Friday, 9/28: pretty much had the race of my life. That's all.
Saturday, 9/29: well...I don't think anything particularly noteworthy occurred. Oh wait! I performed at the Musical BAR! My set list was as follows: I'll Fly Away (old hymn), Untitled (Simple Plan), Days (Philip Larkin, poet), Dog Days Are Over (Florence + the Machine). Audience was awesomely supportive.
Sunday, 9/30: finally had the conversation/answers I needed concerning [dance] partying (in a nutshell), with a person I didn't expect (although he IS on leadership for FCA...).
Monday, 10/1: Cross Country coach told me I've matured a lot as runner this season (although he seems to think so for reasons I don't exactly agree with) and am having a great season, essentially. Then went and had a killer workout—in the sense that it hurt a lot, mostly because I didn't get a sufficient warm-up, but I still felt super accomplished afterward.
Tuesday, 10/2: Read like 2 1/2 books of poetry since I didn't have class due to the Nobel Conference, didn't do any homework.
BUT ALSO.
Roommate took a guy to the ER to get six stitches after watching him crack his head open while longboarding down the hill behind our dorm and get blood all over our floor and sink.
AND.
Was moved to tears listening to an acquaintance describe the amazing and completely miraculous survival of her roommate in a head-on collision with a guy high on meth, the weekend before school started.
(Oh and you can throw in an hour and half meeting with the Firethorne staff to review works of prose written by our very own schoolmates, which was a little bit awesome.)
Still with me?
K good.
Wednesday, 10/3: Still Nobel, barely got more homework done, but this was probably more due to the fact that I watched my co-worker pass out and start puking up something very strange looking WHILE UNCONSCIOUS, and less to do with me reading another book of poetry. But hey, I wrote a poem about it after I finished watching a lecture on Ethics and the Ocean which completely escaped me for my distraction by the day's events. Poem (minus the name of the girl, anonymized by "---"):
Banana Peppers
rain down on the counter-top
in acidic yellow, scattering
in loops on the floor
that match the perfect O's of surprise
forming in the mouths of petrified bystanders
while my back is turned
one "Oh my goodness!"
rotates my body and suddenly
adrenaline is moving my hands,
flinging aside toxic-yellow peppers,
shoving her shoulders over
to keep the vomit out of her lungs,
kicking myself for forgetting
her name (as if it made a difference)
and no one is coming
and we are alone
and wait it's stopping, "S---..."
She wipes the alien substance
from her face and stares
at me in the stock, wide-eyed terror
of utter confusion, to which I reply,
"It's okay,"
and see the peace and truth of those words
in her acceptance, reflected
in the calm of her eyes,
which neither the supervisors
nor the medics notice
when they ask the girl in the vegetables
if she knows what day it is
"Just so you know," she says,
"the fainting runs in my family,"
as if that really made a difference.
And today? Thursday, 10/4: Read more poetry, but also some entries in a public journal sitting on a bed in the campus center set up for some psych/art project. And what after that? Got up, walked five steps to the Interfaith Space, opened and shut the door, and rattled off in tongues for a good three minutes (I think). Why not yesterday, I asked myself, when I found myself almost completely helpless in the face of a physical crisis of another human being?
Ha. I should know by now, that we don't ever really get answers to these questions. I don't know what I said today either, except for the one English plea thrown in that foreign prayer: "God, love them." Those people who are hurting, but still have the courage to pour out their souls in writing, albeit anonymously. It was just...
Well, let's just say that there's been a lot of "movement" in my life lately. In every sense of the word.
"Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance."
James 1:2-4
God bless.
P.S. Check out "Days" by Philip Larkin (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178046), if you get a chance. It's a short but powerful poem (that I also happened to read for the aforementioned music and spoken word event called the Musical BAR).
