| 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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| weekend thus far |
| Sunday, August 2, 2009 |
So I'm back at my favorite JavaCo in Kirksville this early afternoon after a couple of hours on campus taking photos and reliving some last-minute memories even though the buildings are supposed to be closed and locked down (more on that later) and there is absolutely no one on campus that I can see. It's been fantastic having the Netbook along on the trip, but it's been much more tedious to edit/resize photos on it than I anticipated, so I haven't gotten a whole lot of that done so far. I've uploaded a couple to Facebook so far, but I haven't published the album yet; I'll do that once I'm home and have gotten everything right where I want it, captions included.
I'll also have a full rundown of the entire weekend coming soon, tonight or tomorrow night. It's been quiet, relaxing, and very, very tranquil, but it has not been without its share of emotion, and that goes beyond the extensive trip down memory lane I expected and into the realm of such excitement as my doubtlessly illegal entry into campus buildings and my failed attempt to gift myself with a school flag I saw flying on campus. Again, full stories on the way, all. :)
Although it has been a trip down the aforementioned memory lane, one thing it has not been is a trip back in time, as my friend Briana suggested. Everywhere I looked, I was reminded that it is not 1999 anymore. For starters, The Shack, aka The Love Shack, aka Mathilda's Love Shack, was the very center of the Theatre People's social universe when I was at Truman, and it was torn down, along with that entire row of houses, sometime around 2002-2003, as I remember. It turns out I have been to Kirksville since Rachael graduated, it was to make one or two random deliveries for the Red Cross, but they weren't meaningful visits; it was during one of those trips that I stopped by campus and found The Shack to be missing, as in not there anymore.
And since that was Landmark #1 on my memory playlist, the new Ruth Town Museum and Visitor's Center that now stands in its place was a constant reminder, all weekend, of how things can and do change over time.
Likewise, Missouri Hall? Where I lived every semester I was at Truman? Has this horrendous glass foyer tacked onto the main entrance that appears, from the outside, to be nothing more than a student lounge with red plush furniture and little else; the building was locked, and this one, I couldn't get into. :)
The Baldwin Little Theatre, where we performed The Foreigner and which had hosted countless other plays before and since, is now, for all purposes, a classroom. I managed to get inside on Friday night, less than an hour after I'd arrived in town, and you can imagine my shock when I saw that all the windows that had been painted over and covered had been cleared; the stage itself had been boarded up and sealed, as had the sound and light booths in the back of the theatre. Apparently the new James G. Severns Theatre, which was under construction when I graduated, negates the need for our historic Little Theatre, at least in the eyes of the bean counters that run the place. With time comes improvements, and with improvements come change. We know this.
This building just plain wasn't there when I was a student. I have no idea what it is:
Toons is now called Wrongdaddy's, Stone Creations is now Tranquil Seasons, the Wal-Mart is now a massive supercenter... but one thing that has not changed much is the Washington Street Java Company, of which I am the lone customer at the moment. They close at 5:00 today, and I had planned to blog and post photos until they kicked me out, but I may just head out of town a couple of hours earlier than that so I can get home and knock out a bit of laundry for tomorrow. I don't relish the thought of getting back to my life, no offense to anyone, but getting home after dark won't accomplish anything.
So until then, I will bid you all adieu, and I promise that over the next couple of days I will have many more stories and photos for those of you so interested. As a final thought for the time being... I know I've said my next visit to Kirksville could be a very, very long time from now, but I was wrong. I don't plan on waiting another seven years before I see the place again. I hope to get up here once every summer until Life no longer allows it... and maybe even after that as well.
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posted by N.T. @ 12:30 PM  |
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