Grad School: RIP 2005 - 2008

I know it's a little premature, but I just finished my last paper for grad school and I am flipping out. It's 11:15 PM on Tuesday, April 29. Mark this day.

Impact final is done - 10 pages even, meeting neatly the 8 - 10 page range.

All I have left is to defend my case study (how casual I can be about that silly defense!) and I AM DONE. (Three more class sessions, but that's a formality at this point.)

It's been three years. Three long years of working, schooling, studying, cramming, writing, researching, reading, discussing, contemplating, struggling and cursing. Lots and lots of cursing.

Oh shit. What am I going to do with myself?

Song for Gram

Just weeks before my gram died I became obsessed with the song "Goin' Out" by Sarah Harmer, mostly because it reminded me of my gram and the comfort and love she made me feel throughout my life. The song just popped up on my iTunes playlist while I was writing my paper, and it still brings tears to my eyes thinking about her, and the love she left with us, and how very, very much I miss her spirit.

Goin' Out
When the days close on the memories that you’ve acquired
And your body cannot hold your soul inspired
You are here and not alone
Everybody has come home
There’s a bed made up upstairs
If you get tired

All the heaviness around you will get light
And your worry lifted up into the night
Left with nothing but pure love
Left with all you are made of
Can I stay around awhile
Is that all right?

Oh lives don’t end
We're goin’ out to be brought back again
Our lives don’t end

(You can listen to a sample here.)

Update to the update (updated again)(and again)(and again)

left to do:
defend case study
32 oz of UFO

done:
write Impact final
read for Impact final
Impact response paper
case study (38 pages done and handed in. early.)
case study planning (the plot is in my head and will soon be in PowerPoint)

ALMOST THERE! 10 days to go.

Great tips for Earth Day!

Go here to check this list of 50 easy things you can do!

Highlight

I have to say the highlight of my weekend happened when I was exiting the cafe where Tara and I had lunch yesterday and a guy on a bike rode by with both nads hanging out of his shorts, while they pressed against the bike seat.

Both. Nads.

An exchange Jenna and I just had:

hooperlindros (10:34:29 PM): hey!

Generator2376 (10:34:53 PM): WEIRDO - I was just thinking about you! I was about to look up one of your poems

hooperlindros (10:35:21 PM): I can write you a poem now if you want

Generator2376 (10:35:32 PM): let me guess:

Generator2376 (10:35:40 PM): roses are red

Generator2376 (10:35:44 PM): violets are blue

Generator2376 (10:35:49 PM): school sucks and

Generator2376 (10:35:51 PM): school sucks

My first act as a circus performer...

...watch closely (over the next several days) as I make items disappear from the list:

Left to Do:
prepare oral defense
defend the case study
read for Impact final
write Impact final
get drunk

Done:
edit 37 page Integrative capstone case study (it's now 38 pages and DONE)
five page Impact reaction paper

Defense

It's official - my oral defense is on Monday, May 5 at 1 PM. Please be very nice to me in the days leading up to that and in the hours immediately beforehand!

And in the hours afterward?

BUY ME A F*&%ING BEER!

PP,P2

= Pity Party, Part 2

I'm tired!!

Wahhh. I literally do not think I have ever been this tired in my life, outside of the stupid times stupid Val in stupid college stayed up stupidly all night long. But still, stupid Val in college didn't also work stupid full stupid time when she did that.

It has never taken me this long to write five pages. Ever. It would help if I could keep my eyes open, but come hell or high water, I am finishing this damn thing tonight IF IT KILLS ME.

KOOZA

Tara and I, along with her parents, went to see Cirque du Soleil's KOOZA last night, and it was truly magical. Full of traditional clowning and old-school circus acrobatics, it was really one of the most magical experiences of my life. I was held in the suspense of true wonder and curiosity for 3 hours straight!

Never mind that it was actually in the Grand Chapiteau, so it was old-time Big Top circus all-around! I think my favorite act of the night was the Unicycle Duo. They did tricks not unlike figure skating pairs, all while the male half of the duo skillfully peddled his unicycle, often balancing the female acrobat high in the air. The intimacy and trust required to perform this act was palpable, and only intensified the magic under the Top!

Of course, for heart-thumping, blood racing action, The Wheel of Death never disappoints! My favorite were their scaly pants and devil horn hair! Not to forget the contortionists, who twisted into unimaginable, complicated, and human-body-defying shapes!

This was my last hurrah before the final push for school, and what a way to go out! Left on the docket: edits to the 37 page Integrative final; write the 4 page response paper for Impact; read for and write the 10 page Impact final; and prepare and present my oral defense. I will be done three weeks from tomorrow, and I can't wait. I'm ready to graduate already so I can run off and become a circus performer!

Because I know you're curious

I am eating a granola bar, and I just ate a dried cherry so tart that it gave me that feeling in the back of my nose just like when you get chlorinated pool water sucked in the wrong way.

Weird.

Yowza!

Yesterday, as I was leaving class, I had in tow:

- my notebook and pen loose in my hands
- a 1/2 full water bottle
- my purse
- my backpack
- my car keys
- my cell phone
- a paper that just got handed back to me (19/20 points awarded!)

Not ten feet from my car I stubbed my toe, twisted my ankle, and I, the notebooks, the water bottle, my purse, my backpack, my car keys, my cell phone, and my paper all went flying and crashing to the ground. I scraped my hand, my knee (through my pants) and twisted my ankle and my back.

I'm sore today, but it's mostly my ego that's bruised. And man, it hurts!

First draft

I just sent my motherf&$%ing thirty seven page draft to my professor. I think it's done, except for minor changes. Yes, that's right. Possibly DONE except for some editing.

This means I have one four page paper and one 12 page paper left.

EVER. E. V. E. R.

OH MY GOD.

I am GIDDY and just finished dancing around the living room with Tara.

Video: Bob, being Bob

This is an old video from our old apartment - 2003, I think.

Image: Nephew

You're killing me, kid.

Image: Happy Birthday, Bob!

Today was Bob's 8th birthday. Needless to say, he was a little confused about why he couldn't eat the food already? Why was this thing burning in his food? Don't mommies know that I'm starving and they should give me that food instead of singing?! Why are they torturing me? It's MY BIRTHDAY!

Happy birthday, Bob! You fool!

Hiatus

You may not hear from me until May 9th. It's not you. It's me.

Oral defense: Monday, May 5 at 5 PM
Integrative Final Due (25 - 30 pages): Wednesday, May 7
College Impact Final Due (10 - 12 pages): Thursday, May 8
Die of Complete Exhaustion: Friday, May 9, then drive to Rochester for Harrison's birthday party
Wait for Graduation: May 12 - May 23 until 1:59 PM
Become Master: May 23, 2:00 PM
Begin Student loan repayment: six months later

For Gram

Like Sarah, I am posting the eulogy we delivered together at Gram's funeral. Yesterday was Easter, the secular version of which invariably reminds me of Gram. The last few weeks have been hard, and I have a few moments when I am thinking about something else entirely. These moments are sometimes punctuated with memories of her, or visions of her in her casket, or other moments from the last two weeks or of her eighty-eight years. In the end, she has given us so much, and though her physical body is gone from us, there are so many things, countless things, that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. I love you, Gram. Thank you for everything you have ever given us.
____________________________________

We want to talk a little about memory today. We want to talk about memory because, as most of you know, in the last few years of her life, our Grandmother lost much of her memory to Alzheimer's. Much of the time, she could not remember us, her beloved family and friends. On very bad days she could not remember even herself. It seems fitting, then, to honor her memory with remembrance and recollection.

You are a girl. There is the fresh sweet taste of still-warm milk on the farm; the family of skunks befriended one summer and visited every day in the fields; being scolded by your mother, our great grandma Gladys, for mussing the dress and Mary Janes you are forced to wear, even though you are a tomboy and invariably prefer trousers. The dresses never stop you from climbing every tree. You skin your knees. The patent leather shoes lie in a heap in the mud. You love your daddy, Freeman Ordway, and he adores you above all else.

There are near death experiences as a child, later retold with humorous sensationalism to wide-eyed grandchildren: a lightening strike on the house, with your hand just a few inches away from the post of a cast-iron bed, sheets scorched; an amusement park accident with a collapsed chair swing, returning the next day to find eyeglasses crunched next to a giant, steel support beam.

Later, as a teenager, you are carousing with Curly, with Vince, and your "gang" of friends, everyone smoking and drinking, all packed to overflowing in your cars and always going to country dances the next town or county over.

There is Curly, our grandpa, Clarence Richard Hooper, the love of your life. You go all over New York, Pennsylvania, and even Canada, to explore your love of music, especially organs and organ music. There are three children, first Douglas, then Donald, our father, and finally a girl—Martha. There are swimming trips and picnics. Silverware sewn to napkins with fine silver thread as an April Fool's prank. Piano lessons, Girl Scouts, county fairs, train exhibits, and home-sewn costumes. Vegetable gardens, perennials, annuals, iris beds, saplings, and raspberry canes. A pet bunny carried in your apron pocket. Beloved dogs Lady, Mugsy, Joey, Nicky, Mokey, Macduff, and Duffy. Cats too numerous to name. You are always scanning the skies—in the day for birds and at night for constellations, shooting stars, meteor showers, and eclipses. Your children grow. There are weddings and divorces. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Accounting class, pottery class, basket-weaving class. Lifetime subscriptions to Smithsonian, Nature, National Geographic, and Scientific American. Countless books and more books.

Later, when Curly retires, you come home every day at your lunch hour, from your job at the gas company, to make him lunch. This works out very well for Grandpa, since you are off from 12 to 1, Price is Right ends at noon, and Days of Our Lives starts at 1, so he has an hour free in his afternoon schedule. You have lunch together every single day. Many years later, after Curly's death, you play for me and my husband a record of organ music and recollect emotionally how this particular organist's hands remind you so much of Grandpa's when he played. It is the only time I have ever seen you cry, remembering your husband's hands and how they danced over the keys.

Then there are our own memories of you, like the flickering 5-4-3-2-1 countdown before an old black and white movie: the smell of fresh molasses cookies and the POP! of the cookie jar seal, or of fabric softener sheets, tucked into musty old volumes of Encyclopedia Brittanica.

There are old margarine containers, holding red coins from Michigan Kitty, orphaned boardgame pieces, or leftover cinnamon apples after Thanksgiving. There is a freezer full of pinkish applesauce in square Tupperware, TV dinners, orange push pops. Dead birds in plastic bags you rescued from the driveway or from the radiator grills of parked cars, and froze so you could examine them later.

There's the sweet treat of Lifesavers tucked neatly into the corner of the electric organ, a hideaway for mixed fruit, wintergreen, butterscotch. The measure of a perfect dollop of pear and fig filling in the center of a cookie. Angel food cake upside down, waiting to cool, ready to cover with sugared strawberries, handpicked raspberries, or to eat plain, with our fingers, swinging together on the back porch.

There is the taste of Dr. Pepper, which we bought with extra quarters you brought just for me, and sipped from fat glass bottles in the laundromat, waiting for the wash to dry, swinging my feet in the plastic chairs when my legs were too short for my feet to touch the ground.

There’s the smell of paper and ink, a dull brass key held tight in my hand, sweaty with responsibility as I move with purpose toward your Fillmore post office box, Number 51.

We traipse through Southern Tier cemeteries to find graves of long lost relations, Val and I gathering the discarded plastic flowers for our own morbid collection; we stand in the big farm kitchen, learning how to spoon flour into a measuring cup and scrape the excess with the flat back side of a knife. There are candy hunts on Easter morning with personalized riddles leading the way to each sugary treat. We are hunching over the dining room table over baking and science and sewing projects. We are reading Mary Jemison's autobiography together and then leaving flowers at her grave in Letchworth Park.

There’s me, leaning on the doorframe of your bedroom downstairs, watching as you ready yourself for a grocery trip "downtown." First, Listerine, then a thorough brush through your long, grey locks, carefully separating it into an even part, then braided and pinned neatly to your head until the braids meet, then cross, in the middle, ends tucked in. All this held in place with the familiar spray of White Rain Extra Hold. A quick flash of a toothy smile into the mirror to double-check. A tug of the shirt to straighten it out, wisping away any stray animal hairs. Perfection.

I am eight, and it is summertime and we are with you during summer vacation, like every summer before. It’s humid and sticky out during the days, but at night the air is biting and cool. You set up lawn chairs in the back yard and tuck us in up to our chins while we watch for shooting stars. For each one we see, you ask us to say a wish out loud. I thank the stars for you. Before bed time, you bring us mason jars to collect lightening bugs, and we marvel at them glowing inside the jars and in suspension above the irises. Before we sleep, we open the lids and release them into the night air. We whisper, “Goodbye. And thank you.”

You are calling to the chickadees, listening to the quiet whirr of hummingbirds in flight. You reply to each piercing squawk of the nearby cardinal or jay. You laugh when I shave my fingernail into the batch of butter pickles we are making. This summer, there's a litter of bunnies borrowed from a farmer friend, on loan just for us.

Finally, here I am, tucked into bed in my own father's childhood room, the room where I was brought first as an infant, just back from the hospital. It's a few years later, I am bundled under high quilts with stories—House at Pooh Corner. Later again in the bed, as a teenager, exhausted from a night of late talking or rummy. Finally, in the end, as a woman, with my husband beside me. You kiss us both, tuck us in, like children, then go singing down the stairs and into the night.

Thank you, Gram. Thank you for your memory.

Image: Grandmother

Goodbye, sweet lady. I love you more than you could ever know.

Making Peace

I've had several epiphanies over the last several days, and I am officially making peace with the work I have to do over the next 2 1/2 months. The bottom line is:

- it has to be done
- it will end at some point
- I can do it

I am looking forward to May 23, and also certain stops along the way. I have to be OK with it. I have chosen this.

(Can you see me still convincing myself?)