was a depressed, anxiety-ridden mess, and I really couldn't afford to relax, or things around me would have fallen apart even more than they already had. That was 1997. When I came back in 1999, I was in much better shape emotionally, but I was completely engrossed in the theatre scene, working on shows, hoping to get cast, etc. Students' lives here are very campus-centric, and since I still didn't have money or a laptop, it just wasn't a place I gravitated toward to unwind or share in a bit of literary wisdom or witticism, as I hear the people around me doing now.
And by the by, business has picked up quite a bit since I sat down. I'm counting around twenty other characters in here, almost none of them the same as when I first arrived. Good to see.
I took nearly fifty photos on campus this morning, but there was actual wedding planning going on in the sunken gardens at the time, so I didn't get any shots of it today. I'll have to come back tomorrow once everyone's married off and cleared out. I'm off now to take some pictures of the square, find Stone Creations, if it still exists (I'm reading that it might not), and let me tell you... Samantha is coming in more handy than I imagined she would this weekend. I am floored by how much I don't remember, in terms of where things are and now to get there. I've been away far, far too long. I can't do that again.
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posted by N.T. @ 3:16 PM  |
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