Our house, in the middle of our street

We've all been here for around three weeks now, and I haven't been around here for just as long.  Exciting, busy things are making me run around and compile long lists.  So this is it, for now.

It's family beaches that I desire

I realized all too late that my new planner starts with August while my old planner ends with June, which makes July 2010 the Lost Month.  One month of can't stand work, one month of going to the mall for hot dogs on sticks and Orange Juliuses and shoelaces and awful video games, one month of falling asleep without brushing our teeth and stale mouths in the morning, one month of unofficial fireworks show flying in the face of safety, one month on the beach one easy bike ride from the new house and legs reaccustomed to biking up hills, one month of near drizzling gray outsides hopefully breaking cracking open with sunlight pouring into the front room, one month of packing this little room up tonight because tomorrow we move into the most beautiful house in the world.

Projecting, one month of hopefully visitors in what I assume is an extra bed, one month reunited with the crazy boys that I will be living with, one month of haircuts once scissors are unearthed from the back of the garage, one month of soccer in the backyard and naps in the tree fort, one month of hot baths and no more lukewarm showers, one month of cooking and eating and laughing and loving, one month of figuring out how to get myself places like feeling so grown up suddenly, one month figuring out the ins and outs of homeleasership.

In deep, far beneath

I always assumed that the summer lull was brought on by temperatures in the hundreds where even breathing feels unnaturally sticky hot, not wanting to do anything for fear of drowning in even more excess sweat, but those don't-wanna-leave-my-bed summer mornings persist in the cool, gray of Santa Cruz.  Our current room is small and uninspiring, and I do not leave it entirely as often as I would like because going outside would mean bundling up and bundling up would mean foraging through the garage for my winter clothes, and I do not leave my bed until a few more minutes past the alarm in order to psyche myself up for the quickly diminishing heat of the tepid shower.  If it were at all hot, I would be motivated to get my bicycle down from the bows of the garage and get myself down to the beach, but it's not hot at all.  Bundled in a down comforter, I must reassess my assumptions.  And, happily, I must succumb to the warm laziness of under the covers--at least for one more week until my whole closet can reassemble in the new and gigantic closet of the Dream House, and I will be close enough to the beach where I won't be as disappointed if freezing water and fragile nerves are at war.

Two and a half weeks in limbo

Typing from a tiny temporary sublet while we settle back into life in Santa Cruz, salads and tacos and consignment stores in this foggy not-quite-summer, happy to figure my way up to campus three days a week before we move into the Dream House on July seventh.  Printing out resumes and in my best outfit, one bottle of nail polish remover until we troll downtown for my second job to supplement ten hours a week before a bout of cinematic regression in 3D; everything feels a little not real, like waiting anticipating until our actual life starts.

One week later...

Feels like I've been out of commission since the quarter started, and I'm still not fully recovered from the million bugs in my tummy and million swirling thoughts (constantly) in my head, and day after day further buried under the pile of clothes and school books that grows when productivity gives way to illness.

Last weekend, in a Sunday afternoon reprieve from the sourest stomach, Pup and I squeezed in a bike ride and visit to the Santa Cruz Fungus Fair, and for the past serendipitously rainy and cool week we've been hyper-aware of the mushrooms growing out of every crevice of our wooded campus, and identifying with our best guesses.

But really, we've stuck around our apartment wrapped in blankets and swallowing down scratchy throats and watching documentaries about drag queens, excursing only for class or work or for medicine or sudden insatiable cravings or when a social outing fallen through turns our warm apartment suddenly too stuffy.

There are many things that endear me to Santa Cruz; I was so happy to roam a small and musty room with hundreds of locals just as fungi-fascinated as me. But at the same time, Pup and I still struggle to find a place to root and grow, our own branching network underground connecting us to thousands of new and interesting individuals, to find beauty and life sprouting from the dead material of the forest floor.

Back in Santa Cruz

Speeding through downtown Los Angeles a few nights ago to swimming through low clouds for a quick five hours today--classes start tomorrow at eight in the morning and I'm back in the spirit, sitting before a stack of notebooks and screenshots of my schedule on my computer desktop. Give me a minute to settle in again, with three more science classes and some cold, dense fog to brave.

Going under

Today, diving into a three-in-a-row finals week with my lucky hat in tow, and once the busy-ness and tumult is over I will resurface.

Javelin + Lucky Dragons

Digital hibernation

I haven't been feeling too Internet-drawn lately, just doing the basic check email, check blogs, check my bank balance, and that's usually when I've checked out at work. Once I get home from a day of classes and world travels in scanning and staring at a computer screen, all I want to do is eat and finish homework and curl up until eight the next morning. But at least I have a camera:

Too much of a slump to type, suffice it to say doing well despite darkening days tinged with nostalgia. I've been missing a lot lately, and I guess my web-avoidance is an attempt to make a little more tolerable my "reminiscences of the day mixed with some memories from the past." I'm looking forward too some sort of return bumbling through this big world, dreaming of certain people and certain places and certain times in my life while acting out adolescently in the dark on the bridge and getting much too wibbly and excited by movies I watched when I was six.

Halloweenie

Winding down after a weekend of being wild, pumpkin patching and pumpkin carving and pumpkin seed roasting, free tacos and not-free Thai food, splicers and lots of Maxies but no monsters but nonetheless downtown in the most popular costume, long bus waits, big birthday cardigan-and-steak celebrations and lots of cheesecake, hurtling into another week of entropy.