Or 15 or 20.  I’m sitting on a tacky teal couch in Ketner  - a 3 story building that housed the computer labs, and therefore, the center of my social life.  It’s certainly later than midnight, but probably not 6 a.m., yet.  I’ve been coming here for years, and the days blend together.  This sort of life is a glimpse into the future: unconventional hours of wakefulness; a skewed sense of time; mutual depression and other social/emotional maladies [undiagnosed] for a few of us; still a gleeful geekiness pervades.  We all know we’re smart, and our perception of ourselves are expressed in caricatures.  We talk with breathless enthusiasm and broad strokes that would make me blush in a few years (when, we talk, that is.  There’s a lot that goes unsaid, and I’m not sure if it’s stoicism or immaturity).  We’ve probably played a few hands of Spades,  with Fred well past the Line of Rationality, but who knows, he may have caught that elusive bid - it’s not important - the war stories are all that are important.

I’m tired and low - I’m running away from my family; the spectres of an unknown school;  Some of the others have spent time in school, and are here for the revelry; maybe the others are from the outside, looking in.  I’m addicted to something, probably a mix of a few things.  I look at things in terms of stats and points, and, at the very least, I have some friends.

“Livin’ life without fear.  Puttin’ 5 karats in my baby girl’s ear.” - Notorious B.I.G., “Juicy”.

Or was it the other way around?  I always get those two confused. Was Biggie at Yalta?  I’m pretty sure F.D.R. was sippin’ Champagne when he was “thirst-ay”…

Surgeons? Endocrinologists? Cardiologists? Neurologists?

Chefs? Skateboarders? Junkies? Cyclists?

Agoraphobes?

Nuggets.
Swedish Tastemakers, looking inwards, and referencing themselves.
An epoch of MGMT; the idea that writers should be more judicious with the terms ‘epoch’, ‘era’, and ‘eon’.
The almost-sepia, often kaleidoscopic edges of Lomo photographs.
Rick McCrank and John Rattray.
Tailblocks, Pivot-Fakies, and Nosepicks.
Sincerely enjoying African drumming when you hear it, then completely forgetting about it, until the next time you hear it.

Drawing in my grandmother’s studio, sucking on a coffee cordial, listening to classical on NPR, aged 7.

Sharing headphones with a twenty two year old mailman from Bath, taking a bus from Bilbao to San Sebastian.

(Later, climbing over the groynes in San Sebastien like children.)

In the arms of someone who loves me.

In my mother’s kitchen, cooking pasta and squash for my friends.  (The squash was a hit.)

Wading in lakes in the Yukon.

My memory has never been the best.  Faces, names, situations, all escape me with time.  Numbers and trivia survive a little better.  When I do look back on the past, certain events act as road markers,  making a clearer path.  It’s the changes that stand out. I’ve been back in New York about 2 and a half years now (I started at Tabla in August ‘06…) and the days run together in a blur.  I have a schedule that I follow - I know where and when I must be, snapping around as if moored by a rubber band.  I don’t make it to class as often as I should, for this reason - I can’t exactly skip a day of work. I’m on the cusp again.  I need to change.   Change jobs?  Change habits?  I need a new road sign with which to punctuate 2008, and make this era memorable. Most reading this know of my aspirations to open a wine bar, and some know how close it is.  Very close, and paradoxically, far.  Is this going to be the stratifying agent of change (with my apologies to Barack)?  Yes, IF, it furthers my real goals, whatever those might be.