And, there we were
asleep in each other’s arms —
recording the memories (with
a microcassette,
a vhs camcorder,
an hd flipcam,
a smartphone.)
— on tape.
Sometimes, I wonder if I even knew you.
Later, we decided to feed the reels to a fire,
to never speak of this again,
and to remember it all as we wish.
As we wish changes from day to day.
Day to day to day.
tuesday’s melancholy still
carried on your shoulders,
a coat draped over a chair.
Tonight, no one is singing
“we are lawrence brewer”
because it’s okay
for the State to kill a racist.
Let’s toast
to the man who
will die in a high-profile
execution, and drink
to forget the man who
died after a high-profile
crime.
i am awake
again
after
such a
familiar
dream.
he’s leaving.
new twist,
someone
familiar
is coming
over.
it’s awkward.
i don’t
love
him;
i don’t
love
anyone
but him.
new twist,
we are
staying
in that
house.
a fence separates us.
my dog is
alive
and his
leg
is broken.
no one notices.
i am awake
again
so i
am doing
some
laundry.
he’s sleeping next to me.
when people
have been
abandoned.
they
begin
to expect
abandonment.
it never comes.
it becomes
uncomfortable.
the anxiety,
the waiting.
i’m awake
in the morning
curled up
like a child.
disoriented.
We’re in the middle of the first really hot few days of the year. It’s 86 degrees and almost 9 p.m. This is my favorite kind of weather. Except today has not been my favorite kind of day.
After a long day of work that I mostly spent fretting because it looked like the problems with our car are problems with its head gasket (read: I had a panic attack over the lunch hour; update: it’s not the head gasket, it’s two fans that need to be replaced and will cost us a little over $100 to fix). I came home from work mildly satisfied because I suggested that we push our education committee meetings back to every six weeks and my committee decides it would be better to do it every two months. There sits Kyle who looks super hot and defeated. It turns out, our air conditioner isn’t kicking on.
He called a friend of ours — Greg, the guy that basically turned into our lead guy during the re-model. Greg came over and started troubleshooting the problem. After he called in a friend of his, they traced the problem to a break in the electrical line and fixed it really quickly. So it’s cooling down in here and that feels pretty good.
And I need to spend a little over $100 instead of getting a new head gasket for $1500 or a new car for .. you know .. more.
“Summer” in the school sense of the world is just around the corner, or I guess, for Kyle it’s already started. His teaching appointment ended the first of May and we found out this past week that they’re not going to be able to renew him for next year. We’re trying to look at that as a positive thing but it’s still a major bummer. We were hoping he’d get another one-year appointment at the same school to direct their debate and forensics team. I know he would have been a great fit and a great candidate for the job, but I guess it’s a little hard to compete against people with PhDs when the department looks at it as a way to add another tenure-track position to their department.
I think he’s doing better about it than I expected him to if this happened, and now we’re really back where we expected to be last August, except this time we’re not dealing with the financial strain of having just completed graduate school, or of having just moved almost 600 miles, and we’ve both been more gainfully employed for the last 9 months than ever in our life and we have a house with a mortgage payment smaller than any amount of rent we’ve ever paid and we even have some money in savings. So, all in all, it could be worse.
Kyle and I love to make fun of ourselves by quoting Will Ferrell in Old School, when he describes married life as being excited about a trip to Home Depot on Saturday. In typical fashion, today we had a totally mockable Saturday.
We hung a new ceiling fan which was kind of a disaster. The instructions that came with it were terrible. The fan could allegedly be mounted flush to the ceiling or with a dropbar, but the instructions for both ways were combined and there were about 9 steps that pertained to the dropbar installation and not the ceiling mount–including the instruction that described how to actually mount the thing. We tried to improvise without the instruction and either it’s incredibly complicated to do it or we had some part of it incredibly wrong. About an hour and a half and two bodies full of totally ruined muscles later, we gave up and installed it with the dropbar. That took about 20 or 30 minutes and then we finished a bunch of other day projects.
Plus, the Masters!
Now we’re relaxing and my upper thighs and left bicep are killing me. Even with Aleve. Maybe I should double the dose?
Work was super busy today. I’ve been out of the office March 23 for a workshop; March 24, 25 and 26 for a different workshop; March 31 and April 1 to make up for the first series of workshops; and April 4 and 5 for scavenger hunts with high school students — technically I was at work but completely out of my office. Needless to say, I have a significant amount of catch up work to do so of course I had no time to get anything done.
My schedule:
9 a.m. – arrive at work without tea because our office administrator is sick and i have to be exactly on time to let our front desk person in
9:15 a.m. – director arrives, chat
9:45 a.m. – out of the office in search of tea and the daily newspaper
10 a.m. – arrive at desk
10:10 a.m. – genealogy appointment (slightly unannounced)
noon – chamber of commerce meeting, didn’t serve me lunch
1 p.m. – let dog out, get lunch at subway
1:15 p.m. – reporter arrives for tv interview
1:18 p.m. – local guy shows up with awesome new story with some civil war history (unanounced)
1:20 p.m. – tv interview
1:25 p.m. – check on the scanning of the newspaper
1:30 p.m. – genealogy appointment returns from his lunch
3 p.m. – genealogy appoint leaves after awesome conversation
3:10 p.m. – guy arrives looking for cemetery plats (barely announced)
3:30 p.m. – finish responding to first email I opened today
Good thing I wore heels because I thought I’d only be standing during a tv interview and would spend the rest of the day comfortably behind my desk. I can’t really complain though because I really did have some fun and good conversations. It’s nice to feel busy even if it’s just on unexpected little projects.
