El Aguacero

Rain is plummeting towards, pummeling-plashing-pounding my apartment building and probably also the rest of Tulsa. It has been too long, Precipitation.
This is positively the best sort of day to have the sort of day I'm having: an unexpected reprieve from mindless orientation activities, a day alone at the apartment to clean and bake and spend short moments scampering through puddles in order to 1. take out the overflowing (nearly) kitchen trash 2. roll up my car windows (poor upholstery!) 3. check the mail. Punctuated with lightning that barely registers on my dining room wall, held back by the incandescence of indoors, and the far-away snores of thunder; overlaid, of course, with every Chris rice album I have on iTunes (6, not counting the Christmas one).

And to look forward to (like dessert): After the banana muffins emerge sugar-topped and spicy from the oven I will splash to my car and go to purchase necessary things like: toilet paper, and cotton balls, and brown sugar, and butter, and then:
AND THEN--
I will go to Barnes & Noble and buy a new journal.

People give me journals somewhat frequently. At the moment I have three empty ones. But I can't use any of them. One I will never use because I think it is somewhere across the continent and another I would not use of everyday journaling--probably more for writing letters out of--and the third I've begun using for plots and stories and ideas that I am terrible about writing down and thus remembering.
So you see I need a new one. I really do.

Also: I am learning that grace is a posthumous process. it's monumental in my mind--

Oh, it's been one of those days
where you walk with me so close

El Amanecer

As far as I know (a short distance indeed) I am beginning my last first week of school.
TU gives free lunch during orientation week. Lasagna! Also, I discovered that I could leave right after lunch today. Leaving early!

I am excited about Life right now. The future, as pertains to me, inscrutable as ever, is today shiny and appealing. I don't know what's in it, but I know it will be Good.

I drank a 32 oz. QT drink quite quickly. now I have to get up and pee every fifteen minutes or so. Diet Coke!

The world, as I approach it, looks more and more different from the shadowy place my timid eyes once assumed it to be. Better; also, worse.

There was no mail today in the box. My kitchen smells of soup and whipped cream. I do not like my oven. (It does not work as it should.)

I am working on: Not fearing people, not believing in my own entitlement, and keeping my room neat. Based on my track records, all three have an even chance of failure. But! Grace, I find, has little-to-nothing to do with Track Records. They don't even speak to one another at parties.

Well, well, well.

My mouth tastes like foot.

I said something REALLY stupid today.
I'm still embarrassed.

(p.s. I may have begun writing what may become a novel last night. A children's novel. Maybe?)

I don't do embarrassed very well.

Last Hurrah?

I changed the layout here. I like this. We'll see how long it lasts...

I intended to be so productive this week-- I NEED to be so productive this week-- but three old friends are in town and I NEED to catch up with all of them, and the Perseid meteor shower is about to hit and I NEED to watch that at least a little, and-- and-- AND--

Enough excuses. What I must get done, I will get done. I'm apprehensive still about teaching this semester, but I know that it will work out. I'll do my best. I hope my students will do theirs. (and the copout in the back of my mind comfortingly murmurs that even if I don't, and they don't, this is it. my last year in school. my last hurrah.)

(That's actually not comforting at all.)

Anyway, I have about four different lists started: reading lists, lists of handouts I'll eventually make, lists of workshops I want to focus on, lists of exercises for class activities...now I just need to make all of these lists happen. Which I will. In between stargazing and friend-seeing and putting everything back in the cabinets of my apartment since the maintenance people have to spray for cockroaches. yuck.

Tomorrow I will get so much accomplished! Right?

It's Nice To Know

That I'm on the same page with those I love
that I'm not alone in uncertainty
that I'm needed.

I worked all day on Monsieur Syllabus. and Dented him. Tomorrow is my last (!) babysitting job of the summer (PRAISES) and tomorrow night I get to see one whom I love dearly, and whom I must lose ere long. Ere long being Saturday, when she goes off to law school. Life is just transitioning it up all over the place. Like a house afire!

I like to say that whenever I can. It doesn't often work. In fact it works far less often than I manage to use it. But that's not slowing me down.

Well, the summer's over. And to show for it I have the best tan I've probably ever had, ever; up-to-date rent payments, and a much better working knowledge of Tulsa's upper-middle-class suburban cookie-cutter neighborhoods. Also, a concrete experiential knowledge of the old axiom that one's own children are always less dreadful than a stranger's.
But I have loved these kids. These spoiled, weepy, neurotic, rude, lovable, corrupt, manipulative, capable, intelligent, challenging, wonderful children. And it's fitting that I end my time as a summer nanny with the kids I've seen most often this summer. The kids with whom I have spent many a tuesday relaxing at the country club pool while they have their swim lessons (my life is an ABC Family Channel original series waiting to happen. how depressing is that thought? [answer: quite]). The kids I've gotten to know best. They will forget about me: soon I will be a faceless, vague memory of that one summer babysitter before time eradicates me entirely. It's been intensely interesting being the fly on the wall of so many homes this summer, observing people who most often could not remember my name and wouldn't recognize me again. getting to play a part, however small, in all sorts of lives. I wonder who they will become; if the dreams they shared with me will come to pass as they see them now, what kind of grownups they'll morph into.
But I'm SO glad tomorrow's my last day.

It's nice to know.