and now

I graduated from the University of Nebraska on May 3. It was my half birthday; exactly 27 and a half and I felt every year of it.

I don't know what to do with myself anymore. My life feels not- empty, but no longer compelled now that I don't have school to demand my attentions. I have no more milestones to overcome and I have no more deadlines to meet with gusto. In some ways I might flounder for a while. I can't quite concisely assess why the prospect of this is so disquieting, but I can't sleep any more anyways.

Something about a divine and innate need to make progress, to keep growing, to keep learning and to keep gaining. This is the worrisome and uncomfortable part.

Beets and peas are growing in the back yard so I guess things are ok.

And sometimes I get to touch boy's forearms and hands so I guess things are ok.

And I have a plane ticket and a strong heart that knows a lot of different weather so I get to hope that things are ok.

I go for much longer drives alone now than I ever did before. Never mind. I have always gone for long drives; the difference is now I can do them unrepentantly and without restraint.

We're going to have a baby and it's really really scary and a little sad, I think (maybe more on this later).

Nebraska is the most pretty when you can forget all of the sprawl and just see the clouds and dirt and grass.

I think I will always find a way to love tall grass.

This is all I can muster for now.

reassess, re-envision

It's POURING rain outside right now, pounding hard on my double panes. I can barely hear the trains sporadically cutting through the tumult of weather. The thunder is absolutely deafening and the lightning shatters the dark of my bedroom and makes it look a little bit scary. I wish you were here to buffer the scariness. Nebraska in May, I guess I should have anticipated as much.

I never knew what a thunderstorm was, really before moving here, and I doubt I will ever un-know this.

Today at church, the teacher asked us to list places that we thought were beautiful, and I said, "NEBRASKA." Everyone laughed, and my ears grew hot with shame because I was completely sincere in my assertion. Earnestness met with ridicule is hard to bear sometimes; I've never learned the lesson from that. I think she wanted me to say "the temple" or something, but "NEBRASKA" was a more fitting answer for me then, and maybe now, I'm not sure. I didn't want to cover it up, so I just allowed myself to feel hot and ashamed. I think I heard one quiet utterance of agreement, but it's okay. You should come visit (again): I'll show you (again).

Sister friend was here for a week last week, and her absence makes the lonesomeness even more lonesomey and missing-y. So I spent the night at someone's house and had a really REALLY awkward morning.

It's hard to be by myself. I feel floaty in a detached, not-that-good, sort-of-lost kind of way. I had come to believe that I was getting good at being alone.

I'm not.

I need to remember what I am doing here. And where would I be if not here? I need a better system to lay down roots. I never learned that, really.

I think I would feel less like I had to convince myself of things every day if there were more feeling present. Prospects (so many) have shifted in dramatic ways lately, and things are different. I need to reassess and re-envision where things are headed. A relative stranger with insider information recently commented that she had heard that I "had some major life decisions to make". She was right, but I was annoyed that she would offer such an intimate assessment of my life, and the means through witch she received such knowledge about me left me completely enraged/frustrated/vulnerable-feeling. I didn't really know what to say to her, and defaulted a mumbled, "I think I would like to get married". Would I like that? It would solve nothing...

Maybe it would solve some thing(s), but I would still be this person. I love this person. But this person could/should/can/will/must be more/better/bigger/rounder/wiser/kinder/patienter/knowinger than present. How do I keep getting myself stuck here?

...make progress. make progress. make progress. make progress...

Mom comes for a visit next week. I hope that I will have figured some things out {by} then. I want to figure out some things with her, some things about her, some things about just me, and I want her advice on how to make myself not-alone. She is a pro at not-alone. Is she also good at not-alonely?

Is that a thing I can do? Surely.

And I force my dad to girltalk with me about every little emotional whim. I consider it payback for something, I'm not sure what, but it feels gratifying somehow. It feels like he's got my back, even if it's just because someone else now knows how I feel. He has a lot of hope invested in me, that is sometimes shocking to hear voiced. It makes me wonder how he sees what he does, and it makes me hopeful that he is right in his fullness and seeingness. Or maybe it's a lack of seeingness that is making him so hopeful. But even still, he thinks that I'm going to be okay.

I think wind is lucky because it can go wherever it wants. It's probably never lonesome. I think I need to learn to make plans, for the first time in my life.

I'm sorry if I make too many words up, but English is an insufficient language on its own.

I do my best when I shouldn't be.

I like driving. I sometimes think I like it more than normal people should, but I don't believe in should any more. Should breeds guilt and insecurity, and I'm not into that business.
It stays light for longer here than anywhere I have lived, except in Alaska, where the sun licked the shore for at least 20 hours. Those were the longest days and the incongruously best nights I have ever had. But Prairie light is different, it's diffused over the country and seems softer and brighter at once, and for so much longer. Tonight, it was light until 8m at least, and the prettiest juxtaposition of complimentary colors. Blue. Orange. Pink. Cyan.
The light of the world.
And then it all melted.
Into a backyard with a stream running through the middle of it and a waving neighbor lady. Big groups of us swarmed there, joking about fish, and forgetting the lesson, and exposing our secrets to one another. We are so tender. I've been so honest lately.

I declined the first hug in over a year and a half tonight, but I made up for it with all that honesty.

..................................................................................

Before I left, I drove for a while. I parked behind this apartment building and watched the prairie wind push the grass around and defy the dissolved stillness of that diffused light. It seemed like every piece, every blade was animated and it jumped around with ferocity in all directions. It reminded me of those fake candle lights that flicker until their battery runs out.

(Imagine this as a gif, where every blade is animated in a different direction. Spring is alright in the middle.) 

Horses made noises in the field down the road near where that body was found.

Who was it?

Who was it?

I thought about that body while I watched the grass dancing. I was reminded of that scene in that book I loved first, where the girl sees the wretched old man with holey shoes, and can only think about his mother kissing those same feet as a baby boy. Who kissed the feet of that body?
It led me to thinking about my own baby-foot-kissing-mother. I came inside and looked at that dress that was sent to me: She was so tiny! So full! What was she like? I used to spend hours and hours thinking about my parents. I used to wonder if we would have been friends and how they probably looked and what they liked to eat when they were my age. It's probably normal kid stuff, but I haven't honestly been so fixed on the idea of them in years. How many years? I remember asking both of them what they loved about each other first: she was a great conversationalist, and he was sincere. His hands were cold, and her smile was killer.

I tried on her gloves and then I put on some perfume and thought more about that body. I turned on the A/C earlier this week and then forgot about it; the heat is desultory here I am learning.  So tonight, the vents puffed out soft tufts of faux-chill.
Diffusion of light, diffusion of force (is that what wind is?), diffusion of chemistry in my bedroom, diffusion of a corpse in the field.

In my mind, it all looks the way broccoli looks from the top of the "tree" but with more colors. They are pastel and dusty and taste like chalk. Call me morose, I guess.

And now my hair smells like the last time she hugged me before I left, minus the scent of the beach and tobacco.


*oh, and in 100% unrelated news,  this is something I did recently. The "co" of "co-curator Amber Mohr" is me.

navigator, first class

I like Lincoln about sunset time, on days when I get to go home and be alone. Does that sound as sad as I think it does? 
Nevertheless.
It's the time where I can like, breathe. I know I have  a lot ahead of me still to do, a lot of day left to live and the likelihood of copious amounts of reading left to do before the next day. But those are put on hold for me around sunset time. I like to look at the sky. It's so big here, and it frequently looks like this:

which is pretty okay, if you ask me

I guess the early night is sort of time for me to stop thinking so damn much and start to feel things. I put feeling things on hold a lot throughout the regular day: work, reading, class all require nothing but THINKING. Thinking is pretty nice, but there needs to be a balance. Balance.

So here's what I have been feeling this week. Since I am trying to work on presence, I am trying to focus really hard on not missing people and letting myself be here. With that in mind, I fill myself up with thinking about the reasons why I liked people to begin with; the things that made me miss people once I leave.
This week has been full of my dad. He and I have a very strange relationship. Mostly I just spend a lot of time admiringly perplexed by him and wondering who he is.
When I was a kid, the best adventures were ones where I could either go to the store, or a ride in the car with my dad. I just wanted him to take me somewhere so that I could look at things. I like looking at things a lot. On many of the drives, my pa would turn the navigational duties to me (assuredly to help me build my brains and confidence: #GoodParenting). When I became an angsty teen, he tried to help me feel powerful by declaring me, a fully refined Navigator, First Class.

He even made me a badge.

I loved it. I took so much pride in the fact that I could navigate anywhere, and really, I did have some reasonable navigational skillz. A large part of it was intuitive direction, the rest was map reading.

Today in (one of three bonkers philosophical/crazy difficult) seminar, we were talking about maps as images. I like to think that my map-reading abilities intersect somewhere with my abilities to understand paintings. We (I) decided that maps are actually just images/ paintings. Aaaaaaand, it stands to reason, that since I spent so much time looking at/deciphering them as a kid, it led me (at least in part) to my attempts to speak/think/understand art historically (hi steve.) in everything I speak/think/understand about today.

So there you have it.

Now I MUST get to work reading a 300 page book and pretending to have the capacity to respond to it intelligently by 4 tomorrow afternoon.

Round II

By way of update to this, I should now like to commemorate that this town often smells of aged beef jerkey, there are many strange sounds at night (such as street sweepers and owls and cackling women), often my house wiggles for the benefit of the thundering trains that pass through a block away, and I am suspicious of the cold because I am always.

To hell with this place/I want nothing more than to be in love.

there is an alarmingly increasing amount in the things I might enjoy forgetting.

I really enjoy forgetting:

There's a part in True Stories where David Byrne, continuous driver of an incredible convertible, is reflecting on his first interactions in the fictional town of Virgil Texas. It's one of the most poignant scenes for me, where he says, "Well. I really enjoy forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details: the way the sky looks, the color of white paper, the way people walk, doorknobs, everything. Then I get used to a place and I don't notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting, can I see the place again. As it really is."
(Sometimes, and in so many ways, that film is solid cinematic gold.)

This is my list of white paper about Lincoln, Nebraska.

-There is a constant buzz of  insect noise. People who are from here don't notice it anymore- I asked some. It is this loud buzz of a zillion high pitched voices chomping and celebrating and mating and living in the prairie. One person suggested cicadas. I don't even know what those are.

-One way streets. There are one way-ers in San Diego, but they aren't like these ones. These are the main thoroughfares through Lincoln, and they blow my mind. Every time. People drive fast on them ,and expect you to as well. They yell out their windows, over the heads of their babies if you aren't compliant.

-There are probably nine billion pounds of corn and soybeans growing around me. I get overwhelmed thinking about how monotonous and ecologically unsound it is to grow two things almost exclusively and so abundantly. The utter ocean of cornfield after soybean field after cornfield is mesmerizing at best.

-Nebraska is not a desert. I guess I got used to the desert of Utah, and forgot how green things can be. I guess I let myself slip into thinking that green things only grew in little hidden valleys, and never really considered the vast expanse of the central United States. It is so very verdant, so incredibly alive. It seems shameful to not know the livingness of this place.

-Lawns are very big in this place. I thought is was a falsehood that people really cared about their lawn this much, but it's real, and it's here. It makes for really beautiful looking neighborhoods.

-The sky is utterly expansive, totally engrossing, and engaging at ANY MOMENT in the day. I am beginning to think that I should have gone into meteorology with the amount of time I spend looking up. I live inside clouds sometimes. Sunrises. Sunsets. Mid- Day. Nighttime. All of it. IT is beautiful and huge, and carves itself onward, seemingly forever. I have never experienced a place where the sky was such a major element of things, it was always broken up by the mountains, or in competition with the ocean's largess.I hope I can focus. I hope I don't forget this one.

-People want to talk to me, but they don't really know how. I am trying to relearn the art of friend-making and talking. I forgot how to do that, I got comfortable and lazy in Provo with the immediacy and ease with which friendships were created there.

-Lincoln has a lot of tattoo shops. It follows, then, that there are a lot of tattoos. Mental jury is still out, but for the most part, they lean towards being overjoyed to see so much ink injected under the surface of the skin of my fellow Nebraskans. Beautiful.

-I have, with solemnity, replaced my preset radio stations. I found a replacement for KRCL, but with great trepidation and high expectations. I had to sort through A LOT of Evangelical Christian rock stations and classic rock channels to find it, but I can report a success nevertheless. The new station is... sub-par, but a college station, so I accept. They have a program where they play the music from movies. As in, all of the music. I have always thought someone should do that, so that program alone has me listening.

-The ward is a family more than any other I have ever experienced. I had a really wonderful FHE tonight, and I felt I made some in-roads to making friends. I am curious about the Elder's Quorum President. I think I have a baby crush, one of the variety that doesn't make any sense at all. That is all.


I cannot stop listening to this song (please click this link. The song is so good. I tried to embed it here, but failed miserably. Sorry. Just click. Just click.), because is it perfect for me. Add 800 miles to the part where she says "16 miles to the promised land", and you will understand. This is hard; I'm doing the best I can.

i have gone, i have seen, and i have returned.

And I will leave again.

 

I went to Lincoln, Nebraska last week for a visit. Despite having  a difficult week with my neckmeats, I had a rather lovely time. I met some great new friends, and was thoroughly impressed by this new city. I hope the Midwest is ready for this jelly, because I accepted the offer (tuition+health insurance+stipend+gainful employment) at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

It feels strange to really have a new goal in achievable sight, and to see the future looming so forcibly in front of me. (I will soon enough have a master's degree... who would have thought that would be the case?) I hope that I am ready and able to live up to the expectations I have placed upon me.

I hope most that I will figure out what I really really love before I am too committed. 

How do you know what you love?

Maybe I am scared of commitment?

In the meantime, the rest of April promises to be lovely. I am here until August. I hope to maximize my time in Provo, which is as much or more my home than anywhere else on earth at this time. Come visit me in Nebraska?