Pixels

I should like to buy a new camera.

I've been holding off since my last (how many have we been through now? 4?) camera broke on Halloween. Usually, it's my fault (sand, it getting stolen at a bar, more sand...) but this time it was nobody's fault and that upset me. I take responsibility (I don't know why, it's my own sense of responsibility to myself, I guess) and then buy a new one. But this time I held off.

Now that I'm realizing that my time here is numbered (cue heavy melodramatic music), I'm wanting to document my life here. My college-self isn't necessarily dying, but she's being pushed aside for real-life-grown-up-Katie and I'm nervous to lose the things that I love here. My routine. The funny things I see every day. My neighborhood.

And I've realized that the very first thing I buy when I graduate (because I'll still be here, still be in school, but at least I'll have the hopes of summer in my mind and heart) will be a new camera. That way I can document my life here and keep it safe.
I miss picture blogs, and I hope you do too.

I'm not going to buy a point and shoot and I'm not going to buy a super nice one either, I'm going to go straight down the middle. Perhaps a digital with a nice lens?

Also, it snowed today in Chicago. That was lame. A little cold. A little tired. This week stretches on, but I'm excited to get to Denver tomorrow. It will be a quick break and then a quicker slide to graduation. And then a break, for which I will be back in Denver for the obligatory doctor's appointments and settlement figured out, and then summer classes and then home.

Where is home?

I want to travel. I want to pick up and go somewhere. South America?

Evasion of the Best Kind

Ah, the things one learns when one lives in Chicago.
Unlike Colorado, Illinois does not have a 30-day grace period for vehicle registration.
Alas, I woke Monday morning to a perfectly placed parking ticket bearing that oh-so-familiar orange coloring. My windshield and those things are well acquainted.
Funny thing, though: I had parked legally.
Pssh, idiots, I thought. Then I looked at the date of registration. 3/10.
It's now 4.
Shit.
It had totally slipped my mind. So the past few days have been a blur of frantic attempts to get an emissions test (finally accomplished this afternoon), faxing papers and registration, googling the exact statute for Colorado that gives me extra time, etc. etc.
And so, I have been hiding Simon from the police.
Hiding in plain sight.
That car cover that I bought so long ago, which has been languishing in the closet, was pulled out and put on. He looks ridiculous. He's the only car on the block that is buried under a white (now dirty brown-white) sheet. But, hedging my bet that I'm legally bound to Colorado law and not Illinois, I've managed to escape ticketing by assuming that the police are too lazy to pull back the sheet in order to look at the license plate. And thus far, I've been correct. Since Monday, I've remained ticketless and Simon has managed to be covered through the first hail of the spring.
Ha, take that Chicago.

I'm fighting the first ticket based on the registration laws but also based on the fact that no circle was filled in about why the ticket was being issued. Stay tuned for updates on that ordeal.

Sourcing and the future. Or, the way we were.

I'm slowly being squeezed to death by gender theory. Simultaneously, I am being force fed Foucault and Butler. Two separate classes, teaching the same theorists. No one else knows this pain, the gradual tightening of the noose of gender theory.
I'm realizing that there are some things in life you just don't want to understand. I don't want to think more about it. It is what it is, I want to write on the paper that's due Thursday. It is what it is and what I think doesn't matter now and won't ever.
But that's not why we throw money at education, is it?
I'd like to have learned something useful; been forced to take classes about resume building and interviewing, ideas of lives well-led. The journeys that the professors themselves have been on to get to where they are today.
Not everyone skyrockets straight to the top, but they don't tell you that.
They string you along and then dump you, indebted and lonely, a twenty two year old graduate with a bachelor's degree in something you thought you'd love. Then what?

I found a quote that I loved, in a memoir by a transsexual. I love this book. I started it last night. I relate to this woman (not sexuality-wise) but I love her life and her observations and her humor and her narrative voice.

"Briefly I was a journalist in my twenties, although not a very good one. I didn't quite grasp the whole concept of accuracy. Whenever I needed a quote, I'd just make one up and attribute it to an 'anonymous source.' On one occasion, I alleged that something had been stated 'according to someone that would know.'"
-From She's Not There, by Jennifer Boylan.


This morning in the pouring rain, a very soaked me was handed the free newspaper. I accepted, then remember, shit, now you're obligated to tip. She's a nice lady, she stands there every morning. I shrugged when she asked me if I had any change and then dug in my pockets.
"It's fresh from the closet," I said apologetically. She laughed in a good natured way. Then I turned and  ran into a man while waiting to cross Sheridan Rd. He asked me if I was a Taurus, to which I replied yes. He showed me his Illinois state ID. May 18, same birthday as me. I told him so.
"You play sports?" he asked. I laughed and shook my head. "You've got the legs for it." I laughed again.
He told me something about his fingernails, then asked me if I was a smoker. "It was bad nail polish," I said defensively. (I currently have yellow nails stained from the dark red nail polish of last week.)
"Brittle," he replied.
True.
He told me he was a musician, "like the Beatles," and then proceeded to keep talking as I crossed the street. "My brother....KRS-One....rap artist...." I heard as the light changed and I walked away.

I'm going to miss mornings like that. I'm not quite sure that Denver will have them.

Anywhere, just to be.

Exhaustion has set in. I feel as though it's a Monday tradition.
I really do love to pack up and go, I'm learning. I love the feeling of being somewhere new. I've realized that I don't get stressed when I'm lost (which I'm also realizing doesn't happen often when I'm trying to get somewhere new) or when I'm somewhere I've never been before.
I'm quick to pick up on directions and to orient myself within a space.
I enjoy new places and changes of pace. I find it exhilarating and calming.
I am my own person and I am in my own space. I have no future and no past, only present. Only conversation and today.
I would like to explore that feeling more.

This is, of course, the complete opposite of the segment of my personality that cannot handle change. I think that it's only the future and permanent change that throws me. Perhaps I'm not as much of a homebody as I had once thought. As long as it's not something I'll have to do often, I'm fine. I like being transient and anonymous, unnoticed.
The first day of school still terrifies me, as does getting a job. But that's what's in store for me. The settling, to a certain degree.
But passing through seems just fine to me.


I'll go anywhere, just to be.
I've been through you
Worked and worked so hard to maintain,
create a life,
build one,
then to run away.
Nothing left behind,
a whisper, maybe,
but certainly no other trail in my wake.
Time, the imprint of what once was
Remains.
Sustained solely by thoughts and feelings.
Those fade too, replaced
by thoughts and feelings.
Emotions that beget emotions
that upset, then force regret,
then, finally, if only to forget.
It's the forgotten ones you've got to be careful of.
Mind them, just like the gap,
until you're just as lost and
nothing's left.
Are you safer than you were before?
Running from the sea
to the middle of the nowhere,
the dead center of that
folded, crumpled map.
Not even sand, the sand that made the shore
left in the indents at the bottom of your shoes.
Gone like those little grains
that held and clung,
transported as if my magic
somewhere else.
New home, to them, is where you left them be.
Days pass.
Shattered glass picked up to go a thousand different ways.
Sweep, sweep, swept.

I'll slip through time 

in the past tense. 

You're lost, I'm gone and nothing's left.
Again, again, repeat, regress.



Forgive me for that ill-fated attempt. I've not written poetry in awhile, but it slipped out and I let it go.

Hoppy Easter!