my favorite month

Dear June,

I love you. You are my favorite. You remind me of the anticipation of the end of school. Of early in the season days at Cole Park which were filled with school children who only came for a few hours and a lot of chit chat. You remind me of summer classes at Penn State. You remind me of bonfires in high school and solo back yard beers at slootsville manner, state college. You remind me of graduating high school, of moving to baltimore. You remind me of the best weekend of my life, when I married Nick. You remind me of all the possibilities that lay before me not only when I hit a milestone in my life but each day when I wake up.

June, you inspire me to dance barefoot in the rain feeling the mud between my toes. You inspire me to take road trips. To write poetry beneath the trees. To eat popsicles with children. To skip to my destination rather than walk or run.

Thanks, June, for the way you make me feel inside. For invigorating my senses. For causing tears of joy and sheer exuberance in my heart.

Forever and Always,

Katherine Mary

Ode to Mrs. Woolfe

My introduction to one Mrs. Virginia Woolfe came my senior year of high school when I wrote my very first literary research paper of any worth titled something like "Feminism in Virginia Woolfe." I'm sure I still have it somewhere in my papers. Later in my intro to lit class at Capital University (my first college) I really got into A Room of One's Own. I owe this second transition in my home to this book.

You see, I traded off parking my car through the long, treacherous winters we face in Upstate New York for a room of my own. A room I had a dream about, actually. It's graduation season so continually we are reminded by the late Eleanor Roosevelt that "the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." I dreamt in orange. I dreamt in walls of bookshelves and a door I could close and make the rest of the world go away. No, really, I had a dream I painted the office orange and so we did.

Orange represents the sacral chakra in the lower abdomen. Associated personal elements include emotional expression , sense of feeling..."utilization of creative forces into all aspects of being". excellent.

Nick and I, we need rooms of our own. He needs the garage and a half to belong to him. He needs his space to create, build, paint, do whatever things he does with his tools down there. I need my room to do the same thing. I just implement different tools: keyboards, books, deep thinking sessions...

This room has become the most perfect spot for me. It went from this:


To this:





In the worlds of Woolfe herself..."A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

The Hood.

I spent an hour last Wednesday evening trying to figure out how to wear my master's hood. I was online looking for examples, none of which were helpful. There were directions with the hood but they were made for the high dollar hood, which SUNY Cortland does not give you. I tried it every which way finally stopping at 1030pm...with an exasperated "I GIVE UP" -- not quite my style.

Friday I was dreading going to graduation, everyone is going to be wearing their hoods and I am going to look like a jackass. Plus, I have no friends to ask to help me so I'll have to ask some stranger and look like a total jerk...

Guess what? Of course, that didn't happen. They actually handed out directions for your hood when you got there. You don't even wear your hood in, they put it on you in the hooding ceremony which is actually what I was going to, not truly a commencement. Get it? So Cortland of them.

What else was so Cortland was (a) the director of English Graduate studies also didn't know how the hell the hood went on (b) the key note speaker was Austin MacRae. Right. He also got his MA that night. In English. But he's published and sipped grape soda with some really awesome guy so he's extra special. Luckily we got to hear a poem he composed after said soda sipping. That pretty much sums up my experience at Cortland. Grape soda. Sounds good, but its just nasty dyed syrup and carbonated water.

But I have my hood and that's pretty cool.

Here I am getting the hood put on:
I did it:


The hubs and I:


If I look spaced and exhausted in this one, its because I am. I didn't realize Corcoran was taking the picture. (Should I mention I said good bye to a bunch of my babes this day, too at work!) Wait, I lied, in this picture I am contemplating my future... thinking two words "holy shinikees!"

transformation #1

the living room...

my amazing husband...and my fabulous taste (in both men and colors)

goes something like this:

Red is one of my favorite colors, however, this was too much...


it is pretty and big, though...




So, we taped...


there i am, cute as a button, after taping. . .

and there's my cute hubby (that orioles hat is his painting hat ONLY not to be worn in public!)


and corky primed (we were almost asphyxiated the first night we tried to prime, apparently using the contractor degree of primer in a non-ventilated area causes your "explosive gases" alarm to go off, and also for you to start hallucinating)



then it was perfect, well except the crap everywhere...

define intense living

While doing research on the Kunstlerroman I find the passage "art is rooted in experience and the person who lives most intensely is the best artist" (beebe, ivory towers and sacred founts, p6).

what defines intense living?

how can i live intensely? do i? have i? do i want to?

getting there

every stroke of the paintbrush this weekend was one step closer to finishing the updates to our apartment for our new tenant and closer to coming home and attempting to work on the paper.

oh yeah, i'm still writing my thesis, right? on top of moving and improving!

hee.

Went up to Cortland yesterday morning as soon as I woke up to return some books and get some new ones out.

Remember that whole part about Lan Cao and how it was going to be relatively painless to just add her into the already made paper. Well, my paper's official title was "The Transcultural Kunstlerroman..." and Monkey Bride (her work) is not a K-roman.

Alas...so I'm concentrating on more defining of the Kunstlerroman, the origins and how the two texts fit into the genre.

and perhaps a little postfeminism in there for a good measure.

I still have so much to say...

and so many rooms in this house to paint! I'll post photos of the wackiness soon.

we've closed on the house and are moved in... at least, our stuff is there and we're staying there... eventually there will even be internet access and a phone and cable there... until then I have an "office" in one house and "life" in another. split personalities??

...and so it goes...