"It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present, you know what I mean?"
I've had Rufus Wainwright's 'Grey Gardens' stuck in my head more or less all day, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the sadness that's hidden underneath the bright rhythm. The album it's on, Poses, is a wonderful one that I haven't really given an in-depth listen to since I bought it a few months back. Maybe over this break I can get to know it a little better.
It's been an interesting day, strangely quiet for how stressfully it started. Somehow I achieved the strange miracle of leaving a full ten minutes later than yesterday for school, but arriving there at the exact same time. My car, among its other talents, seems to have the ability to defy the space-time continuum. I always knew it was special...
The last exams all went well. The one I was the most nervous about actually went the best of all of them (Spanish, and I was never all that worried to begin with), and I finished up my Latin exam about half an hour early, which was nice. English could have gone better-- the essay topic I chose was too big for five pages and I didn't prepare enough in advance-- but life goes on.
Anyway, not really any news on France. I just felt like I should write something since today was my last day at school here in NM until August '09. Actually, small news: I did attend a conference call Wednesday night with the other AFSers bound for France. We had a Q & A session with a returnee from last year, and now some of my anxieties about what my transcripts are going to look like once I get back have lifted. Interesting overall, a few more details on what to expect once I get off the plane and when I meet my host family, etc.
I'm not sure exactly what this mood is. I feel this way at the start of every break, kind of like the way a pond looks after a rock's been thrown in and the ripples have all dissipated. Quiet, but with a nervous expectancy: well, that's over...now what? Doubtless between French and the infamous thesis I'll find plenty to do, but it's always that first evening that the gap between the big events seems too large to fill.
In the meantime, I've been thinking about people: people in general but specifically the ones that I know-- everyone I miss right now and everyone I'm going to start missing very shortly, and how many more people have managed to squeeze themselves into those 'everyone's in such a short period of time. Also some things about language, how it's not perfect like math and that's why I'm good at it and how 'circle back' is its own weird little idiom distinguishable from just 'circle' (try making a sentence with the first and substituting the second-- it doesn't work); about re-learning how to knit; about the writers who win the Nobel Prize and the ones who don't; and about how everything I'm currently reading or listening to was recommended to me or given to me by someone else. And then I realized that for nearly a year, for my choices of books I've been mostly going off the suggestions of other people or its place in 'the canon of classics' (whose membership is debatable, I'll freely admit). With a very few exceptions, mostly in poetry, everything I've been reading (or listening to: I've been doing the same with music) has been because people tell me to read it. And I'm not sure how that feeling sits with me. My eyes have been opened so some amazing artists and writers because of these recommendations, and in some cases they've led me to make my own discoveries, but still, how little of my reading/listening came of my own initiative is interesting considering in the past, I mostly just browsed sections of the bookstore and came up with titles that sounded interesting when I wanted something to read. Just a difference in approach, I guess. And it creates a bond with the person who recommended it to you (Ah, see, I just knew you'd love it! What'd you think of the end, with x and such happening to so-and-so?...).
So...I'm not unhappy, just pensive, and wondering where things go from here. In terms of everything, not just lecture.
That was a lot of rambling; I'm sorry. (Pertinent) updates as they come.