Appalachia Year

I was pretty diligent for six months there, so I'm going to do a quick and dirty rundown of the past couple of weeks so I get back into this again. As I fished my camera out of my purse to upload photos, I accidentally palmed the lens into my pillow and it made the dull crunch of a stepped-on exoskeleton. Now it's reading "lens error" and the lens is hyperventilating half-open then half-shut. Tragically, I'm not sure I'll be able to take any more photos on it. Strange, after six months of dropping it on pavement so it snaps open and pukes out its batteries, wedging it beneath heavy textbooks in a tossed-around backpack, and general roughhousing, I killed the ol' girl with a pillow? Really? Gah. It's like the soldier who serves two tours in Iraq and slips on a banana peel at home and dies. That's not a thing, is it? Damn.

Sjanneke is planning a wedding, and teaching middle schoolers, and going to graduate school and writing a thesis. Industrious, disciplined, or fucking insane? Yes, those. A past Evie might have made herself feel bad in comparison to such an impressive person, and made halfhearted attempts to change my fundamental slacker hardwiring. The Evie that writes this now is wise enough to say, "Hey! Congratulations on being an excellent human! Drink a beer on my porch! I will continue to wake up at 10, though."

Something that must be nice about being my boyfriend is that occasionally I will make you veggie meatball subs. Just a guess.

So Lauren has to drive a lot for work and for self and so a dashboard GPS is pretty much a must. What I find amazing is that Lauren's dad, an actor, does many of the navigational voices for GPS devices. So, instead of "Niles" guiding you to your destination in dulcet cadences of the Queen's English, Lauren can be guided around by her dad. She seemed pretty blase about this but I think it's amazing and novel. Having your dad's voice navigate you safely through traffic: comforting or frustrating? At first I thought comforting, but eventually I think I'd revert to an angry adolescent subjected to one of my dad's driving lessons again. My first lesson my dad "let me" coast on the brakes in the church parking lot. What, you thought I'd be allowed to touch the accelerator on my first lesson? False.

This girl has a new place in Olde Towne East that I believe she would describe as both "bitchin'" and "juicy". It is a place where spontaneous painting happens, which I think is the whole idea, right?

Athens is sort of objectively lovely right now. Branches are spitting popcorn balls and shiny green leaf buds are uncurling depth and space into what was once gray and dimensionless. Spring is a tremendous relief, but I have to be honest, my spirits have been completely rotten lately. I think it's been weeks since I went a day without bursting into tears for some abstract, impossible-to-explain reason.

The thing about this house is that sometimes I'll catch a brilliant shaft of lemonade-white sunlight through one of the windows and I know it won't last long, so I'll grab an object (and think, "If only I had a dog or a child to put in this light and photograph!") and I'll take fifty shots of a pocketwatch on my macro setting before it vanishes. And sometimes I take pictures of myself in this light, which is now something you know that I do. So, here's me, resolving (at least for now) not to try my hardest, not to make the most of a goddamn thing, just to get by until it gets better.