first of the lasts

Since I can remember, the first day of school has always been accompanied with excitement and a little anxiety -- Will my teacher be nice? Will I know people in my class? What if I forget my schedule or get lost?

But this first day of school is particularly jarring: Tomorrow is the last first day of school I will ever have.

I love school, I always have. I'm a good student, call me a priss, a goody-goody, whatever. But I like to learn. I like the process of school, I like the adrenaline you get when you take a test, and then again when it's being handed back by the teacher. I like going home and talking about the things you learned, the things that blow your mind because you could have never imagined that they were true. I like buying school supplies, I love the smell of fresh notebook paper and I think I'm vaguely obsessive when it comes to buying day planners.

But never again. Not unless I go to grad school, which won't be happening any time soon. And not until my children, should I have them, pack up their backpacks and head to school will that first day of class be important again.

I've been trying not to think a lot about the number of lasts that are about to start cascading down on my life. It seems so incredible that I'm here, finally, staring at only four months left in a place I've called home for four years. A place where I've both found and lost any number of things, clothing, friends, love, my sense of self.

I often like to think about the road not taken, about the way things could have ended up but didn't. What if I had gone to Boston University like I so desperately wanted to? What if I had never met Olivia, Mandy, Ryan, Bryan, Colleen, Kiersten and all of the other people I see as so necessary to my life, that I love so deeply. What if I had chosen differently?

One thing is for sure, regardless of where I was, I'd probably still be feeling this same ache, knowing that goodbyes are coming. Lasts are inevitable. But so are beginnings. I've never been good with change -- McKenzie always says we're ducks in a row kind of girls -- we like everything in order. I like to know where I'm going, how I'm going to get there and what it'll look like when I finally arrive. But life's not like that. I don't know where I'm going, I don't know what I'm doing. And it's scary. But I sort of like it.

My professor over this past winter term (my last winter term) told us every so often to buckle our seatbelts, grab the oxygen if needed and prepare for a bumpy ride.

It's going to be a bumpy few months, but I think it's going to be ride of a lifetime.

...Anyone know where I can get an oxygen tank to have on hand?

a blog of a different color

So if you're a regular viewer, you'll notice a change in color. I decided to shake things up a bit, change the design of the page -- let me know how you like it.

The original photo was taken by my dear friend Alex Neff during a photo shoot last summer for her portfolio.

Thanks for all your support of the years. Please keep reading!

b.

just wow.

I wish I could say something original and profound. But I can't think of anything that hasn't been said already to describe the warmth I felt sitting on my couch, watching snow fall out my window, listening to Barack Obama become president.

I'm hopeful for tomorrow. I feel proud. I feel excited.

As I looked at the sea of heads on television that stretched for miles, I was overcome. I watched as millions of people, like me, welled up with tears in their eyes at the enormity and beauty of the history unfolding in front of our eyes. The thought that I couldn't shake: Only in America.

So yeah, wow. Just wow.

That's all for now.

circles

I really like circles.

I can't explain why, but I just really like them. I like the fluidity and the motion of their shape, and I like the symbolism of the never-ending form. I really like circles.

Since I'm a writer and an artist, I find myself thinking about things like circles. It sounds really strange, but I can't help it.

I've been taking yoga classes, which are helping me ground myself in my thoughts and my feelings -- discovering and understanding the way that my body moves and the way that we often think: in circles. An idea will pop into your head, you think on it, then move on to the next thing, then to the next thing, and then to the next thing. But then it dawns on you -- I've forgotten where I started. And you go back. You complete the circle, using the the things that you've thought in the interim as a prompt, a way to more fully understand the first thing.

When you learn to draw a person, most of us learned the circle method. We are, according to elementary art principles, just a bunch of circles. Sometimes ovals, but circles stacked and connected to create our form.

My grandfather has been very ill recently. He has congestive heart failure and was placed in a hospice facility about a week ago. I was telling someone about it and they said to me, not indignantly, but actually rather surprised, that I seem really very OK with it all. I'm not, actually, OK with everything, but the more I've thought about this, the more I'm beginning to accept that this is all just part of the circle. I hate the cliche -- the circle of life -- but I think, like all cliches, it exists because there is something of a fragment of truth to its meaning: You're born, you live, you die. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We're not meant to stick around forever, and I find something strangely comforting knowing that we live and die because we are meant to, not as some universal vengeance being taken on the living. Death is hard on the living, I've said that before, but mostly because it forces us to confront our own mortality, which I'm not going to lie, is absolutely terrifying. But why? Why is it so scary for us if that's what we're meant to do eventually? Maybe because living is the only thing we know how to do. These are all still thoughts in process... I'd like to know what you all think too.

But circles. Layers upon layers of circles. Life is about circles, days, weeks, months, years. The organization appeals to me and comforts my sensibilities. Such big ideas for a Thursday morning...

addiction

I've been called one before, but I did not, until today, realize just how big of an email-addict I am.

I discovered this little thing on bottom right corner of the Elon email page that, if you click on it, allows you to observe the number of times you've visited the Web site in the past. On my computer, which I've had since the spring of my freshman year, I have visited the Elon email web page 2,549 times.

Yes. And that's only on my computer. Can you imagine the countless number of times I've visited on the myriad of other computers I work with on a day to day basis? The numbers are staggering.

Hello, my name is Bethany...

paper towels

Last night I was reminded of this story, and I just wanted to share:


We roadtripped for 10 days. We drove for more than 3,000 miles, from North Carolina, to Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and back. Ten days in the car, just the two of us. We did a lot of talking, even more singing and we developed a case of kleptomania.

I've always been one to take the soaps and shampoo, pens and lotions from hotel rooms. I would never take towels or things of real value, but for some reason, I've forever felt entitled to the things that they would replace anyway if I hadn't taken them -- might as well put it to good use, I say. Waste not, want not, I say. He made fun of me a little that first morning in the hotel when I stuffed the lotion into my purse.

But then we went to the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, just to take a look at the ducks. The hotel is gorgeous, mission style furniture, stained glass, dark wood, marble floors and white flower arrangements. We each went to the bathroom. They're beautiful. Granite countertops, gold fixtures and these glorious luxury paper towels. We each walked out with three. They went promptly into the glove box. Only to be used in emergencies. These things are way too nice for just runny noses and random McDonald's spills. These are our special towels. And so begins our obsession.

Further into our trip, we're in Charleston. We stop to pee in a hotel after a day wandering around what has become one of our favorite cities. We come out of the bathroom, and walk out of the hotel. He takes my hand as we cross the street, walking his fingers up my right arm to my purse. Finding the zipper, he opens the bag and slyly shoves luxury hotel bathroom towels into my purse. "Who are you?" I ask. I've turned him into a towel snatcher.

Our trip ended and we'd filled the glove box with towels. Memorabilia from the multiplicity of nice hotels we'd peed in, but never slept at.

Two months later, we're in Boston saying goodbye. We had walked all day, through the public gardens and the common, lunch in Fanuiel Hall, dinner on Newbury Street and now it was time to pee. We stopped at a hotel a few blocks from Fenway. It was beautiful.

Marble. Dark-stained hardwood. Flower arrangements larger than the wingback chairs in my parents' house. The kind of place with nice paper towels.

I smile to the doorman as we walk by. He knows our purpose, but doesn't hesitate. We're two good looking 20-somethings, harmless and handsome. Holding hands as we walk in. We're blending. We're fitting in. We belong here. Hell, we go to Elon, half of my 9:25 a.m. Media History class has probably stayed here, so who's to say we couldn't be guests?

The bathroom is spectacular as I expected. I pee, walk to the beautiful Corian countertop to wash my hands. And there they are. The lux towels. They're perfect, thick paper towels that are so nice they feel like cloth. They're Peabody towels, but from Boston. I should grab some. No. No. I shouldn't do it. I can't, we've moved passed our spring break kleptomania.

After some mental sommersaults, I walk out of the bathroom empty handed. He takes my hand and we walk back out, fitting in as before, past the doorman and on to the street.

"Did you take the towels?" I asked once we were about half a block down the street.

"What? Of course not," he turns, his smile lighting up as he reaches to the big pocket on his khaki cargo shorts, which now, I notice, is bulging with four paper towels.

in the end it was the twinkies

I've been reading some pretty heavy philosophy for my methodologies in art history class. This week we're focusing on Martin Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art. Basically, Heidegger claims that the essence of a thing, especially and specifically a thing that works or produces some sort of good for the communal being (he was a Marxist...), lies in its ability to do that work. It is its true self when it is performing the function it was meant to perform. His example: a pair of peasant's (again, Marxist) shoes.

There are problems with his interpretation, the biggest according to one critic, being that the shoes he was inspired by, a painting by Van Gogh, are actually not peasant's shoes, they were Van Gogh's own shoes. To this one critic, the essence of the shoe lies in the fact that they aren't anyone else's shoes but Van Gogh and that is precisely why he chose to paint them. They were his and they represented him.

So I started thinking about my shoes. Bare with me here, there is a point, I promise. I started thinking about my shoes and what they say about me. I have lots of shoes, as do a lot of women, and some men, I suppose. And they all serve different purposes. Some are play shoes, the ones that I wear when we go out dancing or to the bar. I have dressy shoes, ones that I wear when I have to look all grown up and professional. I have comfy shoes, athletic shoes, and practical shoes. Slippers, pumps, flats, peep toes, red, brown, black (lots of black), blue, pink (yes, my sneakers are pink)... etc., etc., and the list goes on. One hundred years from now, when an archeologist uncovers my shoes, how in the world will they know who I am?

To Van Gogh, the shoes made the man, so to speak. He had probably only one or two pair, and they, like the lines on his face, bore the imprints of the miles he'd walked, the mud he'd schlepped through and the doormats he'd crossed. They probably had splats of paint, and maybe drops of blood from when he cut off his ear... only kidding, sort of. But Van Gogh truly believed that we could read a pair of shoes like a book -- the shoes maybe didn't make the man, but they were inexorable. You cannot have the pair of shoes be that pair of shoes without that man, and a man can't get very far (without lots of glass and prickly things in his feet) without the shoes.

Again, I swear I have a point. So I started thinking about my shoes again and my legacy. I've done this before, when I was holed up in the British Library about two years ago. Our consumerism has left us with dozens of pairs of shoes, tons of clothing, jewelry, CDs, DVDs. You name it, we have it in droves. What will archaeologists say about us? Because we're so forward-looking (heh, sure), theorists have already started predicting what will kill us all in the end and historians have already started anticipating how some of us will be remembered. But what about the every day people? What about you and me? How will what we leave behind shape how we're remembered?

There certainly isn't an answer, and I suppose there really wasn't a point other than to ask these questions. I would hope that some of the legacy will be good -- we managed to create a society where equality and justice, honesty and truth (hey, I can dream) were key doctrines. It'll probably be something along the lines of the indestructibility of Twinkies.

I can see it now, 150 years post-Armageddon...

Archaeologist 1: "Floyd, I just found something."
Archaeologist 2: "What is it, Vanessa?"
A1: "It's a strange yellow cylinder wrapped in plastic; it seems to have once been edible?"
A2 unwraps said shrink wrap and pops said yellow cylinder into his mouth: "Still is!"