I am a loose cannon.

There has been this nagging thought in the back of my head for years now. I may have recounted this experience before, because it nags at me, but I think I’m coming to the place of extracting the thorn.

Several years ago a spiritual leader at one of the Christian organizations I worked for told me that he didn’t think it was a good idea for me to be in a mentoring position with young highschool kids. The position that I wanted involved physical labor and conversation a few hours each day. His primary contentions were my radical beliefs: deeply empathizing with Buddhism and loving Henry David Thoreau (also having a nose-ring, which Lamar later removed with wire cutters). He felt that I might endanger his and the organization’s already precarious position with conservative parents. But Walden, really? Every highschool sophomore in California reads Walden! Maybe the reason I could never make sense of it is because it really didn’t make sense. Time to move on, right?

But here’s the deal. He was right. I am a loose canon. Having my own thoughts and wanting to express them is dangerous… but awesome. For the first time in way too many years I am not under the payroll of any Christian organization– it is such an incredibly liberating feeling! As I said to my dad last week: “Dear Church, Glad you’ve decided you want young adults in your organization. Now that you have us, take note: we have opinions, we have politics, we are college educated; we are here and we are LOUD.” Our church, The Church… everybody needs to make some changes.

Honestly, I don’t know if that will get us anywhere– and maybe I just like to buck the system just for the sake of being a loose cannon. Maybe this is my long-delayed teenage rebellion. Does it really matter? I’m so over subconscious motivation, these days I just try to do what feels right.

Also, I can’t remember how to break this off into pieces so that the whole long post doesn’t appear at once  (you know, how to create the “jump”) so if anyone has advice on this it would make everyone’s eyes bleed less, I am certain.

speaking of commencement…

Jim Winters kindly provided me with the link to my commencement address. It’s very short (they address with precorded specifically so that the Powers That Be could control the time length), but turned out well. If you’re interested you can click below, select “Arts and Letters,” then advance the recording to 51:51.

Click Here

I am so close.

Less than two more weeks of class and hardly anything to do for finals weeks means that I am in the home stretch. Even though the end of a school term is always frustrating and stressful, I’ve been particularly disheartened by the fact that my quarter ends so much later than other schools. I mean, we’re even running behind compared to other schools on the quarter system. My commencement speech is fully recorded now, I have two major papers to write and a few minor ones, and an entire apartment to pack up and move. I’m pretty miserable right now, but also feeling good about pressing toward the finish line.

I’m a little worn out, I think.

I’ve been joking with my sister that, in honor of her recent sixty-six mile bicycle ride, I did about a mile and a quarter on the treadmill the other day after class. Somehow, I think the joke is vaguely indicative of the fact that I feel like I’m really not going anywhere.

My positive self-talk says that the feeling is completely unfounded, because I’ve accomplished so much in the past two years– I’m earning my B.A. four years after my highschool diploma, even though I took an entire year off in the middle, I’m the interim kitchen supervisor at the camp, and I’m graduating with highest honors. Not to, you know, toot my own horn. We’re moving back to Modesto to be closer to friends and family, I have a wonderful job lined up, and we’re trying to buy a house. But I have to be honest, I am overwhelmed with ennui. I feel positive about what I’ve accomplished and where we’re headed in life, but it seems like, at least recently, FUN is an endangered, if not completely extinct, specie. We recently realized that we haven’t been on any sort of “real” vacation (i.e. time away from work spent in ways other than sleeping on the floor at one of our parents’ houses) since our honeymoon– almost two years ago.

It’s nobody’s fault, and maybe it’s even necessary to get the things done that need to get done, but I sure wouldn’t mind laughing a little more often.

ditching class

I often wonder what the point of having so much grass every where could possibly be when no one ever seems to use it. I suppose it helps to suppress erosion, or something, at the expense of lakes and rivers. I’m seated on a grassy rise somewhere near the middle of campus and the people who pass by give me odd looks. I’m drinking sweet, sweet coffee. In the past week I’ve learned something about myself: I like black coffee and sickeningly sweet coffee (sickeningly features English adverb, verb, and adjective markers), but nothing in between. I have a little canister of decaf, too, because my subconscious beats my husband when I sleep caffeinated. You learn things about your repressed self when you get married.

Obviously, it is the end of the quarter and I am crashing quickly. We, by which I mean my husband and I, talk often about how much we need a vacation and the corresponding money to finance such a vacation– I’d probably settle for a night out. I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately, and it’s affected my narative voice, if you haven’t already noticed. A fabulously kind scholarship recommendation temperarily rallied my spirits this week, but I’ve slipped back into a mixture of senior, end of the quarter, and I-work-too-much “itis,” which I offer as a means of explaining why I’m on the grassy rise and not in class discussing the predominant features of post-modern literature.