April and I.

Oh, FINE: I need to get a job. I concede, I concede; I am not happy about it, but I will begin a serious search this week. I was so enjoying having more time for creativity, but it would appear that I am down to my last $200 of tax refunds, and will soon be flat broke. No more bumming around and trading used books and painting at whim for me--the rat race calls, loud and clear: it's time to get out there and perform my mad little tapdance for the Pied Piper once again.

At any rate, the past month of vacation has been, hands-down, the most blissful in my entire life--better than any summer vacation I had as a kid, and the only real break (longer than perhaps a week total) I've had since I started working every summer after school.
An commemorative (and admittedly self-absorbed) inventory of What I Did in April is in order, I think--yes. Ah, April, the times we had together.

In April, I read (at a leisurely pace for the first time in years) these books, which I'd never before read:
Life of Pi by Yann Martel,
The Aguero Sisters by Cristina Garcia,
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer,
Dubliners by James Joyce,
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi,
Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl, and
Orlando by Virginia Woolf.

I traveled through three states (Oregon, California, and Arizona) and saw a healthy chunk of the great American southwest; I camped in the cacti and the petroglyphs and the sequoias; I drove all the way up the California coast, listening to Andrew Bird with my Andrew-bird. And--as I've been planning for years and years--I finally recorded a travelogue and took tons of photos to document our road-tripping, roguish youthfulness and campsite bed-head.

I practiced karate at least three times (and often more) every week, learned three new katas, and am preparing for my next exam (at long last) after 9 months of absence from the dojo. (My friend John--also an English major at UO--practices with me every Monday in a massive, majestic, lofty ballroom that we found in a building on the U of O campus... going there, I feel like I'm in a museum or a castle in a much earlier time period. We train when nobody else is around; we found the one door that remains unlocked after hours.)

I finished a painting, got back into drawing, practiced sketching the undersides of hands, began developing a comic strip, created two stencils for urban artwork, and made a ridiculous scavenger hunt for Andy with a prize at the end (see earlier post).

I slept until ten almost every day, except on Saturdays, when I awoke regularly at the asscrack of dawn to commute to karate. And I dreamed as I haven't in years and years and years.

I started writing an epic novel, which already has an intricate skeleton of a plot---it's the first plot that's ever taken shape fully in my mind before beginning to write. I began the first chapter last night and so far it seems to have quite a lot of potential. We'll see.

I listened strictly to albums and artists that I hadn't given enough attention before. I sorted through my eight gigs of tunes and deleted some of the bands I've outgrown or associate with circumstances I'd rather not remember. And I sang wildly with Joni Mitchell in the car, as usual.

I visited my grandparents and took my Gram around the city, which she loved, as she can't drive or move around very well on her own. We rode on an ancient hand-pulley operated freight elevator in a furniture shop, which was actually rather terrifying; we shopped for flowers and got coffee from the Beanery in celebration of our survival.

I walked along Nye Beach at the Oregon Coast on a sunny day with Andy, and found a lost and confused elderly poodle, its concerned family, a huge China cap shell, and columns of tallies carved into a stone sea-cliff. I poked gently at the sticky sea anemones in the tide-pools; they're some of my favorite creatures ever. Later that day we went to the Devil's Punch Bowl and had some chowder at Moe's in Otter Rock, something we don't do often enough as Oregonians. The best part of having chowder at the Otter Rock Moe's is that it's in a windier, more exposed location than the bayfront Moe's, which makes the tiny restaurant cozier and the soup all the more comforting after you come in from the elements.

I'm sure there are wonderful things I've forgotten, but these are the best of the best. I feel really refreshed after this month--restored, rebuilt, and almost, but not quite, ready to go back to school again.
Now to do some laundry.