With A Girl Like You

I have about thirty unfinished little blog-post ruminations about anything from gender roles to highway medians, but they're only yet little seeds.

I'll keep chipping away, but for now, here is a little head-bopping boost to keep this here blog afloat.

- "With A Girl Like You" by The Troggs, from Wild Thing (1966)

Moundridge

Lots of feelings; back again.

Grain elevator; Moundridge, KS

Underlay

Sweet sweet pups

cuddled up

in the slightly-less-sweet underlay.

Cheerleader

The first time I truly heard this song, I was with my friends, careening around central MA in a minivan. This song's associations have grown far beyond that moment, but I'll carry that memory with nostalgia for a long time.

- "Cheerleader" by St. Vincent, from Strange Mercy (2011)

New Age

Lots of exciting stuff is happening right now:

• Last Friday, I signed a one-year lease. I'm living alone in a studio apartment in Midtown Kansas City. After I spent months looking at places in other cities, I've realized that housing here is dirt cheap in comparison.
• Yesterday, I began working at a new job, at a health-food cafe on the Plaza. The team was exceptionally friendly and welcoming, but the work environment was scattered and disorganized. For fear of retribution, I will say nothing more about this company on the Internet, except that I hope I get another job soon.
• This morning, I'm interviewing for a position as an office aide in the Astronomy Department at a local university. Posting about this here makes me wonder if I'm hexing myself, but I am terribly excited about this job and I hope I get it. 
• Today is the forty-seventh consecutive day I've written. That thrills me like a drawn-out game of Jenga: I'm trying my best to keep the tower from toppling. Most days it's a paragraph or two in my notebook about my feelings (imagine that), but those little turns of phrase have a way of worming themselves into poems.

In short, I've decided to settle down here for a while. After all, I've never lived in Kansas City—living on a gravel road in unincorporated Platte County hardly counts. When I left Wellesley, I felt this heavy pressure to use my privileged education to go "change the world." And because so many of my peers were moving to huge new cities and working high-powered jobs, I told myself I had to do the same. But the more I thought about it, I realized that this pressure was entirely self-imposed, and that sometimes it's okay to simply be for a little while. My plan was to find a job to pay the bills so that I could focus on writing, and I'd already become enamored of the poetry community here. On top of that, I've realized how much I missed my friends and family here, and why I want to spend more time with them now. Staying here made a lot more sense when I looked at my priorities in that way. All of these factors pushed me to consider staying, and every morning I wake up more content with that decision.

I have a good feeling about today.

Plainsong (for New Beginnings)

I'm starting a new job, signing a lease, and writing spontaneous (and spotty) ekphrastic tanka poems about clouds:

When I leave this place
(even only if in thought)
dumb, I ossify
the highs of the arms-wide sky
that envelop me, all here

A Rainy Day in the Back Bay

It's been just over three months since I was in Boston.

I'm excited to be starting my "life" and to be out of the pressure cooker that Wellesley could be (maybe I'll just write a whole post about that sometime). Simultaneously, I miss it. A lot. At the most unexpected moments, I'll be entirely enveloped by this cavernous sense of longing and loss. In those moments, I'll wonder which street performers are out in Harvard Square, or what the breeze might smell like on the waterfront in the North End. Most of that feeling is fueled by a sort of nostalgia: I miss the place where I was an irresponsible college student, sheltered and safe from the world.

But there's more to it than that. Metro Boston was the first place I ever knew away from home. It was the first city I ever got to "discover," just by wandering aimlessly on the weekends. It was the first place I felt independent and confident enough to spend entire days wandering by myself. When the marathon bombings happened my first year, it was the first place I'd ever felt any sort of city-wide unity. (That's not to imply that unity doesn't exist in Kansas City; it certainly does. But tragedy and loss can leave deep and unique impacts on a place, and nothing similar has happened in K.C. during my lifetime.)

The point is: I grew there. A lot. That growth could have happened anywhere, but it was shaped by the buildings and the people I knew in Boston. And that city only exists in my recollection now, because when I do eventually return, it will be different: friends will have moved, buildings will have been demolished. I will be different, and my eyes will see the city differently. Even though that perspective will probably lack the youthful excitement of a first-timer, I can't wait to see what the years grant me and how my view matures.

I'll be back soon enough.

Commonwealth and Mass Ave; northeast toward the Common
May 2016

Atticus, In The Desert

I recently finished reading To Kill A Mockingbird for the first time. It was pretty good, though Harper Lee's style occasionally confused me (which was almost certainly her intent, I'd guess). I could write a lot more about it, but I'm slogging through cover letters and job applications at the moment. This Kishi Bashi song will have to suffice.

Ever onward.

- "Atticus, in the Desert" by Kishi Bashi, from 151a (2012)

Alone Again (Naturally)

Some Sundays.

- "Alone Again (Naturally)," by Gilbert O'Sullivan, released as a single in 1972