Blustery New England Morning

The view from my balcony

BONUS PICTURE: Ashley dressed me as a hipster and I don't know what to think.

I look like freaking Chelsea.

Fall Traditions

Every fall, as Halloween approaches, my teeth begin to ache and I salivate more than usual. It's time for candy corn.


I gorge myself on this stuff every October. It's a new thing. I never touched it as a kid, not even in high school or early college. But then when I lived with Seamus and Ashley, in the fall of '06, I got really sick and spent a week on the couch, playing Final Fantasy XII, watching movies, sweating, dying, and eating nothing but candy corn and loaves of french bread. Ever since then, candy corn is fall comfort food. I bought a tub at Hannaford's yesterday.

I also need to accompany it with a video game, so I started back in on Link to the Past. What a fantastic game. I played it until I could eat no more candy corn and felt guilty about not doing homework, then I stopped. Also, if you haven't noticed by now, my secret goal here at thisisnolongertheroadtrip is to write about video games until I have driven everybody I know into a state of coma-like boredom.

Ashley and I also bought a scented candle, which is SOP for me in autumn as well. It's my favorite season. School is really, really time-consuming, so I haven't had a lot of time to get out and do things that are actually fun/worth writing about. Ashley and I did, however, buy our plane tickets home. We're getting out of here on the 11th of December and spending almost six weeks in Washington! Get ready Bellingham, friends who still live in the area, and Gabe and Amanda and Kaylee. I also got a second job, working as an online tutor for Smarthinking. I'm going through their training program right now and getting pretty excited about it. I'll have students again, sort of! I really miss teaching, and this will bring a bit of it back to me. The training manual is full of funny composition neologisms. I am an e-structor who focuses on HOCs before I focus on LOCs when I am writing an asynchronous tutorial. They also won't me to know that "although you can't see your students, you can still touch them."

I will, however, refrain from touching them.

First Fall Color on the UNH Campus

Sarah from the Office of Conduct and Management (where I work, casually known as the OCM) told me I needed to see the fall color early when the first leaves started to turn, then again at the peak of the season. I had wanted to hike up Mount Major near Lake Winnipesaukee to check out the trees and the views of the lake, but unfortunately, the homework load didn't let us. Instead, Ashley and I drove down to campus, which he hadn't had time to really check out yet.

It was family weekend, which meant a ton of parents and little kids, and an inordinate number of students out and about for a Saturday afternoon, but it was still nice. We wandered through the trails and looked for the College Woods, but could not find them. We guessed that they were the little woodsy breaks between clusters of buildings on campus and wrote off the grandeur of the name College Woods to the tiny New England scale of things ("Guys, this mountain is huge!"), but a quick Google search proves us wrong. We actually drove through part of them on the way home, to avoid the family weekend traffic; it's a big 250 acre nature preserve that the campus shoulders up against, with plenty of hiking and biking trails. Another time, College Woods, maybe deeper into fall or after the first snow.

Anyway, here's pictures from around campus.

We've got wicked oak trees here.

The camera doesn't really capture how vivid these red leaves were. Some of the trees look like they're on fire.

These little dudes are all over campus, and love to run under the feet of passersby, stand paralyzed with fear for a second, then run back under the bush they came from.

Hitchcock Hall, on the upper quad, where I work.

Groundhog! Woodchuck1 Whistle Pig! Land Beaver!

The backside of Thompson Hall, which is the cool old building they like to show people on the website.

Defacing signs is big here.

The Weather

I had a conversation with Kelly, a fiction prof at WWU, about the Northwest's weather. She was from Florida, and didn't understand when Washingtonians commented on the weather's changeability--"If you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes." She lived in the midwest for a time, and was used to thunderstorms descending from a blue sky, pouring out, and disappearing just as quickly. "The weather doesn't change here. It's just always gray. All the time," she said.

I laughed and agreed, and it wasn't until I got here that I understood Northwesterners perspective on their weather. It's about unpredictability. In Washington, weather forecasts aren't very useful: they may say that tomorrow will be rainy in the morning with clouds dissipating throughout the afternoon, but the weather invariably pulls a fast one--sunny in the morning, rain squalls in the afternoon, clouds at night. Or something else, who knows. In other parts of the country, and especially in New England--reading the forecast is like reading the movie times. It was humid and in the seventies today--miserable--and I looked online to check the weather tomorrow. The forecast says it will be humid and in the seventies, and I know, without a doubt, that it will be.

We've been having a weird summer hangover: humid, no rain, and the leaves don't know whether to die or hold on for another week. In a couple of weeks, Ashley and I are going to drive the Kancamagus in Northern New Hampshire to see the foliage. Pictures will happen, I promise.

My Obsessive Nerdery

I've been thinking a lot about old video games recently. Yesterday I watched my friend Patrick breeze through Super Mario Brothers like he had just beaten it yesterday. He knew every secret, every warp, every hidden block—like it was encoded into his genes. Nathan fared almost as well. They trash talked while they played. Patrick, from Alabama, would stand up and yell “BOOM!” every time he pulled off a difficult maneuver.

Nothing makes me feel more at home than playing a Mario game with somebody. This is what I'm into right now: how junk entertainment like NES games from the 80s can worm its way into our brains and hearts, into our art and music. They can become something bigger than computer code on a dusty gray chipboard. If I were still taking theory classes at WWU, I would be preparing to write a paper on how vintage video games affect discourse and aesthetics. Since I'm in an MFA, I'm brainstorming ways to slip this stuff into fiction without it coming off as indulgent, nerd-elitist, or overly referential. It's hard, but, to me at least, it's important.

So it turns out Ashley and I are both dripping with Nostalgia. In that spirit, here's the transcript from one of my favorite scenes in Mad Men, when Don Draper sells the idea of the slide carousel to Kodak.

Nostalgia.
It’s delicate, but potent…
Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound.
It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.
This device… isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine.
It goes backwards, forwards.
It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.
It’s not called the Wheel.
It’s called the Carousel.
It lets us travel the way a child travels.
Around and around and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.

Bring on the emo comments, Chelsea!

Playlist

Albums I've been listening to:

The Turtles - "Twenty Greatest Hits"
Fleet Foxes - "Sun Giant EP"
The Zombies - "Odessy and Oracle"
The Love Lights - "Problems and Solutions" and "Lakes and Ponds EP"
Arcade Fire - "Neon Bible"
The Shins - "Wincing the Night Away"

Here's a link to some Love Lights stuff. I recommend "Evermore" from Lakes and Ponds, and anything from either of the live albums. They played in Bellingham last night, at Boundary Bay, and I would love to have been able to go. I need to catch up with Jeff and con him into sending me some new recordings.

I'm posting this because I have nothing real to post. I'm doing homework, reading a lot, and working at the OCM. Promise I'll update when something exciting happens.

What am I doing here again?

During a discussion in a fiction workshop at WWU, the topic of making sacrifices for the art came up. The stereotype goes that writers aren't good family people, they have a hard time maintaining friendships, keeping pets and plants alive, etc. But they write. They produce literature. Which was more important. The fact that we were all locked in a room together at eight o'clock at night, tired and hungry and caffeine-depleted, and paying thousands of dollars to be there seemed to say that yes, we were the type of people who were willing to make sacrifices to write. Kenny disagreed. Yes, literature is important, we're all here because we want to write and have to write, but—and this is exactly what he said—“In the end it's just a book.” He would love to spend his life writing, Kenny said, but he would love even more to spend it with his wife and sons and daughter.

Today my brother Gabe and his wife Amanda became parents, and I became an uncle. My mom skyped Ashley and I from the hospital room where my niece Kaylee was born. They are 3100 miles away, in Seattle; I am wondering what the hell I am doing in New Hampshire; and I am thinking about what Kenny said.

Congrats Gabe and Amanda, and happy birthday Kaylee!