The fact that I haven’t written about graduation here yet has been gnawing at the back of my head for the past few days. On one hand, sure, it’s a big deal. I finished up my four year degree, and did pretty damn well doing it, too. I don’t have my actual shiny diploma yet because I haven’t figured out all of my loan stuff, but that will be soon in coming. But even after all of the pomp and circumstance of the commencement ceremony, holding my mortar board in place because that classic Morris wind was just whipping across the mall, cutting like October, after the friends and relatives and hard goodbyes, laughter and dinners and turning my backs on friends knowing that in the coming days all of us would be scattered to the four corners of the map, it still doesn’t really feel like the end of anything. I guess it’s sort of like when we were kids and we expected to feel different on those milestone birthdays, but of course we didn’t. We were just the way we’d always been–it was just a different day.

And that’s sort of how I feel right now. I’m still in the mode, and it hasn’t really struck me that I won’t be going back there to take classes, won’t be living in that fairly insulated utopia of like-minds. It’s been scarily easy for me to come back home, set up my room, and settle back into that in-between feeling, the feeling of the before time. And the challenge for me now is going to be to take what I’ve brought back with me from Morris, from those three years, and apply it. And I don’t mean the classes and subject matter, but rather the ways of thinking, the way I’ve been trained to assess the world around me critically, to assess myself critically. I’ve landed back at the place of my departure with all of the baggage I’ve accumulated along the way, and I worry about forgetting. That’s my biggest fear about this in-between year before I head back for my Master’s. I worry about forgetting, about getting mentally soft, about reverting back to how things were before. I don’t want that. And in a way I’m sure it’s impossible to do so, to forget and revert. But there’s that fear because I really like the person I turned into when I was at school, I like how I thought, I like how I acted, I love the people I met, and now I’m back here in the same space I was in before all of that change took place. It feels like I’ve moved on while so much here has stayed the same, and of course it has. I’ve moved on, but here I am. A different person in the same body and space.

One constant will be this blog, which I started in earnest up at school as a fiction journal. It’s now morphed into something with a wider scope of reference (all Twilighters in the audience give yourselves a hand for sticking with my rambles this far–there’s more to come), but at it’s heart it’s still the place where I dump my heart out and see what’s there. In the coming year, and I adjust to this place and this place adjusts to me, I hope that this space will help make sense of some feelings that otherwise may go unarticulated and uninterrogated.

I’m bringing with me into this place what I have collected along the way, carrying with me pieces of people, reams of memories, the stuff that I am made of.

So. Cheers, 2009 graduates, specifically my great friends, you all know who you are–you in California, preparing for big changes; you in Kentucky, finding the lip of the next step; you in your cozy prairie house, changing lives; you in a brown room in your brother’s house, preparing for the future and beating the drum; and you just down the road, who have been beside me these three years and hopefully many more to come.

I’ve got a little bit of each of you inside me.

That’s what she said.

Weird, awesome day. Yesterday K told me that there was nothing wrong with taking a day off, and today, unexpectedly, I did. Spent the morning (the early morning) recording with Where Roots Run Deep. After three hours, we had a seven track EP, which I dubbed The April EP. Our recording engineer, Anthony, was a trooper and a saint. I think even J would agree that Anthony epitomizes what it means to be a true gentleman. I doubt he’s reading this, but big ups to Menz Room Recordings regardless.

Spent the afternoon in a car with my fellow staff members, talking about the ethics of lawns, academic prose, and how our parents met. In between we played laser tag in St. Cloud, at which I fairly well wore holes in the knees of the only pair of jeans I have that fit right now (must begin exercise once semester is over).

Finished up the first crappy draft of my paper of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which, at this point, is sort of about history and narrative and ghosts…and stuff. It’s a first draft, it sucks, but now I have something work with rather than just a blank page.

Car tested the April EP tonight, Once-style, with J, Anthony and K. Turns out the headphones we were using to playback the tracks during recording had no bass response, so the whole record is everyone else quiet and in balance in the background, and me on the booming bass, overpowering everyone. And since I’m the one who knows the songs the least, this was not an ideal situation. Plans are being made already for the May EP.

Nearing the end of House of Leaves, and wish I would have read it faster. I still think it’s great, but reading it over such a span of time (almost two months) sort of killed the momentum. I can tell it’s something that I will want to read again, but there’s a stack of awesome books at home waiting for me when I finally grab my diploma (is that even what they call that piece of paper at the college level?)in four weeks.

Now, bed, because I had to get up so early to rock, and my legs feel like pudding from all the rolling around shooting people with laser guns that looked like barcode scanners.

For the past three months, I’ve been working on a movie with my friends. It’s basically The Office, but instead of at a paper company, the characters work in Residential Life at UMM. Tonight, in the ORL conference room, people other than me, K, J, and my editor E, saw it, and all of them really seemed to like it. We got laughs in all the right places and claps at the end.

It’s been a very cool experience, from late-night conception as an idea, to watching the finished product for the first time last week, it’s been a learning process (I can’t imagine working on a feature, although they have more than one camera and more than none money), and, most importantly, an incredible amount of fun. While we were casting roles, I wasn’t sure if everyone would be up for it–even though we’re all CAs, I still often feel like I don’t know people all that well. But, much to my happy surprise, everyone stepped up, got excited, and delivered funny, funny performances. Sitting in the front row tonight, listening to the laughter (most of the cast was seeing it for the first time too) I felt proud of what we’d made.

If any of you readers are in Morris, you can catch it at the UMMy Film Festival on April 24.

Yesterday was a good day. Woke up at the college crack of dawn and got into a space-age car with three of my very favorite people on the planet and drove to St. Paul. There, J and K went off in search of sun while T and I went into the conference building and got our thankfully typed and semi-professional looking name tags. After catching the last half of the keynote, we went to a surprisingly robust and awesome lunch, sat in the back of the room because the caterers had told us to, talked about life after undergrad, and later wound our way through the maze of tables in search of cake and pie.

The room I presented in was wee, and even once T smuggled J and K in, there were still only nine people. But the two woman who were presenting in the same hour were funny and informal, and helped to steady my nerves. As I was reading the paper, all of the nerves seemed to knock loose some of the junk that been gunking up my nose for the past two weeks, and T told me after I was done that she almost just threw a packet of Kleenexes at me, but J said that he didn’t even notice. Which is not terribly reassuring because J notices very little. Got some very nice feedback, both from the audience and my co-presenters, and a hug from T for which I was grateful. One women seemed to be having trouble believing that I was an undergraduate, which I thought was really cool. She told me I should publish what I’d read, and considering I’d written over half of it two days before, that was also cool. The paper was about something about which I’m passionate, and it’s nice to hear that the work I’ve done is good and worthwhile.

K and J went in search of more sun while T and I went to a panel about online writing centers. Felt very smart when I caught the Stephen North references, even though he’s pretty much the god of writing center theory. The people from Walden University–an exclusively online college–were funny and realistic about the often enfuriating and thankless work that writing tutors do. Before, one of the Walden guys saw our name tags and said that he was an alumni, and T asked if he meant alumus, which is the masculine singular of the word, and when he blinked and twisted his face a bit, she told him that she’d lived with a classics major and was a Latin geek and sorry.

After finding J and K out in the sun reading comic books, conferenced-out, we motored over to what would be my first visit to an Asian grocery. Inside, there were aisles and aisles of stuff I’d never even heard of before, tanks full of live lobsters and clams, and a heated glass case with whole roasted ducks hanging in it. As J said of them, “They’ve still got faces.” Walking away from the meat counter, upon which was a massive television tuned to the Travel channel (something unsettling about a butcher watching a documentary about baby deer while slicing up…something), I purused the fish counter only to see a small man hack at a large fish with a machete, dump the pieces into a plastic bag with some water, tie it off, and hand it to a waiting family. At the front of the store were bags of rice as big as bags of water softener salt.

From there, we found Malaysian food. J got a mountain of tofu, T a plate full of spicy lamb, K a heap of spicy noodles, and me a load of chicken served in half a pineapple. I tried a bit of a green chili and my mouth burned for fifteen minutes, and T explained that, yes, they get much hotter. J poked around K’s plate of noodles, stabbed a black jiggly thing and said, “I don’t know what this is, but I’m gonna eat it.” Only after did T explain that it was a mushroom. We shared everything, including a strawberry smoothy with giant tapioca seeds at the bottom, and paid our tabs.

Stopped a co-op where T bought a bag of kumquats and J bought wax for his soon-to-be dreadlocks. I’d never had a kumquat before–they’re the size of cherry tomatoes but look like oranges–but, holy crap, are they good. Taste explosion. Everyone should find some immediately. You eat them whole, rind and all. The fruit is shockingly sour and awesome, and as you chew, the rind becomes sweet. I think they just may be the perfect fruit.

From there, drove through the darkness toward home listening to cd after cd, T always having something new and awesome to share with us.

Driving across the world into the ripening sunset, I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

It was K’s birthday today, so we took the night off.  No homework, no research.  I spent the afternoon reading Bone and napping, and we ate in Alexandria with friends, one of whom who had traveled from the coast.  Then we had to hop across the street to get in line for Quantum of Solace.

I hate movie theaters.

Seriously, if there is a hell, it’s a movie theater like the one we were in tonight.  The thing about theaters is, they’d be great if it weren’t for all of the people.  It was packed, and we had to sit way off to the side and way in front, with a bunch of loud kids in the front row, someone with a laser pointer in the back, and, I swear, the couple behind may as well have bought one ticket because they were in the same seat the whole time.  Come on, kids.  Why do you pay eight dollars to sit in the dark with strangers and make-out?

Oh.

But still.

Go see Madagascar 2 or something, and leave me and Bond in peace, or at least quit pressing against the back of my fucking chair.  I would have been a lot more upset had the movie been worth a crap, but after Casino Royale, this new movie was disappointing.  I might do a review of it soon, but for now it’s late and I didn’t like it.  It felt empty.  Bond has been reduced to a generic action hero, and yes, I understand that it’s a revenge picture, the logical product of the events of the last film, but does that mean it has to be bland?  It needed to be both shorter and longer, for different reasons.

Drove home in the dark and the snow behind cars going slower than they needed to, talking about our friend who invents people, and the things we had done.  Rock Band until one in the morning while the owners of the house slept upstairs, and now I’m home and tired.  Right.  Bed now.