Think Like a Mediterranean

First there was the lovely Friday evening beer cafe with the group known as 'the usual suspects', followed by the most sublime Thai garlic eggplant chicken I think I've ever had.  Celebration #1.

Saturday was a splendid day spent outdoors, ending with an another lovely evening spent with some new kids in town going over the best of David Sedaris' audio works, sipping hot coffee and cognac around a big table in the low orange mood lights.  Celebration #2.

Sunday I spent about three or four hours in the strong hot sun with my neighbors' free-ranging chickens acting like housecats and keeping the weeds down.  Other than allowing myself to get much too dehydrated, it was pure Eden, glowing down into sunset and porch time til after 10.

Spring Term 2008 is over, put to bed, now a stack of course materials and textbooks in my living room, and the anxiously awaited grades online tomorrow.  No lingering regrets this time, I am glad to wrap this term up, so I can go back to focusing on why I'm back in school in the first place; to savor the whole experience, not hoping it's over as soon as possible.  Like being washed up on Trigonometry Island with just a box of damp matches.

Summer Term is one big Time Machine, Oregon history and two Ancient Greek Civilization classes to finish out my transfer student requirements.  I've seen the syllabus for one 400-level class and there's a 12 page research paper due with a pre-approval bibliography submission.  What have I done?  The Fall Term will finish off the Greeks and bring in the Egyptians, Sumerians and pre-Greek Macedonians.  What does any of this have to do with anthropology?

Well---not much really, but I needed some electives to fill out, and there weren't many anth. classes offered this summer, most of the department is going to be doing field work in the archaeology aspect of the field, and I needed to stick around to work and stay in school.  Maybe next year.

Needing to stay disciplined to take an online class should prove a challenge, I've never taken one before that wasn't some kind of corporate training of brief duration.  So this slides right in to the porch time, why not, better than caged in a classroom from 3:30 on every afternoon for a month.  Out on the porch, laptop and books and pretending my tomatoes are really growing and becoming my nectar and ambrosial lunch. 

Can't discuss tomatoes now, I wasn't planing on crying this early in the day.

Summer Begins (dress rehearsal)

And I'm in the front row, on my porch, doing the last weekend of Astronomy homework EVER, and trying to get some solar remedial treatment for my head and chest cold. Alas, it is breezy and in the low 60s, a tad chilly to be in this tanktop and shorts, but I just keep moving into the widening band of sun.

It feels like I've been somewhere, even to me, like Spring Term was some sort of season on Survivor, a show I don't even watch. And I'm still on the island, somehow, holding the soggy torch and looking very pitiful. Sort of how my tomato plants look right now, waiting for the heat and sun, limping along, in their fixed tomato plant way. When we were through with April, I was happy to be done with it and don't need a three week nostalgic rehash of it in June.

Almost 4pm and the wind is still chilly, tarnation! Perhaps I should put the books and notes away, to show the proper sunshine readiness, to call in the blazing rays.

My neighbors' raised bed gardens are doing so much better than ours, with their fresh black sifted organic soils from Portland Nursery, and more shelter from the wind than ours. The inches of new mulch look great still, the herbs and roses look splendid, the lavender and lamb's ears are purple as far as the lot line. Next weekend, when exams and work are done for the week, I will come out here and make up for all the lost time I spent studying and writing papers for Keanu.
Who I am not giving a copy of my paper to after all. What if I wind up being a TA in the department and he's got students reading my paper on a sensitive chapter of my life? Eeww.
It's flattering and all, but I'm already over that and experiencing the relief of being done with his class and all the folderal of the dynamics in there.

Besides, he revealed that his real full-time job is being a writer and editor for something or some place, and this is just his part time gig, jacking people around in the name of anthropology.

This only raised my hackles some more. That's why he was grading my syntax and not the substance of my anthropology work. Putz! But I've moved on. Really.

Sure, this is merely stalling, taking a break from the second half of the dreaded-A practice exam. My head feels like a skewered cork you found under your refrigerator from a previous tenant, the dry coughing has blown my eardrums back and forth too many times to be good. "All I wanna do is have some sun..."