Summer Please

So far it's been a lazy, sleepy summer. Full of delicious, fresh, organic foods,* really good company, sleeping in everyday, and running.
No one seems to want to hire me (or anyone else, for that matter) for summer jobs, but I'm not devastated about that, just slowly running out of money. I start my GRE course in about two weeks and I'd really like to have a day job before so I'm not completely mad with foodlessness or shame.
Life after college is strange in that it just extends so far into the future. I kept joking on graduation day when I got my grades back and all was said and done that I didn't have any short term goals anymore. I've made some but they're a little silly and certainly less practical or guided or externally confirmable than academic goals. I have said for that past year that once I graduated I would shift my thinking from goal-driven days to soul-improvement days, being slower and more careful with my time and my decisions. I'm realizing over the past few weeks, though, it's a complicated shift and I feel much more comfortable and centered having short term goals. A vocation. A reason to use my planner. Income. It takes just as much discipline, it seems, to read on my own, to write for myself, to job search every day, to wake up, to relax, to know I'm completely normal and fine for having taken three weeks off.

I move out of Walter this week into my beautiful Carrboro sublet. I have loved this house so much. It's one of the first times I've lived in one place this long since college--I typically move every semester--and it's so peaceful to feel like I have a definite home. We've had such a hilarious, creative, productive year and I am so grateful to have gotten to spend 10 months with my brother. Our friendship has gotten even more awesome I think.
I will miss the theme parties, the circus ceiling, red room. I will miss the clompy footsteps of students running down the hill outside my front door in sandals to catch the bus. There are a bunch of things I won't miss.
I look forward to riding my bike around, going to the Farmer's Market every Saturday, seeing Elaine a billion times a week, Open Eye afternoons. Yes please. Yes.

Oh, and the sun finally came out today. Jumping for joy. Tomorrow I think I'm going to go to Asheville and spend a solid 48 hours by the pool with a book.

*Except for the fact that I'm trying to clean out the pantry before I move and have been using condensed milk (bought in January for snowcream) in my tea. A little strange but ridiculously good. And WWIIish.

Sundries

I'm not really sure about this, but I think doing a bunch of handstands is giving me crazy deltoids. Thanks, dad (!) (?)

My show, Troilus and Cressida, goes up tomorrow! I'm playing the lubber Ajax. Quite a shift from the latest (Lady Macbeth). I think we've done good work. The monsoons have come as they seem to do when one is trying to perform out of doors.
I'm trying to find jobs of various sorts and generally construct a plan of action for the next three to six months. It's a frustrating vocation that I find myself putting off daily; fear of rejection, I'm sure.
I hope to read ten books before my Carrboro sublet ends. Here's my idea so far:
1) The English Patient...May 22 (rereading from freshman year)
2) The Waves...May 29 (revisit in order to try to write a third chapter of my thesis, sort of transitioning it from undergrad- to grad-style work)
3) One Hundred Years of Solitude...June 5
4) Coming Through Slaughter...June 12
5) Ulysses...June 26 (terrified; I'm giving myself two weeks)
6) Bell's Virginia Woolf...July 3 (I'll be reading this all through June if I can be disciplined)
7) A Passage to India...July 10
8) Orlando...July 17
9) Between the Acts...July 24
10) Roger Fry: A Biography...July 31
This is clearly Woolf-laden. Hoping I don't get sick of her. But 18 months in I'm not so that bodes well.
The order is completely random. And the selections. I could probably pick a more doable and varied menu but I want to have it planned now. So here it is!

Vampire Weekend's "Giving Up the Gun" is taking over my life in a fantastic, sunshiny way.

Books and Plays of Note, 2009

I miss that lamp. I left it in the lobby of my New York dorm when I moved away. Will Guzzardi and I raced to pack my too-many boxes into his hatchback to get back nine hours to North Carolina and drove off without it. Bye bye, lamp.

This is the dreadfully and embarrassingly short list of works that I read carefully in 2009. I would like to have read more, but I spent a lot of time reading for school, either for my Modernism and drama history courses in the fall or primary and secondary research for my honors thesis—the novels, letters, and diaries of Virginia Woolf and Woolf criticism and then information about synesthesia, color, and the Bloomsbury group (approximately respectively). I like to keep track of this kind of thing because some of the authors and people that I like did or do the same. I would like to remember what I read and when; it encourages me to develop as a reader. Hopefully my list will be twice as long in 2009 (though now, as of May, it’s even shorter).

Chaucer, The Love Visions†

Jose Saramago, Blindness

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita*

Franz Kafka, The Trial†

Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird*

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy

Naomi Wallace, One Flea Spare

Patrick Süskind, Perfume*

Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths

Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury*†

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Luigi Pirandello, Henry IV

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Virginia Woolf, The Years

Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own*†

Virginia Woolf, The Waves*

Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

David Kessler, The End of Overeating

Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

Sophocles, Philoctetes

Aeschylus, The Oresteia*

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice†

Donald Barthelme, Snow White

*Indicates something I really enjoyed or something that was deeply affective or significant for me. These are things I might like to talk to you about. Important ones. I could probably say this for all of them, but I’ve tried to only pick a few.

†Indicates a conscious or intelligent rereading for pleasure or a deep analysis for school, possibly of something I read in high school, or something I had previously flown through for a paper.

Oh Glory

Hark! Indulgence. Happy graduation feet are in the future. But I gotta finish writing about some ghosts and merchants first.

Pinksplosion

I painted my room red last summer. This is one of my favorite videos I've ever taken. I like it for its simplicity, ridiculousness, and color.

Fruits of Elective Classes

My most recent painting. Acrylic and loose pigment on canvas, 36"x48"!

Also Worth Remembering

Blast from the Past

"Goin' a Buffalo" credits from Jim Haverkamp on Vimeo.

They Say

Oh, New York:
When am I going to go to you?
Who will I live with?
Will anyone let me be in their play?
(today I was told "sexy and scary" and "regal to a fault")

Will anyone pay me to work in their office?
Will you make me suffer?
Will you bring me joy?
Are you the right place for me to grow up?