While the sky is still dark

Getting up at 5AM, while not my favorite thing in the world, is at least something I'm somewhat familiar with. I was a figure-skater for a few years a looong time ago, and I had many a day at Interlochen where I had to get up before the sun in order to either go running (which I quickly learned was a bad life choice), finish all the homework I'd neglected the night before, or simply because I couldn't go back to sleep. C'est la vie, as my best friend Dean Moriarty would say. (Yes, Dean, I still whole-heartedly want to believe that I'm your Sal Paradise)

Excuse me if this post doesn't make too much sense. Sleep-deprivation will do that to you.

Waking up to a pink sky, after falling asleep at one-thirty AM, and realizing that I have less than a half-hour to be ready to walk out the door is an experience that I have never found pleasant, exactly, but definitely rewarding. I'm always so much more...interesting? Well, some would probably say pretentious...in the morning. I always feel so ready to slip into my Interlochen, or even pre-Interlochen, persona of the girl who, quite simply, had no damns to give. I don't straighten  my hair anymore, or I do so very rarely, and I hardly ever leave the house without a tube of lipstick in my pocket. I always have a notebook with me, ready to scribble down my latest screenplay idea or a poem I'm more likely to make up on the spot and then forget later. I'm hard to understand, I'm told, because I change my mind at least 5 times a minute. Multiply that by oh, about twelve when I've just woken up. It's impossible to keep up with.

It's just light outside now, and not too cold, and people are just starting to filter into the Oakland Center. And I love this building because where I am, the walls are mostly glass, and it makes looking outside so much easier. I don't have my camera with me; I've yet to bring my camera to OU--too risky, especially when I'm already lugging a backpack and a scooter, I can only look after so many things at once. But I love this place, and I swear that as soon as it's fall, and the leaves begin to turn, I will throw caution to the winds and bring my camera, and take picture after picture of this place looking prettier than any New England campus. (Yes, Saxophone Boy, I'm looking at you and I will forever maintain that my campus is prettier than yours.)

I really do think that there are times when someone needs to duct-tape my mouth (or in this case my fingers) before more word-vomit comes out.

I don't think I've done a post this unstructured since Homesickness, Receding last April. In fact I'm sure I haven't. I think it's because I'm essentially automatic-writing and when I do that early in the morning, there's really no way of shutting me up.

Because I promised new photography awhile ago and can't currently deliver new photography owing to the fact that my camera and memory cards are safely in my room while I'm sitting at a cafeteria table a half-hour's drive away, here are some spring break photos that I never got around to posting. Taken with a Samsung Galaxy II in Cuyohoga Falls, OH and Port Huron, MI, with one random shot of my house.

 You don't know what a big deal it was to see this train--for reference, I've been going to this particular spot since I was a baby and I had never seen a train cross through there until that day.

(photo credit to my dad) 

"Whaaaat?" (photo credit to my dad)