I haven’t really had time to post in the past week or so because I’ve been traveling on and off, which has been nice. Went to Hershey, PA earlier this past weekend for an ACE/GOCC event…came back to work for two days, and then was off to Indiana on Tuesday afternoon. It feels like this entire week flew by and here I lay now at the edge of my bed–as I have been all day–soaking in some time to myself, binging on blueberries and pinot grigio and spinach dip and Gorgonzola chips, and watching trash TV on my laptop. It’s been too hot to run the past couple of days, though I will go tomorrow regardless of the heat and humidity because I really do miss it.

I love my job, but I am looking forward to the end of the production season so that I can be “jobless” and have nights like these all the time. Hell, I made what I would make in a day of proofing today, anyway–at home, freelancing–in about three hours. While drinking. I look forward to the freedom to go back to doing whatever while I still can…while it’s still summer and I’m not tied down by classes or tutoring. While I’m twenty one and not really tied down by anything. I want to keep traveling, eventually to the areas of the east coast I’ve been neglecting. More than anything, I want to find that light house and rocky beach on the coast of Maine that I’ve been dreaming of for years now but never quite been able to make it out to or even find on Google Maps. If I could make it there, I think, I’d be one happy girl. Give me a couple hours on that beach, I think, and I’d have written the answers to everything I’ve ever wondered about.

There aren’t any good coasters in Maine, that I know of. That’s probably why I haven’t been there yet. Maybe someday.

At any rate, here are some pictures from Hershey and the time in between and Indiana…

I’m so thankful that I went through with my goal of taking random photos this summer. I’ve done pretty well for the most part, anyway.

Last night, I came home from work, so grateful that it was Friday, and fell asleep before 8PM with every intention to take a short nap and then get to being productive. I think it was about 1:30 by the time I woke back up in full-fledged panic mode. Everything started to sink in. My time here is over halfway through and I have not accomplished even half of what I wanted to when I moved here. My roommate thinks that if I want to find a fall/winter sublet in the area, I’d better start looking now. I hate the idea of starting to look already, but I’ve got a feeling that she’s right. I would love to stay in this area of Ann Arbor; I love being able to go outside without fearing for my life and I love being just minutes away from downtown and in an area with plenty of places to walk and run. At the same time, though, I have to be realistic. Going back to Ypsilanti would probably be a lot cheaper–not to mention, a lot closer to campus. At the end of the day, I’m not too picky; I just want a place that’s comfortable and doesn’t have asshole roommates and will allow kitty cats.

But along with moving into a new sublet comes the realization that I’m going to have to go back to the old apartment to move the rest of my stuff out by the end of the summer. If Nate had things his way, I know I would have had everything out of there a long time ago, but it just hasn’t been feasible. And while I’m more than happy with letting him keep the majority of the furniture and whatnot, I still know that I’m going to spend a good several hours within the walls of that apartment sorting through my stuff and gathering up the things I know I can’t just leave: old journals, electronics, books, DVDs, pictures, scrapbooks, Arrow. And I’m completely dreading it. It feels like I’ve just swept everything under a rug for the past few months and it’s finally about time to face the mess I left.

In other news, I guess I should just be happy to have what I have. As always, things will work themselves out and, as always, things could be much worse. It’s important to look at everything in context, right? In the meantime, if I could just stop being stupid in other aspects of my life, I’d be good to go. I need to actually sit down and deal with the reality of things…looking at stuff in context is good, but being oblivious to issues that have been staring at me right in the face is not going to help me in the long term.

Oh, and I almost forgot this photo from the drive home on Thursday night:

Oh yeah, I also finally got this:

Finally, this:

“There are no precise rules about punctuation (Fowler lays out some general advice (as best he can under the complex circumstances of English prose (he points out, for example, that we possess only four stops (the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the period (the question mark and exclamation point are not, strictly speaking, stops; they are indicators of tone (oddly enough, the Greeks employed the semicolon for their question mark (it produces a strange sensation to read a Greek sentence which is a straightforward question: Why weepest thou; (instead of Why weepest thou? (and, of course, there are parentheses (which are surely a kind of punctuation making this whole matter much more complicated by having to count up the left-handed parentheses in order to be sure of closing with the right number (but if the parentheses were left out, with nothing to work with but the stops we would have considerably more flexibility in the deploying of layers of meaning than if we tried to separate all the clauses by physical barriers (and in the latter case, while we might have more precision and exactitude for our meaning, we would lose the essential flavor of language, which is its wonderful ambiguity)))))))))))).”

– Lewis Thomas, “Notes on Punctuation”