avocados; the month of may

it’s may 2007. that month and year that would never come. that graduation date that was always so far away. i have so many feelings in so many places.

i defended my thesis monday, april 23rd. final words of wisdom from my advisor on a post-it note: “smile confidently and often. look serenely at your audience.” apparently i did that. taylor took pictures, though curiously, none of them are in focus. conclusion: i am smart and pretty and i know a lot of things. afterward, at dinner, i could only really stare into space– rather numb in the wake of the culmination and climax of a year’s worth of work, stress, and sacrificed sleep, sanity, health, life. nothing can really be said besides, “victory is mine!” i wrote a book, basically. you’ll be able to check it out of the university library.

in other news, as my victory raged unabated last week, a girl callously broke up with a boy. well, i’m sure many boys were callously broken up with, but specifically my friend peter. there’s a history there, of mutual affinity and bad timing. we’ve talked about how we should have dated two years ago, but neither of us said anything, and then i went to london and he met that other girl, the blonde callous one with no soft tissue on her body. i suppressed my then very basic crush and we spent the next year playing happily as friends, a natural trio: him, me, and third friend… definitely not her. even after he graduated, we stayed close, seeing each other when our busy and distant schedules allowed. but he called last week and i knew. i don’t even remember the words he used because all i could hear through the phone, like the sound of the ocean in a conch shell, was my feelings for him surging up to the surface, somehow stronger after their time beneath the rock under which i’d buried them.

last weekend we arranged to rally around him in rhode island and organize some fun. i skipped biology, he picked me up from school, and we gathered our friends on the drive to newport. it was a weekend of comfort and cuddling. he slept with his head in my lap for most of the drive. in the small apartment, he volunteered us to share the queen bed to ease the pressure of sleeping arrangements for five people. the whole three days is both a blur and a string of bright clear moments which mass together in my head to confuse me. that moment on the sofa, while we were watching mcguyver, i touched his shoulder and he settled back against me. he came down with a cold, which i resigned myself to catching, and i handed him ibuprofen and rubbed his back. standing on the sidewalk, he rested his head on my shoulder and wrapped his arms around me. refused to let me chip in for pizza, whiskey, bagels. the whole weekend we functioned like a pair. he stayed near me; he clearly wanted me near him.

this is the part where i get irrationally ahead of myself and start thinking in circles. what does all that mean? what do i do with the feelings i get from him? is it real or did he just need me there for comfort and stability? a warm body next to him or more than that? it makes my head spin, and i didn’t know it could go all the way around and back again. it seems cliché, but peter isn’t like the boys i’ve let myself get involved with before. he’s not a moron, for one thing. and i have this sense i can’t explain– that we’d be good together. that somehow pete and i are built for each other; we’d be healthy and real. i can’t be a rebound for him; it would hurt too much. i have to be patient and not push him into something he’s not ready for. which means this is going to take a while. and i’m leaving jersey after graduation, in roughly twenty days. which creates the added difficulty of getting him down to maryland or driving the three hours to jersey frequently enough that we can build something. and he might be against long-distance relationships, anyway. is this just another patch of bad timing?

…and this all just goes to show that under the right circumstances, i can totally bring the crazy train. good thing the weather’s nice. fin.

oh pretty girls, you’re too good for this

i have a lot of feelings about the state of things this past week. it seems i’ve slipped into one of those transitional periods without quite realizing it. there was no explosion or blast to signal the onset of change; suddenly things have just taken on the faint odor of chemical accelerant.

i turned in my final thesis draft on tuesday, a rather innocuous-seeming act. but approximately twenty-four hours later, all the emotions i’ve been incapable of having while living a life buried under the burning sands of stress… began coming back. i received an email from my advisor which said “Katie, your honors thesis–which I couldn’t resist reading quickly last night, for the delight–is a thing of beauty and a joy.” and then i realized the slightly-hysterical half-sob, half-laugh was coming from me, and that my heart rate was alarmingly high, a sure sign of the presence of emotions. however, wednesday was a return to basics, and in the kindergarden roller coaster of feelings- those with corresponding emoticons- happy 🙂 must inevitably be followed by sad 😦 . so the honors banquet marked some sort of breaking point and frankly, it was all i could do to get home before calling eric and having a meltdown about my thesis, graduation, the forthcoming job(s), etc. anyway, progress has been rapid. now, four days later, i’m capable of emotions spelled with more than five letters. it’s a whole new style of being.

friday was that certain holiday in which i can no longer participate, but which still fills me with a wild sort of springtime joy. i spent most of the day on a blanket in the sun, enjoying the scent of freshly planted ferns and basking in the ruckus of our campus’ environmental festival. i took a late-afternoon nap to absent myself from that other, more… brownie-based aspect of the celebrations. when i rejoined the partiers, they were completely burnt. i visited for a while and was hugged by all the soft-brained hippies.

saturday i turned twenty-two. i woke up to a birthday phone call from the brother and a number of text messages. in the absense of a pre-planned celebration, given our thesis madness and distraction, i decided to treat myself to birthday presents at the mall. i’m a consumer whore, remember. i bought large faux-pearl earrings, pin-striped pants, a cute pink/red skirt, and black suede boots. and had a lovely drive with the windows down.

campus was a lovely noisy mess last night. i wore the black suede boots with black tights, black and white tweed shorts, a black shirt, and a loooong string of pearls. a little overdressed, but as georgia said in response to my concerns, “well, you are, but you’re kate. you’re awesome.”

after plowing through several beers, we managed to be the second group in line for the a cappella show, since, like i’ve said, our school does a cappella like most other schools do football. we spread out blankets in front of the stage and subtly sipped from plastic bottles filled with amber contraband. we made fun of the visiting girls’ group, like you do: “oh my god, her dress. i can see her vag!” afterward, we adjourned to the pub, wherein our friend’s cover band was playing. we spent most of the night slipping back and forth between the a cappella party, which was hot and gross and filled with freshman, and the rock show at the pub, which was also hot, also gross, but where there was at least air to breathe. the floor was sticky with spilled beer and the band shouted about my birthday, which apparently i share with the drunk boy who stood further back by the door. more hugs.

and now today, which i was supposed to spend preparing for my thesis defense and bio test, but obviously didn’t. after my procrastination shower, my friend peter called. let me just say, i am desperately tired of offers for sex that i so clearly can’t accept. it’s like an epidemic lately. my guy friends hit hard times and decide that we should have random meaningless sex. i went through that madness with eric. and now peter’s suddenly single and miserable. seriously, if he had just come to visit for graduation, like we’d planned, and one thing led to another, that would have been fine. i’m a bad person; i’ve been waiting for his girlfriend to dump him for over a year so that could happen. but he had to go and actually ask. men are such morons sometimes. they don’t know how often they thwart themselves. and how often they frustrate the hell out of me.

well, i have to go work on that to-do list… i couldn’t care less about my biology test, frankly. i’m understandably distracted by my thesis defense, which is tomorrow at 4pm. the only upside is that in less than twenty-four hours, it’ll be done, over, finished. and i’ll be drunk on $4 champagne.