Today is the day I plug Mindy in the blog. Mindy Mindy Mindy! Mindy is a frosher, only she’s not because the year is over, only she still IS because that’s who she is in my head. And yes, Mindy reads this and wanted to be name-checked like Emily and Strother and whoever else. Congratulations, Mindy: approximately five more people have now read your name.
What I really (still) want is for all my friends to get blogs, or Livejournals, or their own sites, or something. The presence of my crew on the interweb is disappointingly low. I want to check in on them and read about their love lives and be fascinated by the way they think, especially when I’m exiled to Richmond, but they stubbornly persist in their absence. Get blogs, all of you! I promise to link you if you do!
Oh, that means I should talk about Sara. Sara is a (former) frosher with a blog! You could all take a page from her cyber-book, other friends.
I’m still going through the sum of all my belongings, sorting and repacking things for the great exodus to Louisville, and yesterday I found three items of interest. The first is a piece of paper from last summer, on which is scrawled the following:
If I die, and somebody goes to a vanity press or something and has a posthumous collection of my work published, and it’s not called Destroy the Evidence, I shall be very angry and want an explanation.
And you know, it’s still true.
The second was the package of pictures I took in Brazil, all twelve of them. It’s very strange to me that it’s been four years since I was there. I slept on a mattress one inch thick in the same room as Tiago, the world’s biggest Goons and Hoses fan, and ate a lot of beans and rice and lost probably thirty pounds. I started watching Dawson’s Creek for the first time, and was surprised to find that I liked it, and pined for home and Erika too much.
I had an incredibly sweet host sister named Joana, who tried to reach out to me any way she could: we played Quake II together, and she introduced me to cocoa in condensed milk. I saw a giant Jesus and many, many streetside orange vendors. I went to Mass with my host grandmother, who spoke no English at all but who smiled and patted my hand the way my own grandmother would have. I took showers that froze me, burned me and gave me some nasty electric shocks.
Along with the blue acrylic painting I bought at an art fair (still one of my favorite possessions), those pictures are the only souvenirs I still have from Brazil. The Rio pin I used to have was lost with my first bucket hat, fall term of my first year at Centre; I think the futbol calendar Tiago gave me is packed away somewhere in the attic, probably for a long time. It was a very self-centered time for me, and I wish now that it had been otherwise. I should have learned some Portuguese, I should have thrown myself into life there instead of trying to live here in my head, and I should definitely have played less Pokemon.
No regrets, though. I Went There, and I Came Back.
The third thing will have to wait, probably for quite a while, as I want to make it a part of this site and I’m going to have to write some code to do it. Right now I have to lug bags of potato chips over to Emily R’s house for a pre-Chicago Trip meeting. My life is filled with travel.