the voice was being nice

forward and present, in minneapolis. a city i love riding through. i come here in the fall when they leaves change color and there is an abundance of these changing leaves. i come here in the spring. there is oftentimes wind tunneling through the city and i get to see lovely people while i am here. play with basho. there are many things i love about my line of work and traveling and meeting people are certainly two. experiencing and making, too.

i've been thinking a lot about the current thread of clean visual movement the web is making. timelines and flipboards. it seems very interesting how web trends are distinctive. i think one could catalogue the past ten years in the way the face of the web has changed, by tracking design patterns. more than dress patterns, anyway. i wonder about this. i wonder about choice.

and i eat the most delicious chocolate filled croissants. and miss you.

we bother home

in our boots

your little feet and mine

we bother home and the fuss

a little boy swims in a pool

full of wonder and shy

his name is the piece of the fish

when i tell him about my father's leg

perfect hiding place

i know he understands me

enough that i see his eyes

we bother home

all the messy get clean up

with towels and papers

the bed is made

there is something essentially sunday and grand about sitting in a coffee shop, drinking an aranciata and reading alcoff and narayan. trying to write a decent essay about "the problem of speaking for others." at some point being a student switched on (again) in the more formal sense.

we have to stop seeing each other like this. it seems like the time to actually update comes under the strange event in which i have enough time to meander over here and see its been a couple months. today, ladies and gentlemen, as you probably already know, is a snow day! that's right. the college has ceased operations for the first time in recent memory and i am home, occasionally looking out at the drifts. lisa and i have plans to take a walk out into that wintry white in a couple hours, in-between bouts of work and studying for my philosophies of feminism exam. oh yeah, i started taking a class winter term. i also joined the galesburg library book club and the whole girl scout co-leader thing goes well and gets more and more exciting as julia and i continue to introduce our troop to some pretty fancy things: semaphore! fires! cupcakes! i'm also taking advantage of this mid-week-weekend to write a few letters and talk to some people. there is also a potentially large scale, long term plan in the works out here in galesburg, but i will hold my tongue. for now, all is well and bright. someone is playing music of which i can hear the faint beat, there are sounds of shovels scrapping and i am warm.

A weekend in which I have almost nothing to do, but think and read and write and walk. An update on life. I began a new job in August, going back to the Knox where I had a delightful time of it as an undergrad and now work. I really enjoy my job: part admission counselor, part writer/communications contributor. The best part about anything is usually the people and I have met some pretty amazing and intelligent people. Winter term I plan on taking a class. This is exciting. At the moment there are people outside my apartment shuffling around and trying to nail down a plumbing issue in one of the other apartments on the first floor. I live in a mansion. An old, huge, white home that was one of the first built when Galesburg was being founded alongside the college. Since it has been split into apartments. In mine a lovely, large fireplace holds many candles. I feel at ease in the space, at home. Lately I have been thinking about my lives in Japan and Sicily, gender and women's studies, organization and action. As I meet current students I am impressed by the things that they do and the creatures that they are. The same goes for colleagues. I want to acquire new skills which mostly center around technology. I want to travel soon, perhaps in the spring, specifically to Rio and Seattle. Since I have been away I began being in this gorgeous relationship with Adam, a boy I dated in high school. I am in awe of the fact that we dated then, as though I knew so much more than I was knowing at the time. To be with him again has been delightful and full of love. In Galesburg I have had a few visitors already, I look forward to more. I am actually, really, considering the potential buying of a home in the nearish future. This last thing seems so strange and right. During my work travels I got to make my way through Iowa and Minnesota and see so many great friends and do so many things, have so many conversations. And now it is sunny. The day has offered an extra hour for something.

realistically i think i find tumblr a more interesting place for myself. this has to do with the fact that i find what really interests me to be the things that influence me, the things that mount up on my radar and cause me to think or relax or feel as though i am in the presence of beauty and usually all three. this blog though has a place and will continue to still have a place. in fact i am interested in giving that place more focus, as in using it to talk about what i have been ingesting and create combinations/permutations/possibility for what that might mean to myself and my own suitcases of prior thought and experience. this is hopefully going to amount to, slowly, but surely, an eventual place to house something like essays/creative nonfiction. bear with it if you would like because in all likelihood it will be a process.

lately i have been very future minded. the past seven months i spent in sicily were interesting in the way in which they presented to me an entire place in which though it would seem i would feel right at home, given my strong sicilian family history, i did not. the ways in which i did not weren't all together evident, they were slippery, being felt to a certain extent, but being fairly easy to deny or at least create simplified excuses for and then move on operating under the fantastically easy assumption that their essence had been sussed out, found to be impossible to alter and so... though in reality that being the case did not then go on to create a kind of understanding by which i was taken as different, but capable of being integrated into a system of what existed, rather it was a little of that and more of: so, now you are here and you are the one who is going to have to do the bending. this interestingly to me seems to span far more than just my particular experience in sicily, it seems to feed into and permeate a lot of the reading i have been doing lately and the general theoretical work going on in politics, economics and society.

this is nothing new, the first time i started to really think about this was in professor cohn's macroeconomic class... but what is new now is the introduction of things which have the potential to shape this impossible to describe, yet inevitable feeling of future. the cynism and sometimes necessity of the argument that there is a lack of clarity about the particulars of what a post-capitalist world would look like... one where things are going to change regardless of people's, institutions', ... lack of desire to want to or to know exactly how to. we are writing along the way.

part of the problem which might arise here and otherwise in my own daily life is that i am always talking within a continuium, of the stuff i have been through and the stuff i am reading and thinking about and most of it is happening outside of say my particular interaction with this particular person. this is because in part because we are not so neatly placed in the same continuium as we might have been when we were in school together or worked together or were in one way or another involved in the same world even in slightly different ways most of our days and, so here is a place to create context, a place to sit down and write and have a record of that writing, if one so chose, to be able to fairly enlighten someone else and allow them to step in enough to start to make some kind of real empathetical connection/contribution with what i am going through/thinking and then begin to also make that work both ways through the hoped offer of some shared interest type furthering discussion and materials...

http://notroubles.tumblr.com/

hitting the three week mark since i have been back in the states and i think the biggest change i have had to find ways of considering and coming to terms with is the change in speed of life. sicily was a very slow moving place for me in comparison to the amount of distraction and action the states seems ready to provide and engulf one in, positives and negatives to each abound.

my reading diet hasn't suffered much from the transition though, this is nice. what is also nice is being able to see a lot of people from a lot of different parts of my life. chicago is a good city and i feel the more i get to know it the better i feel about maybe staying, i know. but then again nothing is certain. if i know anything about the next part of my life its pretty much i am likely to be surprised. okay.

, originally uploaded by notroubles.

wearing traditional albanian costume.

, originally uploaded by notroubles.

last sunday, my grandfather turned 86.