this is home, i guess.

Jess on August 20, 2008

at least the book i’m reading is funny,
with creatures from planets so unknown,
and irony galore, at least the book i’m
reading is funny, and at least i
sort of understand what it’s like to be
transplanted. and i can take joy in the fact
that i had warning, more than several minutes
that the demolition of home
which once meant topeka, kansas
doesn’t mean the demolition of my planet.
there is still lubbock, texas. at least the book
i’m reading is funny because i think i would grow
tired of the non-stop sexual victims unit drama
brought to me by dvr cable and a nice new tv.
at least the book i’m reading is funny,
because the people here are too charming
and not quite quirky enough, though i love
that the used bookstore man is excited to take
banana-nut muffins from a frequent customery
because they are the kind
with so many preservatives that they
will keep for months. and i am excited to live
in a city where i have not yet pillaged
my favorite authors at the used book stores
where two tom robbins books i have not yet read
wait on a shelf at a place where i like the owner
because i suppose when you are his age,
self-preservation may be a vitamin you eat
in the form of a muffin that never goes bad.
and at least the book i’m reading is funny, or
else i may have to explore the secret world
of the asian markets’ fish deep freezes.  i
cannot begin to explain the joy of cringing
as i open not one but four mystery freezers.
i expect to find cats or boars heads.  but instead,
just piles and piles and piles of frozen eels.
some of them wrapped in wax paper but one,
just staring up at me.  as though it’s an answer
to the question “what recipe requires cooked pork blood?”
the real answer is some sort of korean food. and at least,
the book i’m reading is funny.  because this city
is like a photograph in parts, and i’m
falling in love with that but i fall too easily in love
with cities.  like a toynbee tile excited for summer
when its back warms up and by fall it is wrapped in the mortar
of a new concrete jungle, and oh this is living!
until a new jackhammer uproots it to make room
for a new sprint center.  every city is changing, and i suppose
this one for the better because now
i live in it, now, this is home,
i guess.

Election day!

Jess on August 5, 2008

Election day is awesome, especially when the people you want to win do. I think Lynn Jenkins vs. Jim Ryun is still out but she’s in the lead and that’s what I care about. I think she’s my preference for the seat but at this point it could go either way. Maybe at the last minute I’ll stop being mad at Boyda and vote for her. Otherwise, Vic won which is good and that’s about it.

Election day is also awesome at work because there is pizza. I will miss working here when i’m gone.

We have it re-hashed

Jess on August 2, 2008

Moving out is going a little bit more quickly. I have my entire room basically packed, now I’m just cleaning it and actually throwing away the stuff in my drawers I decided I didn’t want (mostly trash anyway). Since Kyle and I finished the garage a few weeks ago, I just need to do the same in there, cleaning up and throwing things out and I have some other odds and ends to pack. Next is the major task of going through my book collection. I think my goal is to sort things in four piles:

1. books borrowed that should get returned which is a short stack.
2. books i’m going to sell which will mostly consist of books that are contemporary and not my absolute favorite that i’ve purchased and read and will not read again or feel the need to loan out. i’ll probably try to take these to lubbock with me and then liquidate them from there through some source or another, i’ve been thinking about bookmooch.com which would mean giving them away or maybe even half.com or trying to sell via normal used means like used bookstores, half.com and other places.
3. books i’m going to keep at my parent’s house which is a pretty large collection but mostly children’s books because i’d like to keep a lot of the one’s that i like and then some classics that i’ve already read.
4. books i’m going to take to lubbock and keep which is mostly contemporary books which i have purchased but not read and classics which have also not been read. and then of course my favorite authors books who i like to have around so i can loan them out. really, i should start loaning books out more

    My bachelorette party and bridal shower are next Saturday and I quit the cap-j next friday. Quitting the cap-j is leading to a period of terror as I have not been unemployed for a period greater than two weeks since I was just barely sixteen. So now I’m thinking that living in lubbock means I should look for a job, with or without going to grad school. I think I basically just have cold feet about going to grad school for something that wasn’t necessarily my first choice.

    The thing is, I think it is a great choice and a good option and after my internship which ended last week, I am really excited about the prospect of working in museums. I have just been a little hesitant due to some family issues in the last few weeks stemming from financial problems my cousin and his wife are having. Ack. Marriage is a scary institution that should not be entered lightly and I’m not sure that taking on so much debt for something I’m not positive I want is the best way to alleviate all that. Taking two years off and taking another shot at history might have me ending my life more fulfilled at whatever point that is, but then museum science offers so many wonderful possibilities as well. I chatted with Cara about all of this the other day and she had me more excited about museum science than I had been for the few days prior to the conversation so now I think i’m just going to investigate some part-time work in addition to grad school instead of full-time work in lieu of. But let’s be honest, I’m looking pretty heavily into both options and putting in some apps and places I think I would like to work.

    I’m very excited to get to Texas and have the wedding happen. Only 4 more weeks to the day! Eek!

    Changes everywhere

    Jess on July 24, 2008

    I’m completely overwhelmed by the moving process. From buying furniture, figuring out how to move the furniture, and getting a new vehicle for Kyle, it it just too much. Not to mention getting ready to start classes at a new school. At this point, the wedding is such a secondary cause of stress.

    The camera came yesterday. I really like a lot of its features. Now I’m just wishing I had some things to photograph. My plan is to go out and about around Topeka and take pictures of things I’ve been meaning to photograph but I don’t know when I’ll get around to doing that. I’m also making a decision about whether I want to stick with Flickr for photo posting or take advantage of the webspace that I have. I’m thinking I should probably only use flickr for minor things, and I’m probably going to install Gallery 2 for image management on cranewife. Hopefully this works out the way I want it to but if it seems too cumbersome to me, I’m ditching it. I wish flickr was like wordpress and I could host it remotely without paying 25 extra dollars a year for space. I guess that seeems whiny cos 25 isn’t really that much to go pro but I only pay 25 for all the space I have here so that’s quite a chunk of change when I don’t feel like I’m necessarily getting the full bang for my 25 dollars here. Though, I must say, I love wordpress much more off of wordpress.com, even if i understand why wordpress.com would want to limit your features so you can’t muss up their site.

    A picture lasts longer.

    Jess on July 22, 2008

    i’ve been going through a wicked photography phase.  I’m not sure why.  I think it has something to do with Stephen Shore.  I really like the subtlety of his photos.  It’s like each one is a record.  But it’s really just a record of what he saw in a street corner, a living room.  I guess when we were packing up his exhibit I saw a photo and something about it made me like photography much more.

    The downside of this phase is that I’m way less into painting than I used to be.  I had some time because I needed to get out of our cataloguing software so I wandered around the museum and was glad to find that I liked the real version of the Helen Frankenthaler piece we have in the museum better than I like the picture of it on the internet.

    I guess the point of this is that Kyle and I are getting a new camera that’s significantly better than the one we had before, but still not an SLR.  So that’s fine.  I know how I burn out on hobbies and I don’t want something so cumbersome that it’s not functional if I lose interest in it.  This camera is a great in-between.

    (Sun)burned.

    Jess on July 20, 2008

    I forgot to mention yesterday that I have a wretched, wretched sunburn from forgetting to lotion up at the pool. Agh. I also spent a lot of Wednesday getting stuff sorted around and packed for the trip to Lubbock so that I’ll be ready when we leave August 15. That meant my back was in the sun, priming it to get burnt like crazy on Thursday when I was at the pool. But oh well, I learned my lesson about sun screen and it looks like I’m just going to end with a nice tan, not peeling. So that would be good even if the tradeoff is not worth the sun exposure and skin damage.

    I guess that is all.

    Summer is proving to not be nearly the break I've needed

    Jess on July 19, 2008

    I’ve had somewhat of a crazy few weeks.  Kyle and I are in the midst of getting too many things sorted out and I basically just feel like I need a break.  First, we now have a couch and a tv which I don’t think I mentioned before.  It makes me super-excited to get moved down to Lubbock, probably even more so, because now I have an idea of how our apartment will look when we get there.  But mostly I’m dreading getting moved down to Lubbock because so far coordinating what kind of trailor we’re pulling and how we’re affording pulling it is sending me into fits of madness that make me doubt my ability to ever become a grown up.  Basically, my parents have had a crappy year.  After an unexpected hip surgery at the end of last year, my parents have had all the follow ups for that fall under their deductible, plus this wedding, and now all the draintiles around our house need to be replaced so our basement quits flooding.  That makes for an expensive time.  And that’s all really stressful for them.  Plus, Kyle and I are trying to orchestrate a move across two state lines (three or four for him, really) and by the time we get that done we’ll have to coast for a few weeks without really having a pay check.  Ugh.  I think everything is worked out now and we’re going to figure out how to come up with the rest of the money for the trailer if we can’t get any more help from my parents on it.  But while that situation was still up in the air, I’ve felt basically ignored by his parents and my parents alike.  I feel like people aren’t really treating me like an adult and I haven’t always felt like Kyle is on my side about it.  But I am hoping that that is all worked out now.

    Today, my brother ruptured his eardrum by jumping into the pool while he was working.  I’m hoping it will all be covered by worker’s comp (and it should be) but it was still quite the stress when I was woken up this morning by my mom in a tyrade trying to get ready to take him to the hospital while he drove himself home.  Ultimately, I woke up and put on jeans and took him to the hospital, where I promptly ran into a girl I knew from class while covered in cat fur in my previous-nights shirt without a bra on.  ugh.  So we got that all taken care of and Devon calmed down on the car ride there while I explained that I knew someone who had just ruptured their ear drum and devon seemed to have all of those symptoms.  Turns out I was right, and now the poor kid is laid out on painkillers waiting for his ear to stop aching.

    I’m also in the midst of helping square away the details of my bachelorette party (which I think is basically done) and figuring out if I am going to get to have a bridal shower.  Basically, the manager at T-Mobile is a pain and won’t let Tonya off work that day so we’d have to have it at like 10 a.m. which is not ideal and probably makes it not worth having.  I might look in to just inviting more people to the bachelorette party dinner and then going off to party by ourselves.  Sounds like the best solution to that problem right now, but either way, I’m just sort of mopey about all of those plans.

    On the bright side, I think I figured out where we’re going to get our flowers and it sounds like we’ll get a stellar deal on that.  I also have an official inspiration photo for our flowers (thanks to indiebride.com).  Kyle and I also figured out who our soloist is going to be (Mallory’s dad) and we’re clicking away at getting the programs complete and the invitations just need to be return addressed and then they are ready to go.  Thank goodness.

    P.S. I cannot believe I am at the stage of wedding planning where I send out invitations.  Gracious.

    We all need a little more room to live.

    Jess on July 7, 2008

    I’ve spent this weekend in Blue Springs with Kyle.  Mostly, we needed to get stuff done for the wedding.  IE, we had to finish printing our invitations which we are very close to being done with.  All we have to do is print the response cards and then we are done, done, done.  We had to delay it because I needed to buy more gold paint from paper-source to get going on that.  As long as I was ordering something over the internet, I figured I should probably order some extra bulbs and extra screens, so now i’m good to go for any future gocco projects.  hooray!  i’d really like to maybe try some screen printing projects that involve more complex design.  i really like some of the digital art i’ve created over the years and i bet i could create screen prints of that without too much difficulty.  i’ve always worked with layers, and that’s basically what gocco printing is.  just layers, and layers, and layers.  i should try it out soon.

    i’d also like to start taking photographs.  i’ve been lusting after some cameras that are somewhere between what I have now and an actual digital slr.  the thing is, i know that i wouldn’t take classes or at least, i know that i would not want to put the effort into having an actual slr until i have a good feeling about a regular camera that’s just nice.  i don’t want to think that i could see things a certain way and take photos a certain way and then get a camera and find out that i’m not that good at it.  so i think it’s probably worth just an investment in a really good “slr-like” camera, that’s the newegg classification.

    other than that, i’ve just been enjoying the weekend.  the fourth was good.  we had a bunch of people over and partied.  mostly, kyle stayed sober and i partied.  and duker was going to fight a cow but then got inebriated and did not fight the cow, which is too bad.  because i wanted to see him verbally berate a cow.  instead, he yelled about buck o’neill on the back deck for a while.  hopefully, the neighbors aren’t too upset.  luckily, this is the suburbs and everyone goes to sleep early even on the fourth.  even us.

    saturday, we slept in a bit and then printed the rest of the invitations and then kyle cleaned the house and we went out with shaw and phil and rachel to the power and light district.  it was nice and there were bright lights which were pretty. and i guess i get that it should be a hot-spot of kansas city.  especially if you’re from out of town.  but i’m telling you, it’s like a power suck, draining all of the idiots out of the places in kansas city where i would really want to go.  so that’s cool.  and the brewery and restaurants and whatever are fine.  but if i’m going to spend that kind of money on a night out, i’m going to dave and busters.  skee ball + trivia + alcohol.  delicious.

    i think the best thing about this weekend is that it really calmed a lot of my recent fears about us living together, i know it will be fine. but i think i felt a little bit better about the idea last summer.  mostly because all of the semi-living together that we do now is in the context of being guests in our parents houses and that’s just stressful.  so this weekend we had the chance to hang out and live our lives with some space outside of the room we share when we’re here.  i’m sure it will change, hopefully, but i don’t always feel incredibly comfortable just wandering around his house, esp. as i’m only here a few days a week.  i need a lot of room to live and sometimes i feel like i’m being too antisocial or like it’s weird if i just hang out downstairs while he sleeps.  and othertimes i feel incredibly awkward being forced to socialize because he’s still downstairs.  i’m not sure i can fully explain it, but basically, i’m just very, very ready for us to have our own space.  and this weekend confirmed, for me, that the only thing i want is a place to live with him.

    we watched definitely, maybe tonight.  it was pretty good.  as i said to a friend, “it wasn’t THAT predictable.” and that’s true.  i didn’t necessarily see the ending coming until twenty-five or so minutes before it got to the ending.  i also think it got me thinking.  mostly about some things that i’ll only share in a poem or to myself.  i guess i just think it’s weird that someone would marry someone who was not the great love of their life.  i mean, whatever, it’s a movie and a romantic comedy and whatever.  (spoiler alert?:) but for sure, if i thought there was anyone else who i would rather be with if they would just have me, i would not be marrying kyle. and i sort of think the movie made it seem like there was someone else he would have preferred to be with. it also got me thinking about the things that we keep so that we can keep just one piece of someone.  but that’s what the private entry or the poem will be about.  and it will be obvious that that is what it’s about, if i ever get around to writing it or thinking about it.

    i’m back at the internship grind tomorrow.  woo.  excitement-time.  the thing is, i think tomorrow i’m just doing sort of odd jobs and tying up some projects i worked on earlier in my internship.  and unplanned days aren’t really my favorite part.  but it’s not like two weeks ago we could really sit down and make a long plan of what i may or may not be doing today.  and i had last week off because everyone in my office was gone.

    I'm going to miss this

    Jess on July 1, 2008

    Kyle was in Topeka this weekend and on Sunday we had a barbecue with brandon, reanne, James, Lauren and David.  It was a lot of fun and the food was all very good.  ReAnne brought a pasta salad that was good as I have been craving Kidney beans but they are really too boring to eat or even find a basic purpose for in most of my daily eating… and then I made a German potato salad and a napa cabbage salad with ramen noodles and things in it, mom devilled some eggs and Kyle cooked turkey burgers and hamburgers plus a catfish filet for me.  It was fun getting to prepare a big meal all day which is one of my favorite things and to get to sit around with good friends and eat it.  I hope we can do another before the end of the summer because I really like getting together with people and I think my parents enjoyed it, too.

    While Kyle was in town we also picked out tuxedos for the wedding.  The one he decided on is lapelless and I think will look really good on all of the groomsmen.  Plus, I think lapelless tuxedos just look neat and pretty much always  have.  I’m also very glad to have that done.