Today has been busy for me. Not in the: wake up, get dressed, rush to school, take some notes, rush to work, help customers, rush home, do homework, eat, go to bed. But in the: OH my gosh I now have time to do stuff! Since I had the day off, I started the morning with laundry mixed with breakfast (which I used to never eat from home) and lots of goofing off on the computer. Then I went to lunch with Em, dropped some magazines off on campus to be recycled, shipped some textbooks to Amazon so I will hopefully get a big, fat gift card to buy lots and lots of books I actually want to read, and dropped off some deposits for myself and Em. Oh, I also stopped by two used bookstores. The first one I stopped by was awesome. They had books on France’s history and what appeared to be bottles made of sea glass lined up on some wooden shelves behind the front desk. It was vastly different from the used bookstore I stopped by afterward, which was filled with your typical genre fiction: romance (mostly), westerns, histories, etc. The first bookstore focused mainly on rare books and collectibles, which is why it stuck out so much more to me. The place is a gem, and I will definitely be going back again, even though I have no rare and collectible items to sell. I think the guy was quite disappointed and exasperated when I tried to shove my genre fiction off on him. But I just want them off my hands, too, okay?
All day I’ve been wondering if today has been an example of what my life is turning into outside of college. If I don’t go back to school, is this what it will feel like? It’s weird. For the majority of my college career, I wanted to be done with the place. Assignments grew tedious and irritating. The daily commute lost its pleasantness once I hit downtown traffic. Then today I went back to campus and a wave a nostalgia hit me. Granted, campus was also practically deserted and I could actually hear the birds chirping above me from their tree branches. But it made me wish I’d applied to more graduate programs than just the MFA program at USC. I should’ve applied to the MA program, both the regular track and the double masters in library science. Maybe even tried my hand at journalism? I know that it can’t be changed. I know this. And even though I wrote only a week ago about moving on and staying positive, I still feel a kernel of regret. A kernel that’s at least big enough to dangle against my collar bone like a pendant to remind me that this regret still weighs on me. It’s a physical heaviness against my chest. But, like I said, there’s nothing to be done about it except to take this time to evaluate my life and figure out the direction I want it to take.
While I was at the second used bookstore today, I used my store credit to buy Girl With A Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier and The Last Promise by Richard Paul Evans, who I’ve never even heard of before. One thing I will say about used books is that they have a history. They’re worn and soft, if you go paperback, and each crease has its own story. How did it arrive in the condition at which I bought it? Who owned it? How did they treat their books? Did it get scuffed and creased as a result of letting someone borrow it? Or did the owner read it to death? If so, how did it end up in a used bookstore for multitudes of hands to pick over? Or was the owner just bad with books? Did they leave it in vulnerable places to get attacked by the cat or left in the backseat where hordes of other objects piled on top of it? Yes, these are the thing I think about.
Concerning my post last week about your preference for hardbacks or paperbacks, I’m actually finding myself gravitating more towards the papers again. I used to be a stickler about keeping my books in perfect condition. I thought I was literally going to shit a brick the day my friend brought back my copy of Me and Mr. Darcy after her Mom’s evening sweet tea got spilled all over it. I insisted they didn’t need to buy me a new copy, even though they offered time and again to do so. That same friend returned my copy of Eragon with the jacket missing. I asked her for the jacket several times, but never received it. For a while, I was perturbed and had put her on My List. You know the one: these people are not to borrow anymore of my books! But now, I’m starting to appreciate the used and worn book’s candor: I’ve been places, biatch; so, read me or get lost. And I find the worn paperback to still look more attractive than the cracked and stringy hardback. Like I said before, papers just mold into your palms easier. That’s not to take away from the fact that hardcovers last longer, though. I actually bought two books I already had in papers in hardbacks a few weeks ago, because a few more years worth of reading and those papers will have had it.
I think what I’m going to focus on now is taking my learning in a direction I want it to go. I thought of a brilliant quote for it the other day. Let’s see if I can recreate it: The best thing about graduating is getting to create your own syllabus. Yes, that’s beautiful. It’s going to be my new theme for life. The challenging part is going to be constructing my recreational learning around my job. I imagine it’s a mind set. The thing I don’t need to do is think that because I’ve graduated and have “real world” stuff to deal with now (stuff that I was still dealing with in school, anyway), I have less time to do what I really want to do, which is read and write my book and write fanciful articles about the history of France and the state of the N-word in Mark Twain’s novels and how it meshes or clashes with today’s society. Yes, these are also things I think about. You see, I had a habit of thinking my life was so much more structured while I was in school, and summer breaks, while enjoyable and much needed, caused me to lose sight of my goals, because I’m prone to procrastination. Hello, Lauren, you were like that even well into the next semester! So, clearly this is just something about which I need to alter my perspective.
The last thing I want to do is let my brain turn to mush just because I’ve graduated. It’s a muscle, yo, and it needs to see some action. You know, I kind of want to learn French. Remember in The Time Traveler’s Wife when Clare is passing time while Henry has time traveled to God only knows where and she’s reading a book in French and actually understanding it? Yes, this is what I want to do. In French, Italian, Spanish, whatever. I also want to learn Latin. Dead language or no, all the Harry Potter spells are derived from Latin, and I MUST KNOW THEM! Ahem. So, yes, brain exercises are imperative to my new life as a post-grad. We’ll see how this goes. Structure and organization will either be my best of friends or my worst of enemies. I don’t know if I should shake their hands or reach for my wand.
