Make love, not stress

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April 22

I dreamt of green fields, and a hill and my friend and I wanted to see what was there on the other side because we could hear music, but the hill was steep, and I was wearing flip-flops, and I felt the grassy earth squishy underneath my shoes, climbing on and sticking to my soles, and as I fell back my friend managed to climb higher up.

I dreamt we were driving away from a forest and when I looked back there were these gold sculptures, and the further we went the more I saw, it spread out like one of those coloring books that you run a watery paintbrush on and the colors magically appear.

I’m swimming against the tide of homework, assignments, dinners to cook and laundry to dump in the washer, resumes, and tickets for a summer to remember; I’m steady and strong but it’s hard to look back at the completed work, because soon it’s time to cook again and the laundry basket is overflowing, and there are still FOUR MAJOR things left.

But. I’m not going to whine like the regular ol’ grad student. I’m going to talk about why I like St. Louis. I like living in this city because
  1. the sidewalks are like giant staircases if you were a squirrel
  2. of the cat that ate a mushroom
  3. the man in the parking lot nearby who told me to “smile! It’s a beautiful morning” (because it was a beautiful morning)   
  4. the metro buses and trains stop if you run fast enough and yell hey hey HEY!! loud enough
  5. there is a beat up truck in our alley that belongs to a painting but stays parked behind our house and moves once a Fall so that a man can rake the leaves away
  6. the ambulance sirens, the fire trucks, the man with a “homeless” sign, the worn out streets that run right by the pretty ones, and the houses with broken windows and flaky paint that you can see a block away from the ones with sprinklers in their well-trimmed lawns. Everything that makes the city imperfect, and reminds us of the reality that we live in, and the work that we must do, and the people we must be
  7. the free concerts and movie screenings in the parks on hot summer nights or unusually cold summer evenings
  8. the four Thai restaurants on the same street run by the same man
  9. the hookah places where teenagers dance to “I’m sexy and I know it” and feel young and alive but look utterly ridiculous
  10. the pickup truck around the block that is home to a hundred little figurines, baseball players and dinosaurs, and Pikachu too 

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