erin at work:

wait--is today still today? 

... i've accomplished so much, that I can't tell how much time has passed. 
i've also been sitting in this room by myself for too long.  i can tell by my verbal reponses to external stimuli, and by my tendency to sing along with Netscape radio's 90's Alternative station. 
at least my nails look good for once. 

wait. 
what day is today again?  oh, wednesday.  only. 
that's several painful hours until friday, and madison, and old [but newly married] friends and chill music. 
and i want like a real weekend, like i used to have, when i could disappear into the couch with Queer Eye marathons and chicken tenders, when i had a real kitchen, and this suitcase campus lived up to its name. 

i'm itchy to have a drink, i haven't in ... weeks.
i'm itchy to give up the anticipation and get a job and make a life in a city open past 7, and i'm itchy to love on the people who've loved on me. 
...
leaving might hinder that. 

and i'm still struggling with whether it's cooler to have that place to go and drink stale coffee late at night and fiddle with ashtrays and talk about music and relationships and things that don't matter, just to make the passing time alive ... or whether it's cooler to know which places attract these regulars, and showing up only for an hour or so, when you're in town because you had to stop by and visit your parents and let them take you grocery shopping--you've gotta get back to your very urban life any moment now, you've got very important things to attend to. 

all this time, and i still wanna be cool. 

so, i made this totally sweet entry late the other night about how i genuinely enjoy and spend too much money on nerdy health foods.  it was so great.  but it's not here.  so something awkward must have happened between my hand and the computer.  and that is kind of disappointing. 

that was totally boring. sorry.

my newest revelation is that i LOVE tutoring students at the Writing Center.  even if the acne-scarred, suspender-clad, densely-communicative old man that runs the place is an irredeemable jerk. 
there's just something about helping people reach a place of understanding that gives me energy.  it's so great--they'll come in with a bad attitude, ("my prof made me come here.") and after a half an hour working through word by word, and sentence fragment by sentence fragment, their eyes become clearer and their posture less burdened, and suddenly they've created two pages of something that makes complete grammatical sense.  and for most of these kids, that's something they rarely experience.  then they can walk out of that office and confidently submit an essay, or research paper, or scientific report, maybe for the first time ever. 
maybe i'm being melodramatic, but i swear there's a visible physiological change each student goes through as he works to improve his writing.  trust me, i've seen it. 
and it's therapeutic for me too:  the quiet of the lab is warm and comfortable, the gentle rhythm of typing and the slowed breathing of concentration is soothing. 
yesterday was a dream.
his body labored under the stress of confusion as he lowered his heavy linebacker belly in behind the kidney-shaped desktop, and he let out a nervous sigh as he pulled out a few pages of a reflection on an essay by Langston Hughes.  after a long, defensive explanation of the story, his repeated efforts to write the piece, and all the ways his professor had helped him highlight main ideas and form complete, structured paragraphs, he gripped his pencil and eraser with huge, tense brown fingers and braced himself as i skimmed over his piece. 
we worked slowly through his diction and the clarity of an attribution or two. his eyes clouded with all the letters, all the words that he was working so hard to make sense of.  goosebumps chased up and down my forearms as i watched him concentrate and thumb through a thesaurus, burdened by the words he couldn't pronounce, and haunted by his original choice of "unfortunate."  (i would have felt comfortable with that word choice, but he was determined to find the perfect word.)
an hour passed, and a long hopeful story unfolded of his last five years in and out of community college and his mother's recent return to college to become certified as an RN (she had to take the test three times before she finally passed). "She's like been my inspiration..."
he paused, and glanced over the pages, our journey mapped out with neat pencil markings and shadowed eraser rubbings, and the stress suddenly evaporates off his shoulders. 
"I think this is a pretty good paper," he said, beaming. 
"I think you're right," I smiled and replied. "Nice work, man."