since that magic day

Don’t you see baby, this is perfecto

we are the richest people that have ever lived!

Took a walk around their neighborhood. It’s covered with summer leaves and small pale people pouring down the sidewalks near the university, great red brick buildings with ivy and old windows. I went to the bookstore and moved around in there looking for wisdom. I’ve been looking for wisdom and purpose in old bookstores since I was a kid in Joliet, on a bicycle — the used bookstore near the music center, louis, and that short-lived asian good store. The are full of dust and books about how to care for your iguana, all the books of the ’70s, ’80s cramped up shoulder-to-shoulder. Anyhow, the bookstore didn’t hold much promise for me at all so I sidled out of there and east. I wanted to walk along the lake but the area was unfamiliar. I walked northwest to my two friends’ apartment and stood a while on my cell phone waiting for him to pick up so he could let me in. Too people got through the gate in front of me, but I was too far away to join their party.

My boss needs some crap papers and my car and the papers are at my boyfriend’s house that I can’t get into until him or his roommates get off work. 

I lost my allergy medicine somewhere in Edwardsville and now there is a war happening inside of my nose. I keep rubbing and itching it out and today I picked out dry flecks of blood. I’m in an apartment now full of cat dander and dust, May thickness.  

Sunday at my parent’s house. I fell asleep early last night, and woke up early, and did the stuff I wanted to do. My cat at home is looking good. 

My brother is promising me that playing Assassin’s Creed will “blow my mind.” Running through ancient Italian cities, “just seeing the Renaissance is beautiful.”

I went running down the path alongside the old canal this morning and everything was very green and cold. The geese and herons were very noticeably small, feathered lizard raptors. A slim blue heron gives me an eye that is only a small dark circle inside of gold. 

There was a big log in the slow water caught, blocking most of the slender canal. Bright green algae filled up the segment. It was as if the long line of factories lining the canal on the other side got into the veins of everything around them. 

Today I was paid to walk around one of those leafy-green subdivisons in upper-middle class parts of northeastern Illinois. It was me and this soft-spoken girl with dark hair made up of curls. We split up our surveys and walked too much, because we did not know the area well enough to organize our work efficiently. 

The people we made contact with (at their doorsteps, glass doors, long-legged crane flies, granite corners of buildings) were all friendly enough. Many people own funny little or big dogs. There were many no solicitors signs, very small and perfectly small, and the presence of those stickers meant we couldn’t ring or leave museum surveys on those doors. It was a shame, because I felt certain if I explained our study to them and made them realize I was not in the business of selling, they would participate. 

When our workday was over, I drove home for an hour and thirty minutes. Jefferson street, familiar discordance. The skin underneath my eyes is reddened by the sun over Cook County and my lower arms itch. 

Days of heaven, headache.

After work yesterday, I went south to Hyde Park and watched Days of Heaven in the theater there. It was very beautiful and sad, almost too sad. It was beautiful in a way because the badlands remind me of my own home-on-earth, the American grasslands. Although the grasslands were paved over to build my industrial world, I still get very sentimental about grass and wheat and open sky. The narrator was a little urchin girl - Linda - from Chicago, and her voice was my own. 

We were in Edwardsville, IL last weekend to see our friend graduate. Driving to Edwardsville from Chicago takes five something hours, so that was five something hours of corn and grass. The beauty of the American Midwest is that this place is so big and wide and flat. This used to be the prairie state, all tallgrass until the very south, where it turns into eastern forest.  Nowadays, it’s all cities and suburbs and corn to feed the european cattle that feed the cities and suburbs with red, fatty flesh. I can find grassland still, here. It’s taller than me. It’s soft. It waves very gently in the wind. It is under-appreciated. Viva el prado!

 Christina’s World, Andrew Wyeth. 1948. 

I love to go out to the places where loneliness doesn’t exist because there’s no-one but the individual and grass and sky as far as the earth goes. 

At work! People are mumbling.

I’m sitting at work in a white office trying to get ahold of all the summer projects/jobs I’m involved with. My little blue planner is not large enough to give me the effective space I need to jot down dates/times/places. Most - no, all - of the activities are in Chicago, a problem, as I do not really have a place to stay here, and moving around all of the time - trains, cars - makes me nervous. But it’ll be okay. 

Life is going well, though. I’m twenty years old with a car and a boyfriend. I have two jobs, both at very cool institutions. I also have two research projects with doctoral students, one studying ecological game/foraging theory and one exploring how habitat fragmentation of natural areas affects birds. I also have a seventh of weed sitting around. Everything that I really need!

If I had a place to stay, everything would be perfect, but that’s coming, soon. I am hoping to have friends to put on my dreamapt’s couches, but there is a severe shortage of real girls to take dérive with. Until then, I have consumption and bird studies to bury my head in.

Oh my god, it keeps flying around and hitting itself on walls and book shelves, and it is the saddest little black-capped chickadee ever. Gonna try to find someone willing to help. D:

there is a bird trapped in this library.