Oh my. I guess I needed to have Memorial Day weekend be the transition into my new life. I walked up to the bank and then backwards to go see my mother get her hair done on Gaylord Street just a bit ago…and I stopped into my little coffee shop to get some coffee. I have been trying to be more observant as of late to the fliers going around circulating events, undulating under piles of paper, kind of like a beacon for me to pick them up. So last night’s classes are cool. And today I joined a writers group and organization that, BAM! has workshops starting this weekend that would be fantastic to attend if not for the small business UnJob Fair that is happening on Saturday. I really really need both, but it seems that my time is slowly being used and allocated for things I really need to be focusing on. A kind of routine that not having a Sunday through Saturday gig (that was my last job and full time school) would make possible. I really like it here so far. The weather is to die for, and the people I have run into have been really fun and sweet. I got a call from one of the dudes I met at the party I crashed the other night who I just saw had left a voicemail on my phone saying, “so, you really seemed like you wanted to talk the other night, I just wanted to lend you my ear and get to know someone new if you were down.” Perfectly nice and totally cool. F called too, telling me (oh, I laugh at this) that I could not FIRE him when I never picked my phone up. He must have forgotten my complete ignorance of technology these days. This is the girl who decided that knocking on the door of the party was a better gimmick than sauntering around waiting for an opportunity to meet anyone after all. But I love especially seeing that my language and witticisms have still outlasted my physical presence. The piggy also (the piggy is E) has been a major facet of regurgitation of my words and sayings. It’s like I left a permanent mark on those I left because I do have my sayings, my dances, my songs that will live on as happy memories to those I could call closer than family. And that is a mark that cannot be washed away by time or anything. It was always a special moment of pride when someone would relay one of my songs or sayings or wordisms (I make them up sometimes, if you hadn’t noticed) in front of me, introducing deannalanguage to anyone who would listen.

So as I was doing my laundry today I was downstairs and got hit with one of my paralyzing waves of deja-vu. I have cried over these instances before…the transition of memory and time as a kind of roadmap to meaning I am always trying to grasp, but it flies out of my hands almost as soon as the memory fades. I truly believe that my stories would be more prolific if I had the ability to hold onto these moments. They freak me out and have left me crying on the streets of New York before, unsure what to do and where to go. I had a moment like that in August of 2001, walking through the trade center site, when I saw the buildings falling down in my mind’s eye, getting knocked over by water and waves that nobody could escape from. I actually looked up and said aloud, there is no way these will stand forever. Anyways, this is the thing with the writer’s workshop and the Qi Gong and the mental control I am trying to find again. I figure if I can somehow capture the meaning and residue of my dreams that I can finally understand what I am supposed to be doing.

The deja-vu instance had me nervous of a stroke, and I felt a kind of popping fizz of metal in my head and eyes. And I ran upstairs and tried to wash it out of my memory, fixated on something to distract me from the fear that happens when that train goes rushing through my brain. I am not sure if anyone can understand what I mean, but I assume that the train is a warning that the clots are going to come and basically run my body and head over and leave me in a ragged heap of tears on the floor. It really is not pleasant in the least.

I am not even sure I am a writer in the classic sense. I can write, sure. But I read better, not that my words read better, but I can eat books up like nobody’s business, and I have decided to read every single one of the books sitting up on my shelf right now, which should take, oh, a month or two at my rate of absorption. My stories, my fiction and my non-fiction, I keep to myself and to the other students at Columbia who have read them. I do this as an exercise in actually writing, but aside from the poetry, none of that will really ever be here. Unless I get some other advice at my Unjob Fair this weekend.

Off to the mountains today! Oh, how I missed you guys. I haven’t been up that way since D took me to Evergreen out to dinner as an escape a few weeks back. And then Red Rocks has a movie tonight I am going to see with Babs and Joe. I have never been, ever, so this will be good.

I feel like those leaves that just finally opened up on all the trees here, those leaves which sit curled up waiting to bloom like petals, little green wrinkly burritos. I finally bloomed, and it only took two months. In NY only that would have been a joke. Here it’s actually impressive methinks.