Tag Archives: summer

College’s Best-Kept Secret and How to Overcome It (I think)

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Here are some reasons that I haven’t written in a while:

1) The next “favorite” on my list was favorite people, and when one really comes down to it, how does one write that entry? Could get a bit touchy, you know?

2) I’ve been working. Mopping floors and filing papers—quite enviable.

3) I’ve been writing. A little story for the new Mr. and Mrs. Upper along with the beginnings of something much longer.

4) I’ve been watching Good Mythical Morning.

5) I’ve been reading Suri’s Burn Book.

6) I’ve been slacklining. (Excuses are wearing thin at this point…)

7) Mainly, I just haven’t.

Before college the inhabitants of every corner of the earth converge to give you conflicting and vehement advice, but there’s one thing no one ever tells you. Unless you’re one of those mission driven people who gets an internship or works at a camp (and if you are, that’s fine, I still love you) then here’s college’s best kept secret: SUMMERS ARE WEIRD.

It goes like this. You come home and you think “Oh! I’m home! It’s summer!” and then you do nice home things and you go to work and you come home at the end of the day and you think “Oh! I’m home… Where is everyone? Oh. It’s summer.”

And that’s when it hits: you thought summer was going to be like partying inside of instagram, but it’s really more like sitting in your messy room looking at everyone else’s instagram, which you’re pretty sure (but not positive) that they’re all inside of partying without you.

So here’s some suggestions for my fellow weird-summer enthusiasts (or not so enthusiasts):

1) Read your summer books aloud: to your friend, to your cousin, to your teddy bear, to yourself.

2) Look up all those quotes whose origin you’ve never actually known, for that satisfying feeling of I-once-was-wrong-but-now-I’m-right.

3) Dry your laundry on the clothesline.

4) Go for a run in the heat, come home and say, “Welp, I did THAT.”

5) Turn halfway down the stairs into your regular hang-out spot.

6) Paint a room alone. Write secret messages in large letters then cover them up and giggle.

7) Try on old clothes and sit around in them for an embarrassingly long time.

8) Drive. Be loud in the car in whatever way you can think of.

9) Go to the farmers’ market on week days to make the venders feel loved.

10) Make lists. Surprisingly easy and surprisingly fun.

Do this and you will be left with a sore throat, extraneous knowledge, nice smelling clothes, a bunch of lists and no pictures or gas. Summer well spent.

Summer

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I could tell you about this year, about my accomplishments and finishings, but I am tired. My dear sister graduated from college today, and in a few hours will be home for the summer, as I have been since Wednesday. And that is what I want to talk about: Summer.

Here is what I plan to do: clean my church every week, babysit a lot, go to a wedding, write a story or two, read some good books, wean myself off the internet, train for a 10k (God help me), throw an unbirthday party, write some letters, get vitamin D, cook a lot, finally write that review for the Quad, organize my books, spend time with people I love, and stay HOME.

Something else I plan to do is breathe a little life back into this blog. I’m going to start with what will probably be a five part series on those of my favorite things with which I think you ought to be acquainted. I’ll try to post at least once a week. They’re likely to be very list-y, so, you know, get excited.

I want to get together with lots of people this summer, and write lots of letters, so if either of those things sound appealing, please be in touch!

Happy Heart

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I missed a week. I’m sorry. In the meantime I have been thinking deeply about blog ideas. I thought about writing about going running, about heartsickness, about boldness and hypocrisy, about summer jobs, about Hopkins and Emerson, and about the letter V. So here’s that blog entry:

I’m bad at going running; heartsickness sucks; I am not bold, but I am often a hypocrite; I need a summer job; Hopkins and Emerson are marvelous to read; and the letter V is very passionate.

But the blog entry I’m going to actually write you today goes something like this:

I have a folder on my desktop called “Happy Heart” and it is full of other folders which are full of pictures.

My dad took this in July when he ought to have been packing up the car so he and Mom could leave Brookfield. I had just been a mechanic and gotten the belt back on the mower. Also, don’t you love the lake? I miss it.

I love this person.

This is my backyard–mostly my mom’s garden. It was my desktop for a while.

This is my French professor from last fall and my current Symbolic Logic professor. They’re married to each other, and I’m sure they have no idea I’m in possession of this picture.

This is cool.

These are some of my cousins and me on my grandpa’s eighty-sixth birthday. We ate pie and I like them. This was my desktop for a while too.

I love this person too.

This is my dad and my grammy. I like their faces.

We have Storytime tonight. In Heidi’s room. And it’s gonna be  Just. Like. This.

Perspective and Going Running

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I have spent the past week at Story Book Lodge up in the Iron Range of Minnesota. It’s a Bible camp my uncle directs which is operated entirely on the strength of donations and prayer. It is a wonderful, wonderful place which is very dear to many people who are very dear to me. And yet, I am (rather emphatically) not a camp person. Of course this was just a family camp, so to relieve my bad mood I could do things like drive down to the mall in Duluth with my cousins and let shopping get me even grumpier, or sit in the foyer outside the gym for an hour and a half, waiting for evening volleyball to finish and getting eaten by very large mosquitos. You know.

The fact is I have not been super-pleasant this week. My cousin Hannah put up with me quite well and made me laugh a lot besides.  But I kept having conversations with my parents about a rather tense issue, and also spent an inordinate amount of time dreading being back at my grandparents’ house by myself for another two weeks. It’s not that every sensible cell in my brain does not know that it’s really a wonderful blessing to be there, one which will only be available to me for a few more years, but more that I tend to get panicked about being so alone with myself all over again. A nasty part of me is pouting and saying, “But didn’t you already pay your dues? You shouldn’t have to do this.” Really, I should want to do this, but I don’t, and someone should knock me upside the head. Suck it up, Alice. Learn to mow the lawn, and be patient about seeing Harry Potter.

On Thursday night I stayed with Hannah while she housesat for friends and after she had fallen asleep I had a white night sitting in a stranger’s kitchen and crying while their dog alternately licked my feet and growled menacingly. I had a long careful think, and decided three things. First, I was going to beg my cousin Joe to come back to Grandma’s with me. Second, I was going to have all my hair chopped off into a super-short bob. And third, I was going to start going running regularly, preferably early in the morning. Brilliant. Life-changing. I called my mom and told her my plans, and she told me to go to sleep, it was two a.m.

When we got back to camp the next day, my mom told me that Joseph wasn’t going to be able to come, and I received dubious reactions to the bob idea. But the running idea stuck, which I was pleased about. Still am, actually. Feel free to laugh, but I want to do this, and I can be just as stubborn about wanting to do something as not wanting to. (At least, that’s the theory. I’ve never actually tested it.)

And then God brought something else. Perspective. I got on facebook for the first time in few days, and found out that my freshman RA, Alyssa, had just had an emergency liver transplant. I know very few of the details. Last time I saw her she was perfectly healthy, but as I write this she is in Dallas at the Baylor University Medical Center. She is able to blink and move her eyebrows to communicate, and soon they’ll take out the respiratory tube. While she recovers, inch by agonizing inch, I will be breathing clean lake breezes and pulling weeds. I really have no right to say anything but “Thank You.”

I love you, Lyss. If you can have major organs replaced at the drop of a hat, I can learn a little patience and trust, huh? God really is good.

Story

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It is nine-thirty on Monday evening, I have just finished reading the first two chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird to my cousin Charity, and I am wide awake, while she is fast asleep. I guess my southern drawl is soporific. Obviously she wasn’t very engaged in Harper Lee, but I’m so glad to have picked it up.

You see, I really want to write this summer—a real story—something with a climax, plot complications, and the sort of happy ending a reader can curl up and fall asleep in. The books I had been trying to make myself read, while worth my time, weren’t doing much for the creative juices. Bleak House, anyone? I cannot possibly write with Dickens on the brain. I can read with animation, I can hate Mrs. Jellyby with a holy passion, I can weep when Jenny’s baby dies, but when I sit down afterwards, I cannot think of a blasted thing to write. I do not have that scope. Instead, over the last couple of weeks I have drawn up the entire imaginary family tree of a clan called the Hardisons—sixty-one members and six generations worth. There are a good number of extra-marital affairs and shady business dealings involved, and I have the bad habit of marrying off third cousins to one another, but it has been great fun. I have worked out everyone’s birth and death date, and maiden name, all of which are neatly outlined in the 150 year timeline taped above my bed. And yet, there is no story screaming to be written. I have simply been joined by sixty-one vaguely interesting little writing companions. And we all lie there in bed late at night with little to say for ourselves.

In any case, while I could never be Dickens, there is a smidgen of hope for Alice as Harper Lee. I do not mean either that I grew up in place like Maycomb, Alabama in the thirties, which I didn’t, or that I could write something as wonderful and successful as To Kill a Mockingbird, which I couldn’t. I simply mean that Atticus Finch? I know him. I could reach out and shake his dry, warm hand, and honestly declare that I was pleased to meet him. The trick of writing characters, at least for me, is that I cannot write the people I actually know, but I must actually know the people I write. (If that makes any sense.)I must know them, at times, better than I know myself.  Yet, before I really know someone, I must see them doing—I must see them performing the action of being themselves. I know Atticus because I have seen him remove his glasses to shoot a mad dog, and remove his jacket to defend an innocent man. Which brings me back to where I begun. I must have happenings and doings; I must have story. I must have eucatastrophe and dyscatastrophe. I must have that which makes the ladies reach for their smelling salts and the gentlemen for their guns.

My little battalion of sixty-one, or perhaps soldiers from an entirely different quarter, must rise, sail onto the page, stake their claim and defend their territory. Go West, young man into the distant regions of the memory and the subconscious, drag the rivers, mine the gold, rake the muck, but return not empty handed! (Please. I really want to write a story.)

Grandmother’s House

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HI!

Please picture me wondering around an empty house turning off the radios my Grandpa has left on, spreading grass with a large, lethal pitchfork, trying on an extremely classy sixties dress and coat set from my Grandma’s closet, going to battle with a mulberry bush that lives in the middle of the prickliest roses, and discovering the most wonderful photographic evidence of some very early cousin bonding. Kindly remember that I have not yet visited Walmart, and there is still a cow carcass to be removed from the barn. Wish you were here.

Love, Alice

(That was a postcard for you)

Other highlights so far have included having a very business-like game of waving with Cheryl’s twin boys, finding that unless I have the number memorized I am far too slow for the dial telephone, making friends with a sixteen-year-old girl at the library who’s obsessed with anime, finding a really cool cigarette lighter in the yard, walking up to the cemetery on Memorial Day, then slinking away when real mourners came, and making the life-altering decision to give the dog a bath, so that when he gets friendly while I’m weeding I’ll still be able to breathe.

I’m rather lonely—my cousin Charity won’t be here for another week and a half—and am still adjusting to life mostly sans internet and phone reception. There is currently a rather startling red X over the wireless icon at the bottom of my screen, but tonight I’ll drive Grandpa to Moberly for his prison Bible study, sit in the YMCA, and use their Wi-Fi to post this. And I’ll probably watch the season finale of Modern Family, and it will be very therapeutic.

One more thing. I’m making dinner tomorrow night, and in a counterproductive act of utility I convinced my Grandma to give away a good deal of her cookbooks last week. She doesn’t use them—but I would. Ideas? Something simple that would remind me of home.