jesslyn delia

not entirely sure what could have caused it, but last night i dreamed that my husband, dr. martin luther king jr., while in the midst of the american civil rights movement, was shot and then beaten by six teenage boys on the wrap-around deck of our country home while i watched through the glass patio doors, holding our child and crying.

what the fuck, right?

i did just finish writing a paper on john lewis for my american 1960s history course, but that was over the weekend and yesterday was spent wandering the aisles of ikea and the linen chest, comparing bed frames and towels and sets of dishes. this was followed by a casual dinner at montana’s and a lazy bus ride home where i zoned out in front of CSI. or something like it. no pressing thoughts concerning the civil rights movement, let alone mlk.

i do remember discussing babies with matt before we fell asleep, because i wish desperately that i were old enough and mature enough and financially stable enough to have one of those. so that could place the baby in there, but the rest of it? i don’t know. it was pretty graphic. and kind of disturbing.

i think that for a lot of people, looking through old pictures brings back memories of their old friends, old lives, old schools, etc. all i can see when i look through my old pictures are my old clothes.

i have a lot of clothes and i love every single item, even (and in some cases especially) the clothes i rarely wear. i almost hate to say it, but when we had the fire and we had no idea what had happened to the contents of our home, one of my first and recurring concerns was how are my clothes.

when i have to move, i spend hours putting all my clothes in separate piles. careful deliberation and consideration goes into every decision, but by the end of it i’m usually so exhausted and annoyed that i just throw half the stuff into one bag, label it “amity” and take it to the donation bin. i don’t even know what’s in it, and i have to force myself not to tear it open and go through it one more time.

years later, in all my old pictures, i see those wide-legged pants i spent so many afternoons tripping over or the self-studded, checkered jacket  that i fell in immediate second-hand-store love with. i don’t see my friends in the picture, or my hairstyle, or in a lot of cases even what we were doing.  i want to go back to the jacket, or the sweatshirt with the comfiest hood, or the perfect-length skirt. i don’t want to be back in high school, i want to be back in those blue 8-hole docs.

first this, and then this.

cue epic fight music?
i doubt it, but maybe later!

dun dun DUNNNNNN.

FEBRUARY.

have you ever felt a wave of relief as you flipped the calendar from one month to the next? i hadn’t before yesterday. i took my january work schedule off the fridge and replaced it with february’s and, oddly enough, actually noticed what i was doing. i liked the feeling so much that i went into the spare room and flipped that calendar too, which regularly wouldn’t be done until well past the 8th or 9th.

i’m determined to leave january behind me. the things, the time, the hours, the money, the energy, the optimism we lost.

hello february :)

here’s (once more) to 2010, and looking forward, and winterlude, and more pictures, and finishing assignments weeks before they’re due, and living day by day, and certainly more canal skating.

Looking into the Past / Pillar Box Post.

this blog was on the wordpress homepage.

it makes me want to travel through time while sitting on the rooftop of my dad’s apartment, across the shingles and the aluminum and the all-seeing church and doomsday towers, or wear 1920s wedding dresses, or be in the upstairs nook of the waterdown library at age 11, looking at pictures of my grandfather in the history books. i think that speaks for itself.

sometimes sitting through a three-hour terrorism lecture can be a little bit too much for our young, attention-deficit brains. we make it interesting when we can.

generally, in classes with kristina, my notes don’t end up being very useful come exam time. this seems to have been passed on to simon, who is at least taking notes at all.

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simple eight months, spent drinking heavy pitchers of beer, trudging through snowbanks the size of myself, skipping absent-mindedly along the muddy puddles on bank at heron.

and then the buses came off strike.
and then i stopped running into justin in the halls, i realized that a pain-free semester is followed immediately by a string of considerably painful exams, i found that in some cases it’s more important to travel back and forth across the province than it is to keep your job.