Good morning Wednesday. Tomorrow will be my last full day here and then I get to go home! I've always thought about vacations and trips in this way, organizing a countdown of days into words that make home seem decievingly closer than it is. I'm having fun; I usually do on vacations, but for some reason, in the back of my mind, I'm counting down the days, even the hours within those days (It's 11am! Only one more hour until the day is half over), until I leave for home. I think I've even done this at home, counted down the hours until tomorrow. I don't know what I'm always waiting for. I wish I would stop it, enjoy where I am for a goddamn minute, but then I see a clock and I can't help but do the math. This morning, I woke up early (and I mean early in the summer sense of the word), 8am. I didn't want to get up, so instead I laid in bed and tossed in and out of sleep, dreaming about Jason and Sarah and wild animals escaped from tall barbed wire fences in an industrial kind of zoo, gypsies and genies and Jenna was there. Dominik passed me in a middle eastern market, and finally Nathan's voice rang out, disturbing whatever connections my brain had formed between all these images, events, and people, asking if I wanted pancakes. It was 10am. Only 2 more hours and then the day was half over! I did a small fist pump and stumbled upstairs to eat my pancakes.
The people I'm staying with like to watch TV. As a group, we don't have a whole lot in common besides the fact that we're all living together, so I can see where the television would seem like a quick way to relieve any social tension or awkwardness. I'm just not a TV person. What's the benefit of sitting in front of a screen, watching re-runs and movies (with vulgar humor, I might add) and commercials for hours on end? Not that TV can't be informative. I think it certainly can be, and I've been thoroughly inspired by movies and TV specials already. There's just so much you're missing inside with the TV on. Not to mention that the content of some of these shows and movies is as uninformative, uninspiring, and unintelligent as I've seen: Step Brothers with Will Ferrel, I don't know if I've ever hated a movie so much.
This morning, the group is watching the movie Miracle which they've all seen before. Why watch it again? Not that I haven't watched movies twice, three times over, but in this beautiful place, with limited time, while the sun is shining. Why now? I decided to use everyone else's pre-occupation with the TV to re-charge, have a little time to myself. I brough my book onto the porch and got into the first 20 pages of Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbar Kingsolver. I feel earthy just holding the thing, a green paperback book that looks like it was born of the earth rather than picked off a shelf and printed at a press. I want to be earthy. To some degree I guess I am, but there's so much I don't know about nature; it makes me angry that as humans we are so far removed from it. We came from nature. We are part of nature, and yet we shut ourselves in houses and buildings, and we close our windows and we shut our blinds and look down on nature as if it's below us, as if we personally outsmarted it, when in reality, most of us wouldn't last a day without modern conveniences, alone with mother nature. You think you'd survive? Better do a little research on what you're facing. It's brutal out there. Don't take my word for it; there are reality TV shows about this kind of thing.
Don't take what I'm saying the wrong way. I don't want to go back to the jungle. I understand and appreciate the luxury of a warm comfortable home. When you don't have to focus all of your energy on staying alive, there are a lot of amazing things that happen. I doubt that I would be writing this now if humans lived with animals as equals in the wild. People wouldn't sit around and discuss the meaning of life or the possibilites of death; they'd be too busy looking for their next meal, like the squirrel I've been watching from the porch here. I don't know what squirrels eat. I know they hoard nuts, but on a day-to-day basis, I'm not sure. This one climbs up a tree, skuttles around the top brances, taking dramatic pauses every so often to look around; for what, I'm not sure. Then he's down, spiraling around the trunk at a 90 degree angle to the ground. A bush rustles; the leaves move, and he's up another tree, skittering scratching, climbing, pausing, returning to the ground. I've been playing this game where I try to guess which tree he'll climb next the way you try to guess which hole that wicked little beaver they call a mole will pop up out of in your wack-a-mole dreams, except I'm not attempting to wack him with a rubber hammer.
I bet they have wack-a-squirrel shows on TV.
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