ranting, with mini-culture snacks

Here we are, two weeks later. I haven’t really been updating because my life seems very dull and dim for the moment. This time is making me realize how much of my energy and personality is contingent on the company I keep. My friends really give me the energy and the entertainment and the information that makes up a lot of how I perceive my identity.

I can’t believe that four weeks from today, I will be leaving for Austin. I’m trying to keep that whole regime change in perspective for the moment. I feel like my entire life exists in the moments like this. I sacrifice my happiness in the present in the hopes that it will bring me to a happier future. But this inbetween time is by turns endless and warp-speedy. I can’t believe that I’ve been living at home for two months already, nor can I really wrap myself around the fact that I have four weeks of this un-lifestyle still ahead of me. Obviously a narrow stretch of time, but each day seems like another problem and another struggle.

I dunno. I was thrilled to get a visit from my friend Lydia yesterday, and she left a wake of her spark for life in my non-sparkly world, so I’m glad I have that at least. I can’t help but try and look through someone else’s eyes whenever I get the fleeting privelege of being around friends. Do they still see me as the person I was, the dynamo and adventurer and charmer and thinker and creativist....or do they see the empty shell I feel more and more like I resemble?

Part of this shell thing is my own doing, clearly. I am pulling away from a lot of people and spending most of my time alone, in the house, if I’m not working. I think a lot fo that has to do with the fear of having people see me as I see myself right now.

If this sounds deeply depressing, it may have something to do with the beginning of my mini-detox period, in which I will probably be spending the next week without weed. Which is fine, good and beneficial to my last-ditch dieting (I think it’s really important to look cute when moving to a new place). But it makes all this solitude a little more unbearable.

OK, onto lighter topics! Fuck!

I saw Serenity last night, for two reasons: my love of Joss Whedon and the hotness of Nathan Fillion, who plays the cap’n on this zany old west / sci-fi ship. Luckily, they threw in a gratuitous shirtless scene just for people like me. The movie, on the whole, was all right, nothing absurdly special, but still containing a smattering of Joss Whedon smarts here and there. I felt that the show that was its base, Firefly did a better job of straddling the fence that runs between science fiction and westerns, whereas the film was more on the sci-fi side, because we all know genre-bending ain’t what sends the ducats rolling in, it’s big explosions and battle scenes. Seeing this movie at a theater in Kalispell was seriously like being in a test audience, where everyone has a hearty chuckle at the parts that have been so designated and one has the feeling of being in the middle of a laughtrack. The one part I though was really funny was when the ‘tough dude’ says something like, “Let her back on the ship? My muscular buttocks!” Ultimately, while this film is okay, it begs the question of how the fuck Joss talked a studio into producing a movie from a series that was cancelled before the conclusion of its first season.

I bought an AMAZING CD on my last visit to Missoula - Calexico and Iron and Wine’s In the Reins. This is a beautiful combination of the painstaking sincerity of Sam Beam’s vocals with the instrumental complexity and imagination of Calexico. I can’t get enough of it. I was admittedly wary, because I feel like Iron and Wine lost a little direction with some of the more overt production in the EP Woman King, which definitely functions well enough as an album, but pales in comparison to the more scarcely-produced predecessors, The Creek Drank the Cradle (easily one of my fave albums right now) and Our Endless Numbered Days. I was a mite concerned because Endless was definitely more pop-friendly than Creek, then Woman King seemed the next step in that direction, combined with the fucking HIT that is ‘Such Great Heights’ (it was in an M&Ms commercial, mmkay?!). But the newest recording is well-paced, consistent and gorgeous. I’m commenting more specifically on the Iron and Wine aspect because I have a much better understanding of that work than of Calexico’s.

Other things: I’m trying to get ready for the realities of applying to grad school, even if I feel like the most critical part is missing right now: there is no way in hell that my manuscript is even close to being complete. The first step, obviously, is to pick one or two new stories and focus really intensely on them enough to have a confident working draft to turn into people I am begging for letters of recommendation. Which honestly is something I’m quite scared of. I have to assume that people are going to even remember who the fuck I am and why they thought I ever had talent in the first place. Then, assuming that they remember anything about me and my work, I need to show that I have grown as a person and as a writer through what I have written. Then, hope to the baby jesus that that’s enough to inspire an inspirational letter. Next trip to Missoula will include me very hopefully obtaining a GRE book and taking two weeks of study time before laying down a trusty $115 and hoping for the best.

In the tradition of hoping for the best and planning for the worst, I have already designated a backup plan. I am going to start preparing to apply to be an assistant in France again, with the mutual goals of landing in Strasbourg (at the well-worded behest of fellow eurotrashito Zach) with the hope of working at the IUFM, a French teacher training school, instead of a damn high school. It sounds like it would be much more fun, with substantially greater freedom of how I could run my class.

Um, apparently I have a lot on my mind.