The Upside of Being Entirely Aimless

I forgot to bring anything for lunch today. I have all of this delicious produce at home and I keep forgetting to use it. It's going to wither away to goo and I will have wasted my, well I was going to say hard-earned money... but that wouldn't really be accurate.

This week, though, I feel like I worked pretty hard. Justin and I have been working on this project that will eventually make it so that there is only one print copy of any journal on campus so long as there is online access to said journal. Which, in theory, is an important project because it will free up a great deal of much needed shelf space. But it means that we have to get rid of large quantities of these duplicated journals. So Justin and I were at other libraries this week gathering carts full of volumes to eventually ship off to other libraries. I got off pretty easy because he did most of the heavy lifting, and it was his car that had to really bear the brunt. Ah, the sound of an undercarriage scraping on cement. It was fun, though. I'm glad I volunteered him for this job and not anyone else.

It's Friday, and I'm very excited to sleep in tomorrow. That was one of the only things that motivated me to get out of bed this morning, actually. I thought of how I will be able to sleep in as late as I want tomorrow, and that fortified me enough to face another day at work.

What will I do in Portland? Where will I go in December when MG's job ends and she will potentially leave Portland? Will I ever stay anywhere longer than 6 months?

I'll go to Italy. I'll work in a restaurant. When I was in Guatemala we went to a beautiful little restaurant on our first night. We were staying in Antigua, the gringo tourist hot spot of the country. We sat down on the open-air patio and an equally beautiful, young American man came over and handed us menus. He asked, "how's your Spanish?" and laughed when we said all said variations of "extremely shitty." In that moment I created an entire back story for this guy. He dropped out of college, moved to South America, fell in love with a lovely dark-haired girl, had his heart broken by that lovely dark-haired girl, and was traveling around the continent, never staying in one place for too long, trying to forget about her.

So maybe that will be me. I suppose that anything is possible when you don't have any plans. That's the upside of being entirely aimless. One more month here, and I don't know how I'll stand it. I'm starting to get weird pangs of finality, like during the last few weeks of high school. That knowledge that you will never see some of these people again, that you will never take this familiar walk down the street again.

But, as I said, it's Friday. The weekend is spread out before me. I said "it's Friday" to a co-worker a little while ago, in a very cheesey, co-workerly, TGIF sort of way. He then said something about how it's dangerous to always wish it's Friday. He said something about the 'dangers of wishing my life away.' Well, Gary, I'll be on the west coast in about a month and a half, doing exactly what I wish. So don't worry about me. And I'm not taking my job too seriously until then, so don't worry that I'm working to hard or not enjoying the time I have left here. No worries on that front.