Impending Doom (the 'G' word)

I am ready to graduate. I have loved Kenyon, and I will miss it, but somewhere, deep down, I am ready for the next adventure.

Now that it is spring in rural Ohio, and the birds chirp every morning and the dogwoods have burst into bloom, it is a bit harder to remember that I don't actually want to come back next year. That if, in August, I once again were enrolling in classes that would lock me in the library for entire days and I would once again be eating tacos every Tuesday and some sort of chicken dish every night for dinner, I would throw myself off a small cliff. But right now? Oh man right now I would stay here forever.

In an effort to write in this ol' weblog more and in an attempt to commemorate my fast fading college days, I am going to try over the next two weeks to pay homage to the things I love about this pretentious place.

1. Allstu. Kenyon provides us with an All-student (happily abbreviated to 'allstu') e-mail forum that is used for everything from sharing procrastination techniques and finding lost possessions to epic debates that inevitably blow up into the most offensive diatribes anyone has ever read. My relationship with allstu is Love/Hate; sophomore year I tried to start a conversation about gun control after Virginia Tech and it disintegrated into a snarky outcry about immigration reform. But still, for better or for worse, the allstu is a virtual town meeting, a place where we can make our opinions known about issues at Kenyon or out in that so-called "real world."

It's also pretty darn convenient - if next year when I'm walking home from a party late at night and almost step on a skunk, and proceed to throw my keys/cellphone/wallet at it to scare it away and then run away myself, who will send a helpful email the next morning that they found it on their way to Peirce for breakfast?

2. The fact that I would be walking home from wherever when I run into the skunk because everywhere I would ever need to go is less than a mile from my doorstep. Also the fact that there are skunks everywhere and they always come charging out of the woods at me when I'm talking on the phone outside of my apartment.

3. Being a college student. There's something magical that comes with being a college student. You're automatically excused from pretty much anything requiring responsibility. It's ok to never have any money and yet still not be looking for a job. It's ok to wear brightly colored leggings as pants with a flannel t-shirt and sunglasses from the 80's, and to intentionally look like you haven't showered in a few days. It's acceptable to stay up all night working on something you've known about all semester, and to stay awake by drinking essentially poison.

And man is it hip to be a college student. Somehow we know about things weeks before they happen, we see TV shows and movies the day before they air, we know that something's out before it was even in.

Soon it will be irresponsible if I don't have a job. Unprofessional to dress like a homeless person. And just plain stupid to stay up all night doing anything. And at Thanksgiving when everyone's talking about some Youtube video that was mentioned at the end of the evening news or that a co-worker forwarded to them I won't be able to roll my eyes and say, "C'mon, guys, that was sooo last week, the parody of it is waay funnier."

I probably won't even have seen it yet.

Instincts

Meet Obie.

I've had Obie since he was 4 weeks old, when my friends found him on the side of the road while they were canvassing for Obama. One of his eyes was completely swollen shut, and he could fit in the palm of your hand. Of my hand.

His favorite past times are sleeping on my keyboard while I'm trying to write a paper and watching the toilet flush. He learned how to open our bathroom door and loves to do it at the most inopportune times, like as soon as you get in the shower. He loves water, and has no problem being in the tub while the water's running and then jumping back into my bed, soaking wet.



He has a Beanie Baby elephant named Toot Toot that he carries around with him everywhere, and if you throw Toot Toot down the hallway Obie will come trotting back with the elephant swinging in his mouth, plop it down at your feet and look up at you expectantly. He loves to take the fish magnets off of our fridge and leave them around the apartment. I once found one in the bathroom sink; I'm pretty sure he was trying to return it to the sea.

He's had a hard time learning to be a cat. When I brought him home over winter break he met Sadie, our fat orange devil of a feline who hissed every time she saw him. Obie, who I had never heard hiss in his entire short life, started to hiss at everything, at random, and without reason. Even Toot Toot. He eventually grew out of it after a few weeks away from Sadie, but he still never meows, except to let out an awkward squeak when he's really upset.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I woke up this morning to a dead mouse in the middle of my floor. The initial surprise was that there are mice in my apartment, but then I had to wonder, where the heck did this cat who doesn't even know how to hiss and meow properly learn to hunt and kill a mouse? I certainly didn't teach him. Could it really be entirely instinct? It really makes you realize how much more adept our pets are than us. Obie is barely six months old and he can already hunt and kill his own meal. When I was six months old I gummed Melba Toast and had no control over even my bowel movements, let alone being able to feed myself.

At least I know the truth about the red laser pointer dot he chases all over the apartment...that idiot.

If this desk could speak..

It's been a busy week. My senior exercise, a 30 page paper about fisheries and how we're all doomed (yeah yeah blah blah) is due tomorrow. I finished it, but that doesn't really mean anything because, trick trick, I also have all the work I didn't do while I was working on that to finish.

I've been spending a lot of time (just a few 13 hour days, no big deal) in the library trying to get it all done, and I've seen the inside of a lot of these little "study cubicles." I went to a public high school in downtown Omaha, so I'm used to vandalism, especially of the "Crip," "Blood," and "I will kill you" variety. Kenyon, on the other hand, is prestigious. A "New Ivy." Completely full of themselves. I guess I always thought my days of reading aimless scribblings were behind me, until I sat down in this cubicle.

"Fuck Independents" is written on the wall to my left, but someone scribbled out "Fuck" and wrote "Go" instead. An arrow from that points to "Dead Rabbits Society" written in pencil, and "Against Gocial" added in pen (Gocial is a pretty unpopular Dean here on campus, think Umbridge from Harry Potter). Under all of this someone wrote "We have more fun and better sex," after which someone scribbled "False."

"Oh hello" is written at the top of the wall, with "Johannes Van Eyck Fuit Hic (was here)" written underneath. Near the surface of the desk, in small, neat handwriting, is "Finals hurt my soul."

On the right hand wall, a correspondence between strangers: "ALMOST DONE!!!" written in red, "Not me..." underneath that, followed by "me neither..." In faint, slanted writing further down the wall: "KILL ME!" followed, inexplicably, by a star.

I'm a doodler. I draw all over my notebooks during class. But, no matter how bad it gets, I never feel compelled to write on walls. Don't get me wrong, I love reading them, but what is it that makes people write them? Boredom? Desperation? A cry for attention?

On the shelf above me someone wrote "HEHEHE." Why? What was so funny?

Farming

Last week I cut up livestock organs for dog treats. There was a cow tongue, and the tastebuds felt like braille under my fingers. "Grass is good," it said, "but corn is better." That tongue had seen so many blades of grass, so many clumps of clover. It had called out to the rest of the herd, waited for a response. And now it sits in a dehydrator, waiting to be suitable enough for a dog to eat.

Today we decided the fates of sheep. We herded them through a series of gates into smaller and smaller pens. Eventually they crowded into a chute, where we checked the small ones for parasites and chose which ewes, marked with yellow ear tags, were big enough to breed. Lisa sprayed the big ones with blue spray paint to be mixed in with another herd in a few weeks. "You want to be sprayed," she told them when they jumped with the shock of blue on their faces. "Don't you know that?"

The orange ear tags are foster replacement lambs, and the black ones are castrated males, both groups just waiting to grow big enough. After de-worming they ran out of the chute into a different paddock, and immediately forgot the stress.

"They're not the same," Bruce and Lisa tell us. "They don't have life goals or aspirations. They breathe, they eat, they poop. They don't think about yesterday or tomorrow or whether or not they'll be here next spring, they just live."

In one pasture are all the old ewes, the ones past their lambing prime. There's one old ewe who gave them triplets, which isn't rare but usually ends with twins, but this one kept them all alive and strong. "She'll stay here when the rest of them go," Lisa said. "We figured after something like that, well she deserved it."

Today, tomorrow, the next day, that old ewe will probably breathe, eat, and poop. She will never know she did anything spectacular, and will probably never notice that her life ended up differently than anyone else's. She will never appreciate the opportunity they gave her, never use it to better her life. She'll just live.

Prompt: The first time Harry saw Susan...

The first time Harry saw Susan she was running out into the street after her dog, which Harry had just mauled with his car.
"Susan?" he said, getting out of the car. "Susan Jake, class of '89?"
Susan stared at him, incredulous. "Unless the next words out of your mouth are, 'Remember me? I'm the guy who left to go to vet school' I don't give a fuck how you know me, you might have just killed my dog!"
"Oh! Right." Harry crouched beside her, examining the terrier mix sprawled on the pavement. Its leg was bent at an awkward angle but its eyes were open, and it was breathing, so Harry passed it off as alright.
"So, really?" he said. "You don't remember me?"

Sophomore Ramblings

I'll probably give this up in a week, but I thought I'd give it a shot.

I found this in an old notebook from Sophomore year. I kinda liked it:

My Shakespeare professor wears no wedding ring. Her face is round and her hair is gray, pulled back everyday in the same low ponytail, parted to one side. Her large, round glasses make her always surprised, magnifying her make-up free eyes. When she smiles she looks afraid, and the show of emotion quickly falls from her face. She desperately uses her hands to make her points and emphasizes every few words by rising up on her toes. Her favorite word is "uh" and her voice shakes when she speaks, tapering off at the end of every sentence. She shows the most feeling when she reads the Bard aloud, and I wonder if she spent her younger days reciting lines in front of a mirror, her voice bouncing and echoing off the bathroom walls. I wonder if this is where she saw herself when she sat in a classrom just like this one, in this very building, with a breeze smelling of spring rustling the blinds and the late afternoon sun giving everything the perfect light. If she got bored in class and daydreamed, writing love letters she never found the courage to send. Maybe if she had sent them she would be far away from here, watching one of Shakespeare's plays performed at the Globe, making her daydreams real. Or maybe this is exactly where she dreamed she would be, speaking softly the words of Shakespeare as the sound of the church bell striking three reminds us there's only an hour left in class.