dulcetly...notes on a bookish life

The last couple of days have been scorchers, which I have been mitigating with cool showers, lots of fans, and large amounts of fruit(mandarin oranges and peaches)soaked in various alcohols. Since I like to have all the windows open at home, I usually don't run the little portable a/c unless it's completely unbearable. The library is always freezing and I have a window unit in the studio, but up here, where one whole wall is basically big windows spanning the living room and dining room, I like to leave them open to catch the lake breezes from a block over. We mostly had no a/c growing up, so I remember spending alot of time outside to escape the heat in the house. One whole summer during college I read alot of Hemingway and Fitzgerald perched in front of a box fan and moved it room to room with me. Another, I spent wholed up in the second run theater at the mall watching bad movie after bad movie.

I also used to carry around a big envelope box with all my drafts and writing stuff, which I would take outside and pore over magazines deciding where to submit really crappy work (of course, I was 20, so I thought everything I was writing, mostly slender little social message poems, were absolute genius.) This was pre-internet, mostly pre-e-mail, not to mention all of my drafts were typewritten on the electric machine I bought with my h.s. graduation money, every page clotted with dabs of correction fluid from my shoddy typing skills. It was basically that way every summer during high school and college. Luckily, my undergrad years were pretty much paid for, so besides some departmental work during the year and helping my mom out with chores in the summer, I had a little spending money and never had to get an actual job, so summers were like these wide swathes of free time during which I read and wrote, slept til noon and stayed up all night. I was spoiled completely, and of course, I miss those days sometimes, that time and freedom from responsibility.

Even my Depaul years, when I was living off loans and credit cards for 2 years, I remember lots of anxiety over never having enough money during the summer and spending alot of it in the country with my parents. Even my first job for the school district, though the pay was awful, allowed me the summers off. Ever since, I've worked year round and definitely wish I'd been more productive during all those summers. Now as I rush from job to studio, to home, then back again, trying to write and create and edit in the hours between, I love taking my vacations in the summer and pretending, for a little while, that I have these endless stretches of time even if they are finite.