Gather Me Man

Homecoming at Tunnel City Coffee. This morning’s clientele is a walking gift shop of Williams paraphernalia, emphatically purple, incorrigibly loud (especially the bald and the gray playing freshman for a day), and many, I suspect, dashing their coffee with Baileys and Schnapps.

For my part, it’s work-play-time. I’m sitting next to a woman who is translating La planète des singes (Planet of the Apes) - just for a kick. My ears perked up when her husband said “slanguage,” and since I manifested both ignorance and delight, he explained me CB slang. 

CB slang was a global product of the 70s and early 80s. CB is “citizens’ band,” short distance two-way radio channels like those used by American truck drivers, and CB slang is the code of the road, with terms mainly ref’ing police pick-ups, vehicle types, and any roadside site or sight you could (usually pejoratively) peg: “Mistake on the Lake” for Cincinnati or Chicago, “Baboon Butt” for a Kenworth tractor. Apparently, my neighbor possesses a vinyl How-To of CB Slang, whose message is delivered by a mellow-voiced 70s speech doctor trying to sound like a trucker, offset by a few real truckers whose converse sounds like a found poem. Neighbor’s goal is to integrate max amounts of this slang into his daily life: “Paper Hangers” (police giving tickets), “Gum ball machines” (police car, lights on), ” and “Care Bears” (police car in construction zone). I think he may have difficulty being understood (not to mention where are these Bears and ball machines in W-town?). We’re going to have to manufacture a highway to manufacture its slang or try a new CB, with a farmland lilt. A few terms, however, have  crossover: Homecoming’s a good day for “suds and mud.”

I’ve worn glasses since I was five. I wanted desperately to have them, with almost the same stupid craze with which I hopped on the braces bandwagon. I was enchanted by the gesture of settling the frames, sliding three fingers to seat the earpieces - this was something I watched Emmaline Harris do in the Anne of Green Gables films, and I meticulously copied her. Once I had the glasses, I felt like a grown-up. The clarity of sight was almost tangential.

Over the years, vanity kicked in, another part of growing up, and I decided my face looked better sans frames. I’ve kept a pair of glasses, but for the most part, I wear contacts, which trick the senses into thinking your sharp eyes are your own. With glasses, it’s harder to forget that your 20/20 is an optical effect: your clear sight could be knocked right off your face, fogged in a hot room on a cold day, splattered by rain. My contacts are also approved for night wear, so I take them off only a couple times a week, and that just before bed. For years, I’ve spent very little time with my natural vision, which has steadily degenerated since age four. 

I’ve developed a dependency. As my eyesight worsened, edges disappeared, faces grew ominously indistinguishable, and books had to be held closer and closer to my nose. I’m a near-sighted astigmatic, so I can’t see anything that’s far away - at this point, further than 12 inches from my face. While I think my clinical diagnosis is “moderate visual impairment,” I’m functionally incapacitated.

Without optical aids, I’m incapable of assimilating even basic environmental cues. I feel socially crippled and physically imperiled. I lurch through space squinty-eyed. I try to make out friendly faces, but end up staring at strangers. I trip a lot. I feel hemmed in and panicked. Needless to say, I don’t often leave the contacts off.

Then, two summers ago, an attack of dry eyes made my contacts unwearable for half of a very hot July. I was in pretty bad shape at the time, living on a diet of brioche and bagels and working a job that wore me down. My housemates and I divided our lives into major categories: Work, Sleep, Friends, and Exercise. Everybody was neglecting at least one of the four; while the others buddied up for gym runs and skived off thesis prep, I was napping and snacking. The lethargy prompted by hot still days, compounded by the glasses cluttering up my face and slipping down my nose, reached a head halfway through that contact hiatus. 

I needed to run. That’s a parallel summers topic (see here), but the gist was, I couldn’t run with glasses on, and I couldn’t wear contacts. So one night I dropped my glasses on the grass and ran blind. The moon was bigger and blinking. I didn’t move exactly straight, but I went fast, and in the field, it didn’t matter, anyway. I hurtled through the impression of space, its feathered edges and wide soft sameness of grass.  

A few months ago, I was asked to do almost the same thing, this time blindfolded, in a theater, with a circle of eighteen people to catch me. In that same theater training, we’d be assigned ridiculous physical postures, stuff you did at five years old. For example:impersonating hippos in mud. I don’t really see the help in this, but I found that if I couldn’t see the people watching, I didn’t mind so much - and I could choose whether to see them or not, without closing my eyes or giving the impression of wariness. Open, animated, receptive, and secretly bat-blind: such is the privilege of 20/160.

That’s what interests me about my vision. Because I’m naturally near-sighted and can afford corrective lenses, I get to make choices about what and how I see. I have a second set of options, outside of the hard lines and set shapes of things. My eyes disregard those parameters, reform and fuzz them. With my glasses down, my best friend’s eyes look like violet chinks, radiating brilliant light. I can get hallucinogenic effects simply by popping out my lenses.

So sometimes now, when I want to see, that’s what I do. I imagine this picture: the artist at his canvas. Instead of bobbing up to catch the model clearly in her pose, he takes his glasses, and he sets them down.

No, I do.

I’ve never gotten on board with the digitized calendar, mainly because, on the real life side, there’s the doodle factor, the cross-out factor, the “feel of flipping through the notebook” factor, and the “I write in twelve fonts and it helps me” factor — among others. On the computer side, we’ve got the ”but-what-if-I-want-to-circle-it-really-big-?” factor, the ”that-info-goes-in-separate-boxes-?-!-?-!” factor, and the summary “this-gives-me-a-headache” factor.

I always buy the same planner: a good one with wide pages, 5-days-big-and-half-size-weekends (illogical, but we’ve all got our quirks), hours laid out and large monthly calendars. The years that I use my planner well, while not categorically “good” years, are years that turn out more sane and balanced. The scribbling-out factor helps me keep spontaneity; I love filling the book and seeing goals checked off (actually, I never check; I always fill squares).

I’m bringing all MyCal forces to bear on this upcoming year (not for naught was I called Delegation Girl). What my ex-pastor would refer to as “planfulness” is necessary, and I’ve expanded my repertoire to include white boarding and ripping up the free Williams wall calendar to post the months continuously. Weekly, I’m juggling four academic courses, a PE class, two dance groups meeting twelve hours in total, an ensemble play with evening rehearsals, voice lessons two towns over and daily vocal practice, coordinating Story Time and helping prepare its speakers, plus two info sessions (which I give), a campus tour (which I lead), and a two-hour Writing Workshop shift (in which, if I’m lucky, I sit on my butt and know about semicolons and finally do my homework). I also go to church, The Feast, sunrise hikes and Log Lunch and now I’m just throwing nouns at you. I’m also working on fellowship apps and once I did have friends, whose names I won’t list to protect the abandoned. There used to be the idea of play-writing in there, as well, but some rooms are too small to hold houses inside them. 

As well as being an organizer, I’m a procrastinator; in fact, the one serves the other. I procrastinate with these calendars and cataloguing blog posts. Prof. Perry’s essay on “structured procrastination” gives me my new favorite term. I do get plenty done as long as I have clear priorities — and something to get out of. Academic requirements fuel creative projects, my correspondence is written when I should be memorizing lines, and my research gets done as I avoid writing poetry. I’ve been meaning to be better about blogging. It seems all I needed was other things to do! 

I was never a junior. I was a sophomore, then a senior, and once back, I found “my” freshmen ruling the roost.

It hasn’t stopped raining since I got to Williamstown, with patchy cloud cover and the French doors blowing open. My room reminds me of Oxford or a Paris terrace, with two little ground floor balconies, porticoes, rolling wood floor and a twenty-foot ceiling - tucked away inside, I feel privileged and inspired. I’m relishing the sense that, burrowed in the back corner of the hallway I share with six boys, I have my own little apartment.

I’ve preserved the social sense of the adult life I began abroad; I’m daunted by a near-constant onslaught of personalities. Dinner in a dining hall about did me in. Random encounters aren’t random enough; here it would be very possible to be never alone, and that would be very wrong. My first night back, my hallmates came a’ knockin’, asking if I had cups. I’ve got one mug, I say…and I really like it. It was nice to see them and nice to be called upon for a cup of sugar’s college equivalent, even if I hadn’t stocked up on solos. But my mom was visiting and I was glad to go back to my bed, pull out Under Milk Wood and cozy in. I might be a little geriatric, but the intentionality that adult life requires in seeking out relationships and making choices about solitude is precious to me now, as is living “alone.” This morning, I woke up at 6:30, did a half-hour of yoga and pilates, dressed, made breakfast, went to the coffee-shop, bought the cheapest brew, checked email (my campus wifi is still on the fritz), and wrote.

I like this new Williams life.

Malapropism of the day: a caller on NPR as I’m coming home asks a long-winded question about the situation in Syria and right in the middle he just sort of incidentally mentions the high rate of “military defecations.”

No joke. No, really, there was no joke because nobody caught it, or they just didn’t want to shame him on national radio. Or because, hey, guys, this is a serious issue.