I miss college.
Wow, I've been prolific lately. Anyway...
I'm not sure why, but lately I've really been missing college. I freely admit I'm one of those psychos who actually enjoy classes, but that isn't really why I miss it. Lately I've caught myself thinking about the things my friends and I used to do, like heading to the 24-hour Wal-mart at 2 in the morning since it was the only thing open at the time. And that was after I was already in bed and was woken up by pounding on my door and decided, eh, what the heck. I wasn't doing anything that couldn't wait.
I've also been thinking about the places we used to go. The little local restaurants we would visit, people-watching on St. George Street, visiting our favorite stores where the owners knew our names. The waiters at one of our favorite resaurants knew we would show up around happy hour sometimes for the half-price wings and free bread with this amazing garlic butter. And we always ordered cherry cokes which they had to hand-make. I learned to tie cherry stems into knots with my tounge there on Mardi Gras one year. We convinced the waitress to bring us a whole bowl of cherries, my friend explained the concept to me, and we happily sat there and practiced until I could do it.
Good times.
I miss St. Augustine in general. On the whole, it was and remains one of my favorite cities. It's small and you can walk to pretty much all the iimportant places downtown, and that's the part where the college is. I loved living in the historic hotel that made up the main building of the school, and sitting out on the lawns on a nice day with a book listening to and watching the world go buy is a great memory. I miss the architecture of the city, mostly Spanish, with all the coquina bricks and red tile roofs. As my graduation present from college, my parents got me two paintings of the city done by a local artist that hang over my TV. I like to look at them and remember what it felt like to sit at the fort by the river with a couple of good friends, talking about nothing and watching for the wink of the lighthouse from the beach a few miles away.
I miss the inside jokes. The shared phrases and looks and things that would set us all off. I sometimes forget and will pull one out, and it always makes me a little sad when I just get blank looks from everyone around me. I have new inside jokes now, but I miss the ones from college a little.
And I guess I miss my friends. I've never been one to have a large social life. In fact, I rarely have more than one or two close friends at any given point in my life, with maybe one or two more that I'm friends with and spend time with on a regular basis. College was no different in that respect, and I actually do still keep in touch with my two closest friends from that time. But it's not the same. I miss having someone knock on my door at 2am wanting to go wander around Wal-Mart for no good reason, especially since we were too broke to actually buy anything. I miss having a little white board outside my door where friends would leave me random messages to find, or alternately, leaving those random messages for them to find.
In the end it comes down to just being a little homesick I suppose. Even after I graduated, I got a job that was only a 20-minute drive away from St. Aug, so I was still there pretty often. Now it feels so far away. No one I know is there anymore, but it's the city I miss. I'm homesick for my family too, in Tampa, but this is a little different. I always moved around so much that no one city was every really home. Home has always been wherever I happen to be at the moment. But I guess St. Aug means more than I thought it did. It sucks to live so far away that I can't just get in the car and go visit.
But I choose to be here, and I don't regret it. Its mostly more of the same things I mentioned in the previous post, about Fall, and I'll get over it. I just thought I would share.
Summer is Ending
I was writing a comment over on
Steve's Blog about the changing of seasons and the coming cooler weather, and I realized something. One of the reasons I have found myself battling depression lately is this very change that all you northerners seem to be so excited about.
Everyone up here I am close to has lived most if not all of their lives in the northern states. I come in for my fair share of teasing and ribbing about being a bonafide, true Floridian in the sense that I was born and rasied there as opposed to moving there after retirement. And I don't mind, because most of it is true and rather funny. But there are times when I realize that being from a southern state, at times, is like being from another country and the natives speak a very different language.
For northerners, Fall seems to anticipated and enjoyed. I know most people don't like the heat of summer, but to me, the summer here was amazing. Other than a few of the hottest days, my AC was off and my windows were open for the bulk of the season. I start to get cold when the temperature drops below around 72, so with the highs hovering in the 80s most days, this was like heaven. It was a much-needed break from being cold and achy and being forced to spend the vast majority of my time indoors. But it was such a short time. Only a few short months, and now we are firmly heading back into the cold, and this year it seems worse than last year.
This year, I know what's coming, there isn't the thrill of experiencing something new. This year, I know to expect the strings of grey, wet days with no sun, the air that almost hurts to breathe sometimes because it is so cold, my fingers aching almost constantly, the absolute terror of being asked to drive my car with ice and snow on the ground... In short, I am dreading it and this break in the weather, this change of seasons only makes me want to cry and go back in time, beg for just a few more weeks of sunshine and warmth. I only get three, maybe four, short months of comfort and happiness before I am plunged directly back into the eight to nine month stretch that is life in the north. Even spring, which has always been my favorite season, was a traitor this year, giving me only a few hints of warmth before summer overtook it and ran right over the top of it.
So for those of you who keep asking me whats wrong, and why I'm so quiet and seem so sad lately, thats a big part of it. You can laugh if you want, I understand. In the meantime, I suppose I should just give in and go dig out the blankets I only put away a few weeks ago it seems. Several never even made it into storage since I never stopped using them. Hibernation is starting to look better and better every day.
I think I'm going to go for it.
Okay, November is once more
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and I think I am going to give it a shot this year. Last year I was just starting to ease back into writing fiction and was a bit intimidated by the 50,000-word goal, but this year I've done several pieces, including a joint one with Dee that is now over 120,000 words and still going (we're almost at the end though). My individual stuff is steadily getting longer, so this seems like a good challenge. Daunting, but interesting. Now I just have to decide what to write. I have several original character pieces floating around in my head, including the plot bunny I posted a while back, as well as some fanfic ideas I haven't gotten around to doing anything with yet. I'll probably go with an original, but I have a month to decide.
To keep me on track and (hopefully) somewhat accountable, I'll probably post updates here on progess once I start. We shall see. Is anyone else going to participate? It should be a lot of fun, and after its over, there will be a rough draft of a story that can be edited and refined and (gasp) possibly even finished. Wow.
Missing in Action
I'm torn. I own a copy of Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" that I've had since college. It has notes in the margins from where I used it in a writing class -- we were originally only going to study one story, but the whole class loved it so much, most of us went out and bought the book, and we ended up going through several more of the stories. I have been in the mood to re-read it lately, but at some point I loaned the book out.
Now it is missing.
I know I gave it to someone in my family, possibly my mother, but everyone I've asked claims they have no knowledge of it. Someone is lying because they want my notes. I know it. My dilemma is that I DO want to read it again, so do I re-buy the book? Give up on ever seeing my good friend again and lose all the interesting things (which was half the fun of re-reading it) we talked about in class, or do I hold out and ransack my parent's house when I go to visit them next time?
This isn't the first time I've had this happen either. I loaned my spiffy copy of "The Chronicles of Narnia" to my Aunt, an expensive book actually since it has all the books in the series in one volume, with the non-movies cover (I hate movie covers). I know she still has it, but do I give up on ever seeing it again and re-buy it, or do I hope that someday I'll see my book again?
This is why I hate loaning out books. I am a huge re-reader -- pretty much every book in my collection has been read through at least two or three times. I even stopped borrowing books from the library because I get irritated when I want to revisit something and I don't have it. But it is just so much worse when I did purchase the silly book, and I still can't look at it again. My family really doesn't understand this, as none of them ever re-read, so while I love them all dearly, I hate giving them books. I've already re-purchased quite a few books I loaned them and never saw again, but 'Things They Carried' is a special case. It almost hurts to lose that one because of my notes. I didn't keep notes in too many of my college texts -- that one and my Shakespeare omnibus are two of the few -- but I feel a special fondness for them, since those are the classes and subjects I really felt a connection with.
Ah well, I'll wait until Thanksgiving when I visit my parents to check I suppose. Am I the only one who gets possessive and clingy when it comes to books? Have I just confirmed my total geekiness for all those who doubted? I'm almost afraid to find out.
