strike that

Bringing Sexy Back

Just FYI, said Julie, the right lane goes to the coast.

What are we doing in the center lane? I responded, and like that she pulled her Cougar onto route twenty, which heads straight through the vineyards west of Corvallis until it hits the Pacific. You know you’re there when, at the top of the final hill, ocean fills the windshield.

There’s been a lot of resettling in the past year. Ty got a job in Florida. Talley’s in Central Pennsylvania. John came up on Thursday for a farewell dinner before heading to the OC. A Who’s Who of Who’s Left still managed to fill a table that stretched the length of the room. That is no small comfort.

My grad school crew had a collective panic when school was done. They let us out and we didn’t know where to go next, so for a long moment we stood still and blinked uncomfortably in the sun. What’s Next can be a bear, between billable hours and starting over in a new city. It was awkward. And messy. And not always handled with grace.

But it seems, one year and one summer out, we’re finding our footing. Ty has a boat, and John’s about to start programming in a town where he can use his surfboard, and Talley! Is a sculptor. Fuck! Stacey traded in her AutoCAD-all-day gig for a real design job, and Deb and Nopporn are getting married, and Nikki has said the word baby quite a bit more often than it might casually come up. Joshua is househunting. Pede is In Love.

And I think I finally Get my job. I’m still not doing it as well as I’d like, but I’m plotting. In fact I have a new Word document on my desktop called Plans. Things we don’t do that maybe we could. A new pile of kickass shit to learn. The backs of my legs are sunburned from afternoons reading down by the river – EPA guidelines about meth lab cleanup, and GIS manuals, and Supreme Court cases on property rights.

And there’s a guy I like, a guy who today brought me a bracelet from the County Fair with glittery little stickers of Catholic saints on it. On our way to helping his friends move this morning we stopped to pick up muffins, and crossing the street his eight year old slipped her hand into mine. I just about fell over with the wonder of it.

Yesterday on the beach Julie told me about how she’s next going to Change the Campus. And then she caught me up on her current love interests: an Iowa boy in Iowa and an Oregon boy in Oregon and an Iowa boy in Oregon. And I believe this makes it official: we have our groove back. We are Figuring This Out Afterall. We just needed a little gestation. Eight months out and the Year of Gusto rears its marvelous head.

posted by tortaluga @ 10:09 PM