"Without music, life would be a mistake."

--Friedrich Nietzsche

She was seventeen years old when she put headphones on and let a song change her.

It happened that winter of her senior year of high school as she sat on the couch, unsuccessfully trying to knit a scarf. She manipulated the needles through dark blue yarn, but there were knots and holes and she was getting frustrated. She was never very crafty, but she was trying to learn. She stopped to take a break and decided to play a song from an album she hadn't listened to yet.



She wasn't someone who knew how to knit. She wasn't sure yet, didn't know exactly what kind of person she was, but as she sat there in the dark, just listening, she could finally hear the kind of person that she had always wanted to be.

--

Less than two weeks until I finally get to see my favorite band play live.

[Centerpiece on my parents' table, taken March 2012.]

I like to go to coffee shops by myself.

I like to order a drink, find a place, set my stuff up, and sit. Then I like to see how long I can go without connecting to the shop's wireless internet. I sip. Look around. Write a few real lines in a notebook. Read a few real pages in a book. Sip.

Sometimes I feel too connected. I get headaches from my computer. I sit in front of a screen for a few too many hours each day. I check my phone obsessively. I find myself turning the thing over every now and then so I can't see the green notification light, just to prove to myself that I don't need to know whether I have an email or not.

This weekend, I'm staying put for once in what feels like a very long time. I'm going to have lunch with friends, and write things down on paper, and sleep in on Sunday and make a big breakfast. And maybe see how long I can stay away from my computer.

Wishing you some of the same. See you Monday.

I have found myself feeling unsettled this week.

April came, and with it came the realization that the first draft of my thesis needs to be done and submitted by June first. That's two months. I have never had so much time to write a paper before, and so I have never before worked so slowly. I think I managed to forget what it's like to get my stuff together and just write, finishing something in a week at the most. So I feel overwhelmed--overwhelmed with ideas, overwhelmed with pages that still need to be written, overwhelmed with the idea of finally being done with school for the first time in my life. I'm so ready for that, and yet, I'm just not.

Also, our apartment is a mess. How does this happen? I think what happens is that I have a job, and Rob is in class all day, and then I'm supposed to come home and work on my paper, which I just told you I'm not really working on too much, but I'm certainly thinking about working on it, and that's exhausting! So our home never stays well-organized for long.

I want to finish my paper + Master's program. I want to clean my apartment. I want to cook dinner and be productive and go to bed feeling like I accomplished something big. Really, I do. But there's something wrong. It's like writers block, but it's happening to everything. Life block. So I sit, overwhelmed with everything I need to do but am not actually doing.

I make to-do lists in expensive notebooks with nice pens, but I write things like "paint nails" and "clean your room" in the lines between "pay rent" and "follow up on interview." Maybe this is just what life looks like as a graduate student.

It reminds me of the way I sometimes feel about this particular point in my journey. I find myself teetering unsteadily in this rather awkward and sometimes uncomfortable liminality--at once so ready for "real life," so eager to be an adult, and yet, so unprepared, and still with so much work to do.

[View of the world from my parents' deck, taken March 2012. Text quoted below.]

"I wished for things to stay the same. I wished for stillness everywhere, but I opened up the rest of the bedroom windows and let the world in" (Megan Mayhew Bergman, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, page 59).

Here's to letting the world in and then doing something with it.