The End of Spring

Thursday night. In the kitchen, Chris gives Tony a haircut. And I’m sitting in the living room with Tim, both of us staring at our laptops, ignoring the freeze frame of the Red Green Show on TV. I am re-reading my last blog draft, written on Saturday:

This is the end of the spring semester. I don’t even know where to begin, what to say, how to speak. I have to be careful not to drift into whiny complaining about the fact that this part of my life is over. I have had the best time living in Athens and studying at OU. I have met the nicest people here, friends that I am not willing and not ready to let go. This, right here and right now, is the downside of making great once-in-a-lifetime experiences. I should be happy about everything that’s happened to me over the last months, and I really am, but there is a profound sadness overshadowing the gratefulness and happiness right now. Saying goodbye is rarely easy, but it’s especially hard if you have the feeling that you might never see the people who’ve become your friends ever again.

            Today was graduation day at OU. Some of the people I’ve met here have finished their undergrad studies and are about to leave town.

And that’s where that draft stops. For reasons of time, I think. I’m a little less emotional about all of that today. When I wrote that bit on Saturday night, I did not even have to say goodbye to everyone yet. I would see my roommates and some friends again on Sunday. What made Saturday feel so final was the fact that most of my friends here were graduating that day. The ceremony was held at OU’s Convocation Center. Since I’d never been to the Convo before, it was pretty overwhelming. A huge circular structure with more than 13,000 seats, mostly used for basketball games. That day, most of the seats were filled with the students’ relatives. Flags of all (or many?) nationalities hanging from the ceiling. In the center, hundreds of black folding chairs had been placed, and an orchestra was playing. And then, when all the graduates-to-be (I think around 4,000!) marched in in their black gowns and caps, the band played that graduation song you have heard in more than one Hollywood movie. The entire ceremony was pretty touching, it really got much closer to me than I had expected. After all, my friends’ graduation made me realize once more that the spring semester was over now. So we heard speeches, the national anthem, more speeches, and then every single student was called by name. Every single one. 4,000 students. But it was pretty well organized; two people were reading the names alternately, in a quite fluent succession. Mildly impressive.

After those two to three hours, I and Sophia (we had met during the ceremony) searched for Natalie and Geeg and their families, took some photos with them, and then we all walked home, one last time to the house we’d lived in for the semester. We had already moved (most of) our things out that morning, so that now, all that was left was some furniture, some basic kitchen utensils, some boxes. I was already well aware of how much I would miss our house. All the good memories connected to it. So we had one last great feast, and I got to know some more family members of Geeg and Nat. After all of that was over, Nat and I went to Jackson’s house where we hung out on the porch talking to this funny guy, and then I joined Jimmy’s family in the living room for some music, playing the guitar for the first time in many many weeks. Then, off to the bars until the inevitable hour of 2a.m. Not yet the final goodbye.

Sam and I met Geeg, Nat, Kara, Joe, Hannah, and Tom for a farewell brunch at Casa. Had to wait one and a half hours for a table, but there was no hurry on our very last brunch, anyway. Having finished our meals, I had to say and hug goodbye to most of the others. Not cool. However, Tom and I went to Justin’s house, and the three of us walked around one last time, up Mound Street and down, back to Justin’s. Geeg brought Natalie over, and that was about the time when I had to bid farewell to Geeg, Nat, Sophia, and Justin.

I walked around a bit after that, along strangely empty and quiet streets lined with old furniture and trash that former residents had just left in front of their houses. Went to that place high above Athens to enjoy the weather and the view. Didn’t quite succeed in reading. I then went back to Sam’s place which was my home until yesterday when I moved to Tim and Tony’s apartment where I’ll stay until next week when I’ll also leave this town that has become so much of a home to me. So quickly.

Catching Up

You may use this blog as an indicator. The less I write the more real work I have to do. That's why I didn't say hi for ten days.

   After Harrison Ford (still a beautiful song you should listen to!) I came home--back from our trip to New York--at around 4a.m. Took another hour to come up with a somewhat thoughtful summation on that David Foster Wallace essay I had to read for this day's Pop/High Culture class. Sleep until 9 or so, then off to the library around 10, get some other readings done, print the summation. Go to class. Then Editing and Publishing, then Literary Theory. From this point onwards, the days were basically filled with class work, especially for my literary magazine, The Transatlanticist. Had to read and reread the submissions, edit them--some barely, some heavily--and format them all in one document which was probably the most annoying part. Reading texts and cooperating with the authors to turn good manuscripts into great essays and stories, that's time-consuming, and it is work, to be sure, but it is fun! I like working close on the text, in the text. All the notes and corrections in Word, Did you really want to say that? Because that's what it sounds like. Maybe rephrase? or This sentence is too long, too convoluted. or simply This doesn't make sense. It is some sort of translation, of refining, of digging for meaning, scrubbing for clarity, polishing for elegance. But the formatting, the layout? Fun if you figure out how to do the things you want to, but the software I had at my disposal, it doesn't allow for too much creativity, at least not on the level that I am familiar with it. And I tried a lot. The cover design was even more strenuous. I am not a graphic designer, and I didn't have one close at hand here, so I manipulated the maps that Julia had created for the front and back covers. Played around with the contrast, brightness, and colors, oh and resizing them, dpi and stuff, because it didn't fit the online cover creator I had to use to create the mag. Then added the title. Once, twice, thrice, 15 times because something was wrong again and again. Anyway, The Transatlanticist's first (probably only, 'cause this is a cruel world) issue has been sent to the printer this Wednesday after at least one night with too little sleep. Supposed to be here on Tuesday. More than just a tad excited, to be honest.

   Easter was great. We invited all of our friends over and had some very very very (I mean very very very) good food. Fruit salad, mixed vegetable salad, mac & cheese, nachos and home made dips, and so on. Made some Radler (3/4 beer, 1/4 sprite; we also introduced the concept in the bars around here) and started a fire after sunset. It was a genuinely good afternoon and night. One of those days you keep looking back on for months afterwards. Also, with a timing unmatched since the day that Jim Morrison met Ray Manzarek, fellow ASL student and BA+ alumnus Richard came to visit us from Detroit exactly on that Sunday. He spent three days in town and we went out a lot with Nat, Geeg, Sophia, Sam, and some others. Sam took the two of us for an early bike ride around Athens on Wednesday morning at 7:30. Not even 5 minutes outside of town, I felt quite a bit in rural Appalachia already. Crooked old shacks, abandoned cabins, rusty trailers. Some beautiful countryside as well, nice views upon Athens, and this dog without a leash that chased and scared us a good deal, but then was really afraid and just stood there. 

   And then my take home final was due for Literary Theory. Explain some concepts by Butler, Cixous, Foucault, Irigaray, Freud, and others. Then three two-page analyses of Drown, My Life in Pink, and What's Cooking?. Very short, not much you can do on two pages. But that's fine. Anyway, very very unfortunately, we did not go into postmodernism. At all. Might have to go back into that on my own. Might have some time in the summer.

   On Wednesday, we gave our final GLC presentations at the Edison Biotech Institute of Ohio University, located at the Ridges. Wasn't too bad; I think all of us did a better job than at the German Center for Research and Innovation in Manhattan, which was already pretty okay. Got very good responses, anyway. So I'm glad we're done with that, and I'm glad it was good. That same evening, GLC dinner. Good pizza at Jacky O's. Got our certificates and, on top of that, our professor (a philosopher and biker) gave me a book titled Harley Davidson and Philosophy: Full Throttle Aristotle. I was really surprised about that, and still am very thankful. Spent some time at the Smiling Skull Saloon afterwards and then went back to Jacky O's to meet the roomies and homies.

 

   Yesterday, I was pretty much lying in the sun all day. Our friend Rosa was visiting, and we saw that those guys across the street were messing around with this little white bird that couldn't really fly. So she went over there and talked to them. Turns out they bought the little parakeet to play with for a couple of hours and then intended to just release it in a bush or something. Yes. I know. Poor guy has clipped wings (apparently, that's what they do so pet birds can't fly away. Horrible), so there's no chance he would have survived. Rosa had asked if she could take it home with her later so they wouldn't just leave it out to die, and they agreed, or didn't really care, for that matter. Found a box and some branches and turned that into a little home for the bird, and brought it over. In the end, I think she couldn't take the bird home for some reason, but she made sure that the guys would keep it in their house for the night, and I don't know where things'll go from there...

   All school work I have left for next week is one exam and one paper, both in Pop/High Culture. So I will try to write more regularly again. Tell you about my upcoming summer internship and other stuff.

Modernism

Got up this morning between 10 and 11, left the hotel alone because Byron was already out while Matt and Michael were still sleeping, grabbed some breakfast here in Jersey and took the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) to Christopher Street, reading Above All Men on the ride, then walked through the warm and sunny streets of Manhattan noon towards Strand where I browsed through the cheap used books outside for half an hour, finding a book with two short novels by Salinger for $ 0.48

and Proust's Swann's Way (Vol.1 of In Search of Lost Time) for a dollar, then went inside for more endless browsing through innumerable shelves and displays of paperbacks, hardcovers and collector's editions of nearly everything that has ever been printed, limiting myself to buy Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian for $7.??, got out again and went to Washington Square Park where I intended to flee the rush, grab some sun and sit on the grass reading - an idea that was, however, immediately thwarted when I caught sight of all the commotion happening in the park, all the locals and tourists, the hipsters and squares, the children and parents, the dogs and the pigeons, and most of all by Tic and Tac who attracted my attention just as easily as that of almost anybody else around the fountain by having their drummer play a tight beat and hollering around, advertising their show which was about to begin shortly, introducing Tic's or Tac's young son who was also participating in the shouting, which all eventually led to a great performance that was a mixture of very self-aware politically

incorrect comedy and break dance/acrobatics that elicited much applause from the audience which afterwards dispersed, dismissing me onto a lawn next to those cosplay kids looking weird and acting crazy, distracting me once more from reading, just like this hipster jazz trio to my left that played some really good stuff and kept on going, song after song just as I kept on going from jazz band to jazz band in Washington Square Park, oh and then seeing these quiet introvert indie kids playing songs for a few amazing modern dancers who even incorporated this one monument into their performance and didn't let go, me finally going adrift, walking to the Caffe Reggio on MacDougal where I had been before and now wanted to go there again because it seemed like the perfect place to have a first look into Swann's Way 

because both the cafe and the novel might have been created around the same time at the beginning of the last century, and then I read into it and it felt a bit like falling in love with Proust's very beautiful and sometimes suggestive and elusive prose which makes a (reportedly) difficult book seem easy to read while it doesn't really reveal the direction this might go into and what it is gonna be about so I sat for another minute or two thinking and then left, tipping not too generously because today's lousy and standoffish service seemed even worse in comparison to that very friendly waitress that I had chatted with in January and who was the first person out of a few to tell me about the Strand which had eventually brought me back here today, all before I went back to the 9th Street station to catch the PATH back home because we were supposed to meet at 7:30 in the lobby in order to go to that awesome Indian restaurant here in Jersey not far from the hotel where I and Rene and Paul shared a table discussing courtship and marriage and where I might have had too much food because it was so delicious, after which I finally headed back home finishing part I of "Combray" in Swann which has taught me how to write a long sentence.

GLC Road Trip

On the road to New York. Our GLC class will give a presentation in Manhattan on Monday. Good reason to go there for the weekend already.
I left the house at 8 this morning (after having gone out last night 'for just one beer.' But in Athens, there is no such thing as just one beer. So once again, home after 2). Sat on our porch and started reading my newest purchase - Above All Men by Eric Shonkwiler - and was once again amazed by how beautiful Athens is in the spring. Especially mornings. The yellow tulips and daffodils on our small patch, the clear blue sky traversed by plane tracks, the mist rising out of the not too distant woods, the incessantly twittering and chirping birds that seemed to surround me by dozens. Didn't make the reading easier.
Around 9, the group arrived and picked me up in a van. Since we have one more person on board than seats in the vehicle, and I was the last one, I had to share a seat first and then squeezed in between the two seats of the middle row. On the floor. Riding backwards. It was okay, though, and now it's Mitch's turn. We're somewhere in  Maryland on a perfectly sunny day, driving through a still somewhat barren but very green countryside. Couple of hours left until we'll arrive at our hotel in New Jersey. We're very quiet now, some are sleeping, others reading. On the stereo some very good indie electro pop with a female vocalist provides a somewhat surreal atmosphere.