First Days of My Twenties

The Southern states are beautiful, vast, uncompromising, and powerful. If spring in the North arrives in tepid ripples, it comes here unrestrained, in a burst of heat and flowers and wind. Today was beautiful, the first eighty-degree day in what promises to be a florid season. As my mother drove me from Major University to Mountain Town, I could see bright colors everywhere forcing their way into the world, astounding violet hues surfacing in great clusters amidst the lush green of the hills that just a month ago were dead.

Winter has perished.

For all his whining, his remonstrating, his bullying resistance, he’s gone.

Now Summer wields her hand over the land, for it is summer, not spring, that has truly dawned. Spring is somewhat of a fiction here, downgraded from what may once have been a consistent season to the several scattered days of mild temperatures between weeks of 40s and then 80s. It’s just so gorgeous.

Pie and I went out this afternoon to play soccer and had a great time of it in the clouded humidity. Those clouds, iron gray just before our dinner at six or so, opened up several hours ago and have been pouring ever since.

I haven’t seen a storm of such wonderful rage in a long time.

The thunder is so thick and booming that it actually shakes the house, while robust rain pounds forth on the windows and a fearsome lightning ignites the sky bright as day. In the moments it strikes, you could be looking out your window at an overcast noon.

This is the type of storm that nature seems to deliver simply for passion’s sake, and I love it. The tempest outside is like youth: shining in lovely pathos just because.

My first day as a twenty-year-old was benign, but not quite so good as this. Temperatures hovered in the mid-seventies and the sun shone amiably on the occasion. I maintained mostly the same routine as normal, dutifully attending Government 300 but indulging myself to skip Spanish 301, which I can’t stand. My instructor is an American woman whose unintentionally-hilarious facial expressions (she seems to lack the ability to smile normally) are not enough to lighten the heavy dullness of that course. It could potentially be interesting, mind you, with the right professor. She’s nice, but she’s also not that person.

Anyway, I couldn’t abide the idea of sitting in there on my birthday, so I used to extra time to pursue a lead for Student Newspaper.

I had two stories to write yesterday, the glorious occasion of my entry into the world notwithstanding, and I was occupied most of the night with those responsibilities.

The first news article concerned a women’s film festival being held on campus, while the second was actually somewhat of a disappointment; I signed on earlier in the week to cover an appearance by author Petey Chizzi, a poet, in the hopes that it might be a rare treat. I was mistaken.

While the man was clearly a good writer, at least insomuch as having an extensive vocabulary and a knack for god description, if applied right, his poetry was so absurdly abstract as to be indecipherable and unenjoyable, at least for me. The papers (my own not included) have hailed this man as if he’s some kind of god, but I for one found the material intolerable.

I spent the rest of the night, up until two-thirty the following morning, typing up the pages to go to print on Monday. This takes longer than it might seem because one has to integrate information from many different sources, deciding which quotes and statistics to use, which parts of an organization’s press release are not so overtly self-promotional that they might be cited in the piece.

I spent the time from two-thirty to four or so singing in the music rooms (next to literature, music is my other true love), and then went to bed just before five.

I was up at eleven for my English 396 class. Mom picked me up around one, and I had a very nice reception at home this afternoon, one that included a fish dinner and a cookie cake.

I’m going to bed now, though. I’ve got, thanks to my renewed work effort in school, no more homework to do this weekend, and am eager to enjoy myself.