“on the morning when I woke up without you for the first time/I was cold so I put on a sweater and I turned up the heat
and the walls began to close in and I felt so sad and frightened that I practically ran from the living room out into the street
and the wind began to blow/and all the trees began to bend/and the world–in its cold way–started coming alive
and I stood there like a businessman waiting for a train/and I got ready for the future to arrive”

The Mountain Goats “Woke Up New” has been my mantra for about the past week or so. I had a hard time getting back to work and school and all the real world stuff after my trip to Vegas. The last five weeks or so of this semester are going to be hell, I know. As a result, I’ve rebelled. I’ve been reclaiming what’s mine, slowly but surely. Been making a real effort to make sure that I set a good chunk of each day aside to do things I want to do and limiting the time I spend on things I “have” to do. So far, I’ve been sort of successful, I guess.

Spent the weekend at my mom’s house because I can’t deal with being in Ypsi anymore, so I’m not looking forward to heading back in the morning. It’s been great catching up with my mom, Tom, and my grandma. Wish I had more time to do this more often. I love that my mom’s house is right next to a busy set of railroad tracks; the trains fly by every night and blare their horns and I can hear the wheels scraping at the rails like it’s all happening five feet away. I remember staying here for a month about this time last year and keeping the windows open every night just to hear the trains pass by. I didn’t care if they woke me up.

I wish it was warm enough to sleep with the windows open tonight.

Things are slowly but surely coming together for summer and for the next school year, but I can’t help wanting to look beyond that. I want to look beyond it so bad. But then I feel bad because I should be making the most of my years in college and all that, right? My former ENGL121 instructor (who I now work with in the Writing Center) asked me the other day, “So…you’ve only got another year here, huh? What do you want to do when you graduate? Or are you trying not to think about that just yet?”

I told her I didn’t know. That I’d love to get back into publishing, but that that’s not really what my Master’s degree is for. I felt dumb. What am I doing here? But then I started reading Alberto Cairo’s “The Functional Art” today and didn’t want to put it down. “Information architecture.” I’ve heard the term before, but it’s never really resonated with me as a possible career path until today. I wish I had discovered this book years ago (though I guess that’d be impossible, because it wasn’t published until 2013).

Still, I guess I don’t know with 100% certainty what I want to do career-wise once I’m finally “done” with school, but the good news is that I’m pretty damn sure what I want to do with just about every other aspect of my life once this time next year rolls around. And that’s exciting. Even more exciting? Six weeks until what will probably be the last “real” summer I get to enjoy. There’s so much I want to do and, as usual, I’ll make a list and be happy if I get to check off even half of it…

In the meantime, I’ve made a promise to myself (for the sake of my sanity) to drive to the west coast of Michigan on the first super nice day of spring and spend the day sitting at a lighthouse. That day can come any time now.