it was summer, now it’s autumn

Some happy news to share: I got a co-op job in Victoria, BC, from January through April, working at the University of Victoria. This was rather unexpected, as I was looking forward to my term two courses and shucks, graduating (already!) in April. But the job—working with UVic’s institutional repository—was too good to pass up. I will be moving to Victoria at the end of December until at least the end of April (you may recall my visit there last December, with the Mounties and the wax museum, oh my).

As a consequence of taking four months off to work full time in a city on an island famous for its stunning springtime flora and British sensibilities, I will be delaying graduation by eight months, until December 2008 (the summer course pickin’s are always slim, so I’ll need the next fall term to get my money and mind’s worth).

Though enthused about the prospect of free time sans homework and related school stress, in addition, of course, to gaining invaluable professional experience while making a considerable killing, I am less pleased with the reality of life once again hacked into four-month pieces.

How much longer do I need to learn that everything is temporary.

Until I get it right? it wrongs me.

I’m choosing it, at least the artificiality. Four months here, four months there, get far and never close. But it may be that making these decisions—a layer of choice over the truth of inevitability—keeps me from the danger of realizing I’m not in control of anything.

In the meantime—that is this time, right now—I am overwhelmed by what I must accomplish in the coming weeks, such as renting out my Vancouver place. Finding a new place to live in a city I won’t be able to visit until I actually move there. Finishing up the current, ever-crushing courses, all within the month because at the beginning of December I’m going to NYC for a two-week practicum at the New York Public Library.

I am ecstatic and daunted, naturally. About everything. Completing the term, laying to waste logistics and arriving, there. The big apple to my mini. The can’t stop won’t stop city that never sleeps. I have never been, and I’ll be staying with Anna, the sorely missed. She’s promised me frolics, jaunts and restaurants to die for. We shall go dancing. We shall “do it up.” We shall kick a hole in that city that will heal instantaneously but leave me forever marked.

Following that, I’ll be in the Midwest for the Holledays. I’m unsure of Minneapolis dates, if I’ll be there at all. :/ Fargo will be no less living out of a suitcase, but I suspect I shall be tired of the kindness of couches, burdening of friends, and thus may keep it short, if not nonexistent. If I do wander through, it would be starting December 17th for a couple-few days. I will keep in touch.

Here’s the annual Halloween card:

I was Prometheus, damned to perpetually have my liver torn out by a fluffy bald eagle. It was the first time I ever made guts—I was quite pleased, especially considering I came up with the idea, bought the materials, assembled it, applied it and was freaking out my bus driver on my way downtown dancing all in under four hours. The guts are crepe paper souped up in maple syrup and food-coloring fake blood. The next living dead event I attend will definitely see me a gutty zombie. 😀

My birthday followed not far after. Twenty-seven feels older than other degrees of relativity, different, no turning back, especially when I don’t want to. Uncaring that I can’t. I have developed a dent in my face—a crevice between my eyes, all but unnoticeable to others now, I’m sure. This hollow collects shadow that with the cleft in my chin and the groove in my lip where the angel went shhhhh! cuts my face in half.

In five years, it shall be distinctive. In ten, dramatic. In the years following that, my whole face will cave, and this dent will no longer be special. A shame. I think it’s beautiful.

So… with a bit of chagrin, and horror, I’ve come to realize I sink more time in Facebook than here. Quantity can’t beat quality, sure, but it feels like deepsicks is always playing catch-up, especially with general news. Maybe it’s because Facebook is more fun, what with the interaction and opportunity for the gibes, games and glory to spill over into the meatspace.

Different spaces function differently, no doubt about it, and there can be no comparison, really. But I mention it as prelude to the hope that free time in Vic will afford me the chance to pull d6 outta the one-point-oh. Nothing too fancy (considering how I already broke the rising), but an RSS feed is long overdue, and it’d be nice to have deeper integration among my web playgrounds, especially within this one.

Deepsicks is not more true. I am beyond confused by questions of authenticity and my own authority to assign it, even to myself and my own creations, in closed systems, secrets that don’t know they’re secrets. But it is more something. More less, more or less, the edge of experience I otherwise dare not describe.

On an unrelated, random note, I’ve been heavily listening to Nine Inch Nails’ album Year Zero, which, incidentally, I definitely feel too old for. Even as a teen, I bit my tongue tucked in the corner of my cheek. But this, somehow, snuck up on me. Feels good to know I can still be knocked down by a piano, remastered times a million distortion and lyrics unconvincing but shouted oh so just oh so right.

Yeah.