Many a-thing a-happenin' a-today...

Any day when I’ve taken enough pictures of lovely things to share multiple stories is a day I can consider “seized” in my book.

Weather.com announced the hourly forecast from 8am to 8pm was either 75 degrees or 76 degrees, so I met with one of my favorite people to go for a walk in Riverside Park. Having arrived early at our meeting place at Jules, one of my favorite coffee houses in La Crosse, I sauntered over to the connected used bookstore to pass the time. In something that I think would qualify as a nook or a cranny, I found a bright green chair. 

[I’ve seen chairs of the same shape and style, but they’ve always been a lame gray-pink color or something. If this doesn't amaze you, probably you’re just a bit saner than I am.]

When I re-entered Jules and sat down in a booth, I found an old man sleeping across the room. I snuck a picture under the table.

[Ironic that he's sleeping thirty feet from a counter behind which all the caffeine he could ever need sits.] 

My friend and I then had a wonderful time walking through Riverside Park, and I found a dapper old man on a bench.

 [A top hat, huh?  Good for you, gramps.]

And then I came home, and made a delicious pasta dish with asparagus and bacon and other yummy stuff, and served it decadently on a paper plate because our dishwasher is temporarily broken and we don’t want to hand wash our real dishes. (Yeah, we’re really roughing it right now.)

[It was delicious.]

….aaand that’s my day.  The second day of a summer full of Popcorn Dayness. I suggest you all do something blogworthy—something you can take pictures and tell people about—at least once this week.  It’s working for me so far.

First Day of Popcorn Dayness

I set out today fervent on doing something blogworthy. Yesterday's post released in me a drive to do something blogworthy every day this summer, and gall darnit, I'm gunna.

One of my favorite memories from my Europe trip last summer was walking through lavender fields in the Provence region of France. Every whiff of lavender that comes near me since then has brought me right back to that lavender farm, when all was right with the world, my nostrils happily burning with a day-long scent of that warm, purple plant. 

In the midst of the 24-hour pity party I had yesterday, I smelled lavender drifting in from my window. Strange, given that no one around us grows lavender. I'm going to buy some lavender plants tomorrow, I decided.

And here we are, 12:14 on a Wednesday afternoon, and I just bought two wonderful pots of lavender. It requires full sunlight, so the first I moved to a nicer pot and planted on my deck, and the second right outside my bedroom window.

Yum. A summer full of Popcorn Dayness, here I come!

An Empty-Filled Summer Beginning

Having pretty successfully (if I may say so myself) finished off the final exams of my Junior year of college, I am now back in La Crosse.

I must say for the first time it’s felt quite strange to be back here. I mean, I’ve done some pretty fun things so far: learned how to brew southern sweet tea, finished the Harry Potter series I started at Christmas, made a pretty fantastic compost bin for my parents made from recycled shipping pallets, and a few more things. But I’ve also done boring stuff like look for a job, try desperately to sell more of my CDs (BrianSchroederMusic.com, if you really want to make me feel like I’m doing something worthwhile), and answer questions from others and myself that have the overarching theme of What-The-Hell-Are-You-Going-To-Do-In-Twelve-Months-When-You’re-Done-With-College? To be quite honest, I feel as though I have lots of possibilities for a post-college career, all of which I can’t pursue until I get back to school in the fall. Unfortunately, the continue to nag me, now in the first day of June, with three months of potential nothingness ahead of me.

Remember last summer? Where is that magic? Where is the Emerson Merrick I-Appreciate-Everything-So-Deeply-I’m-Willing-To-Sob-While-Looking-At-A-Bowl-Of-Tomatos-I-Planted-Myself Popcorn Day happiness that was woven through every post of this blog just a year ago?  Where are all the zany dreams? Last night I dreamed that it was the night before Christmas and I hadn’t gotten anyone in my family a gift yet. I can’t make a witty collage out of construction paper from that!

I see no reason or excuse of why it’s not happening so far, on my second week of my last free summer vacation.  I need to start to do blog-worthy things again, and quick.

Death of a Flying Friend

Somewhere on the campus of Bethel University, there is a tree.

But this isn’t just any old tree. This is a tree like no other. It’s a tree that reaches to heights even unattainable to NASA. Amongst razor-sharp flakes of pine bark, its trunk is covered with broken lower branches that could slice a tomato without bruising the skin or squishing the insides. The ground around it is at a 45 degree angle, making it even more impossible to manage. This tree is a monster.

And my kite, the famous and reliable Mr. Wingsy, has been stuck in it for three weeks.

On a slightly windy day, I decided to take Mr. Wingsy out of a fly up on the tallest hill on campus.  There are a good amount of trees up there, even though a lot of the top of the hill is grassy.  Given how Mr. Wingsy has a humongous wingspan, I figured that he would be able to fly very nicely and well-manneredly above them.  And he did for a while. 

Mr. Wingsy was just screaming for more slack. “Come on, Shreds! Just let out a few more feet!” So I gave it to him. Little did he or I know what a riotous wind war was going on just fifty feet higher.  Even his unswerving, consistent design couldn’t handle the angry gusts coming at him left and right.  And he nosedived. 

“No biggie,” I though to myself, “I’m so good at getting kites out of trees!” So I tugged, and I pulled, and I gave slack, and I pulled again…a half hour went by…I was tired and sweaty from negotiating this kite out of the tree.  With one final burst of energy I pulled for the last time as the string snapped and sent me flailing down on my backside.

(Tear.)

When I went to survey where Mr. Wingsy had been stuck, I could just make out the tip of his wing from miles up into the sky, at the exact top of the tree. No long sticks would reach to that altitude.  Climbing was not an option.

So, along with Christie and another friend, I stole the longest extendable ladder I could find in the Art department, trudged it up the hill (which, trust me, was a long walk), and laid it up against the trunk. Not even half way.  I was lucky enough to find an actual tree that had broken at the roots and hefted it, one handed, up the ladder as far as I could.  With great terror, I wrapped my leg around the rungs of the ladder and pushed the smaller tree above my head, and found that I was still about ten feet from the kite.  I was out of options.

This is probably why I haven’t posted in so long: the pain of the thought of poor Mr. Wingsy, stuck in that Goliath of a tree, possibly to never be flown again.

Just an hour before Mr. Wingsy’s fatal nosedive, Christie painted a picture of him, which is now in memoriam, entitled Death of a Flying Friend.  

Moment of silence, please. 

Where I've Been and What I've Dreamed

I figured that I should probably post something, given that I’m about to receive The Worst Blogger Alive Award from you, my faithful followers. You have still been checking, though; I’ve seen on my Analytics page that I average about six blog visits a day, which makes me feel like you are going to my blog, seeing “One Very Busy Night In My Head” for the hundredth time, shaking your head and saying, “How has it come to this?”

Actually, I doubt that any of you are that interested in my blog.  Not that that bothers me, necessarily; I’m just so vain that way.  (I probably think this song is about me.)

If it makes you feel any better (it makes me feel less like a blogging jerk, at least), I have been pretty busy.  Here’s what I’ve done lately:

1. Become obsessed with the process of bookmaking, which I’ve learned from my bookmaking class.  I’ll show you some of my projects sometime.

2. Starred in a one-act play at my school.

3. Listened way too intently to Renaissance through Rococo Art History lectures every Tuesday and Thursday.

4. Dreamed more than I ever have before, and stupidly forgotten most of them.

5. Won Bethel Idol singing competition! My winnings: $200 and the fear that someone will confront me about how I am supporting a form of idolatry.

6. Finished Harry Potter Four…Oh my gosh can you believe that Mad-Eye Moody?!

So, even though I’ve been busy, I thought I’d give you a little sump’m sump’m before I head off to California for spring break with Bethel Choir tomorrow, even though this post is probz a little bit too long.

Here’s a dream that I had the other night—one that I remember, anyway…

In my unconscious, I visited a very peculiar town.  Nestled in a small cranny somewhere in the United States (probably in a state, I’m guessing) was a tiny village that spread out vertically instead of horizontally. Let’s call it Whoopsy-Daisyville. Why not.

Whoopsy-Daisyville rested on top of a perfectly measured inverted square the size of a city block. The buildings in that block were dank and gray, dusty with the remnants of years and years of movement that happened above them. Mostly deserted, these dilapidated structures were company to the occasional stray cat or runaway kid that chose to lurk in their shadows.

I was invited to walk around by an elderly man, the kind of guy who still goes running all the time in a t-shirt tucked in to his elastic-waisted windbreaker pants, and sports a walkman (yes, an actual, prehistoric walkman) clipped to the same waist band. Let’s call him Silvio.  He also had a cat.  Let’s call him Tangerine.

Silvio and Tangerine took me on a tour of this town, Whoopsy-Daisyville, an organized mess of stairs and buildings, painted only in the colors or the new Sharpie Pens: Orange, Red, Blue, Green, and Purple (pretty much all my faves).  As we walked over and through purple bridges and green stairways, red rope ladders and orange houses, I wondered how this place was supported. It seemed as though it was only kept up by its numerous walkways. Another mystery that slipped into my mind was that there didn’t seem to be any problems with shadows, regardless of where these ladder-hoisted buildings and walkway were. I was amazed.  Popcorn Day weather.

[I'm trying hard not to listen to the fact that the Art Minor inside of me is ranting about how the bottom of this drawing has two vanishing points.]

We toured the whole town, up and down, Tangerine jumping from railing to landing ever so often.  Silvio waved to a person walking a schnauzer-like dog, merrily. I also spotted a man riding a bike. (How the hell can you ride a bike with all these stairs?) We strolled through a fresh market, a coffee shop, a park made for kids, and finally Silvio’s home. Like all the other buildings, multiple stairways and ladders came in and out of it. The house was adorned with giant windows and hanging flower baskets in the doorway (just flowers in these, though; no popcorn). The blue porch had a walkway up to garden on the roof, which had not only vegetables and flowers, but big trees as well. Most of the houses had them.

It was the most lovely and confusing day.  I knew I wanted to stay there forever, though, in the sun, smelling flowers and waving at dogs, walking around with Silvio and Tangerine…it would have been great, but somewhere in there I woke up, and all I could do was sketch it.

Have a nice spring break, everyone. I’ll have more to write about in a week or so.

One Very Busy Night in My Head...

I don't know how this all happened in one night. This is what I typed into my phone when I woke up. Get ready.

While I was climbing up flights and flights of stairs with groceries, I dropped a bag of chips, a loaf of bread, and some peanut butter, and sincerely hoped they didn’t land on anyone below me.

My sisters pets—two cats, which she has in real life, and her dreampet, a giant white dog—had fleas the size of couscous grains. After cuddling with them, I had like eight of those stupid fleas in my mouth. I found out later that when flicked, the fleas grow much larger and work well as something to attach to a zip line.

Hanging out at my former art teacher’s house, I found out that he used to be a Jew, and that he currently has a super cool dishwasher whose racks roll out and sideways.

The former principal of my high school tried out a rap he was going to share with the kids.

I had to help with an elementary school’s gym class and give them ideas of things to do, and I thought that throwing a bunch of manhole-sized slices of pepperoni for the kids to play with (which the instructors were doing) gave the kids too much pressure to join organized sports.

My parents were making out in my room.  Not cool, Mom and Dad.

I ran into a kid from my school who looked like Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter with curly hair, who had quit school and lived on the side of a river in Wisconsin because he fell in love with the taste of the monkeys he found there. The jerk made fun of me reading a book with a portable book light, saying that it was part of my lame religion, and somehow we got into a fistfight. 

Because of the fight, I got kicked out of school, and sent to a ranch where Michael Scott from The Office lived alone.  He bragged about having a big truck with a bunch of funny action figures and stuff on the dashboard. I later found out that the truck had no engine and that it is so like his character to do something like that.

And then I woke up. 

Return of the Head-i

Good news, friends. After months of regrowing, my frozen, chapped scalp has finally produced enough hair that I can now mold it into what I have lovingly called in previous posts, The Whippy Dip.

[In my Environmental Ethics class, my hair was compared to a tsunami on Dress-Like-A-Natural-Disaster Day, and I can’t seem to shake that image.]

So have no more fears, faithful follower(s). My flippy-haired drawings are now accurate to the real life me. No more lies.