The Beating Heart

Three months ago, I unintentionally put this blog away. My veins felt empty, bled dry of words and images, and I didn't have the heart or the energy to get the blood flowing again. I folded up this space and tucked it into a drawer, waiting for a perfect writing day that seemed to never come. Since then, it has been a heart beating beneath the floorboards, a Siren call I can no longer ignore. So I'm sitting down to it, setting that heart at ease.

Wisconsin is currently an icebox, a monochromatic landscape of white and brown farm fields dotted with blips of red barns. The sun makes shadow patterns, giving the snow a blue sheen. I drive through it almost every day to and from work, escorted by Cormoran Strike, a private detective in a rainy London. I finished The Cuckoo's Calling and didn't wait long before I moved on to The Silkworm. Noir is getting me through the winter. Thanks, J.K. Rowling.

Nate and I wandered through Farm & Fleet last week, picking out Rubbermaid tubs and Plano shelves, so excited for our new apartment that we actually considered the afternoon a date. There is nothing so romantic as having your spouse pick out a tub for your canning jars. If you think I'm being sarcastic, then you don't know me very well. We have such hopes for this new place. It has a garden in the back and a river in the front. It has two bedrooms and a large kitchen. I almost wept at the counter space. I plan to embrace it as a grand adventure.

This has been the hardest semester yet, mostly because I'm ready to get that degree. I have a list of things I can't wait to do when time is my own again. Playing my tin whistle. Gardening. Baking bread. Reading stacks and stacks of books into the deepest hours of the night. Bike riding.

Sometimes I worry that I'm only living in the future, counting away the precious minutes of the present waiting for someday. Is that normal? Is that healthy? Am I being hard on myself? I never know the answer.

Coffee Shop Inspiration

This coffee shop is full of noise, a pulsing potpourri of voices and laughs and typing. Inspiration is so easy for me to find in this world and it varies with the day and my mood and the work I'm trying to do. Sometimes I find it under a tree or burrowed in the quilt on my bed. On Saturday, I heard it call me as I drove into the town on the Mississippi River in which I used to live for four years with all of my soulmates. I had been tense and worried as I wound around the bluffs in my little red car but as I turned the last bend, my soul leaped inside me like John the Baptist and the ugly floated out the window. My soul knows what it needs even when my head has no clue.

But this coffee shop is it today, the perfect blend of subdued frenzy and caffeinated energy that I need to power through the homework lying before me and the writing I'm dying to do. In a room full of people, I feel slightly invisible and small, which can be good feelings to have sometimes. This atmosphere- vibrant, loud, full of life- evokes a desire in me to be part of this world, to "contribute a verse," which helps me pick up the textbook and pull out the notebook. I listen and watch, one person with a story in a crowd of strangers who are probably just like me under the skin. My tea fills me up like grace and mercy, like a weekend of family and friends, like a lesson of compassion and a wordless prayer.

Evidence of a Procrastinator

This article of 18 pages and double columns has become my mortal enemy. (Why are papers published in double columns anyway? Are they trying to torture us?) The abstract glares me down and I return with my own narrow-eyed stare of death. 9:45 on a Thursday night and neither of us wants to be here. This is not going to end well.

This morning I was a different person. I zipped through my readings in record time, with extra to spare. But tonight this one article and I are ready to rip each other apart, the mutual loathing like a red-hot anvil. With fire in its voice, it orders me to get this over with, read it already, put us both out of our misery. I pull the computer toward me, focusing my last vestige of willpower on not checking Facebook or opening Blogger just to write about how much I want to write. I am so close. I can do this. I can stay strong.

10:02. "The Concept of Appraisal and Archival Theory" has lost this round. This post is all the evidence I need.