I'm back!

First, a book list:

1. In Cold Blood / Truman Capote.

2. The Disapparation of James / Anne Ursu.

3. The Immortal Fire / Anne Ursu.

4. Foreign Affairs / Alison Lurie.

5. Her Fearful Symmetry / Audrey Niffenegger.

6. The Stepford Wives / Ira Levin.

7. The Count of Monte Cristo / Alexandre Dumas.

These being the books I plan to read between now and our moving date. … So much has happened in the months {and months!} that I haven't written:

acceptance into graduate school (SUNY Binghamton)

set date for move down there (June 19th-ish)

summer job (N.K.s again, hurrah!)

puppy planning (vacillating on the bulldog question)

graduation (May 14th!!!)

etc etc etc.

In other news, I now have time not only for blogging (if I can keep it up), but also for photography. I am so so glad to get back to it! There is something about that weight on my shoulder that makes me see this city with the eyes of memory. I'm not going to forget Boston - how can I, living here my entire life? - but I constantly seek out the little details that capture me so. I was tremendously pleased when my uncle commented on a shot of the Old North Church and said that I have an eye for architectural photography. Now that I'm writing it out, getting all this writing out that apparently is dying to get out, I'm starting to think that my photos of buildings, of details of the city, are a way for me to remember things differently, with more significance than I've ever attached to them before.

I've been exploring different approaches towards the commandments of "take a picture every day" and "take your camera everywhere." During Senior Week, I naturally took a camera with me to every event, and when my aunt Valerie was visiting I focused on learning to comfortably carry my Sony all over Boston. After 5 days or so, it's practically a habit, and the decision to leave my camera home was really odd for me today. It was more a matter of time than of "I'm not going to take pictures today," not to mention I was going to walk Bry partway to work on my way to my parents' house, and I've been down Boylston into the Back Bay so much lately it's getting a little boring. Plus, I still haven't figured out what I'm doing with the "Day in the Life" shots from yesterday.

I mentioned having writing that needs to get out, an absolutely bizarre sensation. There is a feeling in my limbs, a heaviness especially in my arms, a feeling as though it's thickening and coagulating with a substance that belongs outside of my body but has its source in my blood. This is something that needs to happen. The older I get, the more I discover the truth behind tired clichés like "heartbreak" and "a pounding headache" - now, having spent the hardest nine months of my life reading books and writing papers with every fiber of my being, having graduated not two weeks ago with a B.A. in English Literature, I find myself absolutely bewildered at the prospect of "writing something that wants to be written". I have no idea what this something is. I don't know whether it's a novel or nonfiction. I don't know the subject matter. I am incredibly intimidated (I just started reading Capote, for God's sake - a writer who changed the way people write!), but that does not stop me. Want another cliché? "I am going to explode if I don't" write this thing. This stuff in my blood, that starts inside but longs to be out, this is what will explode.

I keep thinking I'll have to wait until I get to my required creative writing course in graduate school to start my creative juices - but that's just more intimidation, and I don't know where it's coming from, but I don't take that anymore. I have learned to view every obstacle as insurmountable until I surmount it and prove that nothing can stop me. I have completed the entire English major in two years - confusion about subject matter and worries about creative juices are nothing. I can write a novel, I can write a short story, I can write a work of nonfiction; all I have to do is decide what it's about.