Sitting, Waiting, Wishing

Recently I've been freaking out about college and what will happen this year with the essential ETS-produced tests and the need to start looking into grad schools, which I've already started.

I like plans.

Next year's summer plans include studying at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University. What a mouthful. It'll be an adventure, literary-ly and physically (being at a school out of state) and mentally and all that jazz. Mom and Dad have heard me talk about it, but I don't think they realize how serious I am. But I NEED this learning experience like I need water and space to grow.

I'll be in Washington DC for the Presidential Inauguration in January. There's a week long conference that I'm attending. I don't know a single soul that is going, and I like it that way. Of course, my mother is terrified and thinks that I'll be scared and lonely without a solid friend and traveling companion. I really don't mind because I see the trip as a journey outside my comfort zone.

I'm really not a very politically oriented individual, but it wouldn't ever hurt to be informed and take part in once-in-a-lifetime sort of opportunities like this conference. It also wouldn't hurt to essentially travel 3000 miles across the country, friendless, to see what I can make of myself in my situation.

It's good prep for Naropa in Colorado.

I think I need a visit to San Francisco. I want to lay on the floor in the City Lights Bookstore and have Ginsberg's poems read to me. He writes gritty and makes it musical and makes it work. I want to find my center or something; ground myself in words that are real. Something like that.

I need to stop worrying about futures I blindly grasp at-for.

I want Merlin to make me believe in the power of magic again. I don't mind the distraction.

UPDATE: My friend pointed out that I start out my sentences and paragraphs with "I" quite a bit. I'm very me/I-oriented and I won't be apologetic for it. It's MY bell jar, after all.