If I could have anything in the world...

I'd have you.








I mean, seriously, I've got the greatest friends ever :-)

Taking the Right Way Home

I got a little weepy when driving through Memphis back to Knoxville yesterday. At the I-240 interchange past the Brooks Rd. exit, the right lane takes you to eastbound I-40 towards Nashville, and the left lane takes you to westbound I-40 towards Little Rock. After resisting the temptation to give UT, my final (unfinished) papers, and the assistantship the finger and hightail it to Central Arkansas for better or worse, I chose the right lane, followed I-240 around to the the Nashville exit, and once again was presented with the same choice: West to Little Rock, East to Nashville, then on to Knoxville. I lost my bearings for just a second.

See, I'm one of those people who (halfway) believes in the power of signs. Not like stop signs, but signs from above (which is problematic for me because I really don't believe in god) that lure me toward a certain....something. Usually when confronted with the same decision more than once, I freak out a bit, nearly convincing myself that something out there is giving me another chance to make the right decision. However, I invariably stick with the choices I've already made, signs be damned.

I guess I can convince myself that choosing the Nashville exit, which was the right lane after all, was the right decision. I did make some significant progress on one of my papers today, and would have made more had I remembered to dress appropriately for the arctic environs of Hodges Library. Besides, I'd stand to lose a lot by giving up and going back to Conway: free school, teaching experience, newly budding friendships. And all for what? A memory of a perfect time in a perfect place with perfect people when I was perfectly happy. Only it wasn't, they weren't, I wasn't. I was a basket case for most of my undergraduate career, over-extending myself with classes and RSOs and student publications because I learned a long time ago that if I keep myself impossibly busy, I don't have time to think about what's bothering me. Repression has been a key factor in my coming of age, I tell you, and it took me getting away from what I know to realize that.

But nostalgia has a way of skewing the truth of matters. For a little longer than a split second, I thought I might actually go AWOL from McClung Tower and back to a time that will not exist again in a place with people that surely have changed since I made my departure that weepy day at the end of July 2007. Of course they've changed. I've changed. And I'm glad I had the good sense to realize these facts before I merged left.

Dance like you never forgot where you came from

Today on campus, I saw a girl breaking it down by the Eupora fountain in the concrete landing strip called McClung Plaza. Man, was she moving, stomping her feet, twisting her middle, jolting her head from side to side. A boy sat on the fountain's lip reading a newspaper like he didn't see this blonde Rockette dancing out her inner choreography a few feet away.
She had headphones in, moving to the grooves channeled into her ears. I even heard her not so much singing but aspirating her lip sync. She was playing that ever necessary but dangerous game-- dancing like no one was watching.

I envy her lack of inhibition.

In other news, I spent the evening having happy hour beers and free-range chicken sandwiches with some MA friends at the Tomato Head. While waiting to be seated, I saw a group of older folks in Razorbacks sweatshirts leave the restaurant. These my people, I stopped them to ask where they hailed from, and guess what? They were from Conway. Small world, huh? They asked me if I knew a bunch of people I don't know (never was big in the Central Arkansas social scene), but I loved running into people from my old hometown. Reminded me of when I lived in Conway, how I could go anywhere--the coffee shop, Target, the movie theatre--and run into at least one (but usually more) people I knew. I miss that part of small town life.

I'm also nostalgic for my rural roots, but not so much I'm willing to go back to them anytime soon. Until then, Michael Chitwood can tide me over--

From cutting the nuts out of a bull calf's bag with a Barlow,
from laying case knives on a dress pattern,
from running a trotline and baiting the hooks with gone liver,
from mashing a tobacco worm into a green blot,
from crimping dough at the piecrust edge,
from whisking an egg,
from whipping a boy with a switch he fetched,
from doffing a bolt of taffeta,
from working the one arm of the adding machine,
from beating the answers out of the erasers
Oh Lamb of God, they come.

from "The Saved"