Friday, December 05, 2003

Empties

These days are void of content. My new house, too. My mind. Drained of thought and purpose, just going through the motions.

Moving slowly is at once exciting and frustrating, and nothing at all. I'm alone in a house filled only with my possessions, and few at that. But still, I don't want to be here--at work or at my old house--I want to be louging on the hard futon, watching DVDs on my 13-inch television. I want to re-read my travel guides and butcher Thai pronunciation out of the phrasebook. I want to move boxes of things, one carload at a time, and arrange them in my new house. I want to settle in before I have to leave.

Here I'm already settled in. Too settled, maybe. But soon I'll be unsettled all over again. I'm losing my job--my own fault, really, for wanting to take a vacation during the quarter. I can find another. No more sitting in the high un-ergonomic desk chair, feeling fizzled by fluorescent lights. No more immediate knowledge of nearly any question. No more watching people feed $20 bills into a machine that seldom accepts them.

It's transition time. Will it be as lovely as a sunset fading into the horizon, or something more dismal, gray, and harsh?

Do I still really have to go to school? I have three more days of classes (today, Monday, and Wednesday) and then no more until spring. That's brilliant. I have a paper to write on the relative journalistic ethics of McCarthyism, Watergate, and the Starr report. I have to take a test on autism, childhood schizophrenia, and eating disorders. That's the end of psychology, by the way.

Before Thanksgiving, we watched a film in ethics about the Mumia Abu Jamal case. I'd heard bits and pieces of it before, coming from Olympia where the Greeners are occasionally obsessed with it, but it was much more intriguing in the documentary. In psych, we watched a PBS docu about eating disorders I'd seen in another class. One of the subjects was filmed at various Seattle locations: you could pick them out, especially the Tully's on the corner of 45th and Brooklyn, that fishbowl window and blurred Neptune marquee prominently featured. I walk by it every day and someone in that same window usually looks at me funny for daring to look back at them.

I've discovered the Postal Service makes nice driving music and I love Mojave 3.

I need to do Christmas shopping: we've got mom's taken care of (sshhhh) and I have one thing for Kevin, but I need to do a little more. I need to get Margot's and Paul's token (he got a huge birthday present, so Christmas will be little). I need to learn who my Harem gift exchange person is and get them something nice. I think that's the extent of my Christmas necessities.

I can't believe I'm leaving in less than a month. I'm excited, but it's still unreal. I slipped on the phone with my grandma on Thanksgiving and told her about it; I didn't know, but everyone tells me that she'll worry incessantly. So I'm sorry if she calls my mom every day and pesters her.

Things will happen, sometime.

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