  Christ what a long night! I slept for a few short hours and now I am at work, sort of propped up in my chair so I don't do a faceplant into the computer monitor. Stayed up all hours with my man last night, talked a lot about the past and revealed some things.
I love the night, but the sun came up and the birds started singing, and life must go on, as much as I would love to be in bed right now... Today is kind of abrasive to me. New Student Orientation. Lots of Texans in big shiny cars driving down the center of the road. Stopping. Pointing. Stopping...Driving the wrong way down one ways...I usually don't get irritated with people and their foolish ways, but today is an exception. I went across campus to pick up a video tape and I almost died three times. Saturday I went back home. My dad's a bachelor while my stepmom's at a conference. We talked about a lot of unusual things.
Our conversations usually have a pattern. We discuss my future as an academic, in which I am encouraged to do all sorts of things to bolster my resume. That leads to literature, and that leads to politics, and how abysmally stupid our current administration is, and how academia has become a business more than a learning environment. And so on. But this time, we talked about Cartesian dualism, and he told me that he'd been visited by my mother's departing spirit as she lay dying in a wing of St. Mary's Hospital in Manhattan, Kansas. And he said that he was a spiritual man, and that the closest thing to a creed he has is Whitman's "Leaves of Grass.
" It's funny, we never discussed these things, and I have often said that "Leaves..." is the written word, insofar as there is anything sacred to me. Here is a burning question: How in the hell I am going to pay for school this summer? Where is nine hundred dollars supposed to come from? Out of a goddamn hat? I am not eligible for loans until next semester, and my parents are broke. I am also broke, but even if I weren't, I have *never* been up nine hundred dollars! I hurt myself playing kickball yesterday.
I'm in a league with some folks I work with and some others I don't know. It's a lot of fun, albeit kind of silly. Our uniform is a nuclear accident green t-shirt and black shorts. We lose, but we scream and drink celebratory beers anyway. So I sauntered up to the plate and watched the ball roll toward me, took a running kick at it, then ripped something important. I feel like a cripple, but I am too embarrassed about the way I got the injury to make a deal out of it. But wow! It goddamn hurts! Also saw Harry Potter, which I loved better than the previous ones.
Much darker, but that's the tone of the book. Obviously I need to see it again. It's also the ten year anniversary for Pulp Fiction, which I watched last night. A classic. I picked up Passage by Connie Willis. Good summer reading, and it's about death, which I consider a merit. Why is death obsessing me these days? I'm not even feeling morbid, just uncharacteristically interested in what constitutes life and what happens afterwards. And of course the concept of the spirit, and is it a separate thing? I have spent the last year and a half rebounding from a Christian man and spitting out all the absurd things he tried to press down my throat.
I have been operating under a strictly biological view of the cosmos. But now I am wondering if perhaps biology extends into realms that I have given up on considering. I have been thinking also about the mimosa tree that used to grow behind the little shoebox of an apartment where I lived after the separation. How vivid pink the flowers were when spring first came, how the blooms showed through the four windows that I looked through evey morning, when I used to wake up with that gaping hole in my chest. How the hummingbirds used to congregate there, sucking on the nectar. What to make of all these strange echoes of memories and weird overtones? 
