i feel like i should be really painfully lovesick right now, but i am not. it's very odd. i'm not going to question this phenomenon, though - i'll gleefully accept any opportunity to avoid getting all weepy and crazy. i am appropriately moved to write a daily letter and make an occasionally phone call, so i must not be a complete heartless viking. i do find myself wanting to talk about robin a lot, though, and i'm totally aware that everybody hates that. i'm trying hard to fight the urge.

my current project is determining how patient my family members are, as measured by how many shrill and drawn-out mongs i can get in before they yell at me. i give a slight pause between each outburst, so that they think i might be finished every time. so far mom and katie can endure three each, and dad can make it through seven. i think it slightly bothers them that i toy with their feelings this way, but anything for science!

i really miss all of you guys, in a casual and healthy way... big difference from last summer, and i'm happy. the senses of hopelessness and seclusion i felt are very much absent. i do things that remind me of you and i see little pieces of you everywhere i go. it makes me feel like maybe you are here with me all of the time. it makes the waking hours more fun.

i am like 10 pages away from finishing east of eden by john steinbeck. i will go do that. then the chronicles of narnia, hooray! i want to have read so much by the end of the summer.

(robin: if you read that first paragraph as "i don't miss you", you are just plain wrong.)

Y

behold, i have returned from the dead!

or, if you prefer, i have returned from the land of the living to the lifeless rectangular prism that is my laptop.

i am sitting in the floor watching robin pack to leave hawaii. in mere hours he will be gone, and i can finally get to all of the anguish i've been putting off - and craft projects! i am not actually feeling so lighthearted. in joni mitchell fashion, i can at this point declare that i have looked at love from both sides now, from give and take, though i am not recalling any illusions. it's been a long and strange journey from meeting in the lunch line at student impact to the hand-holding snorkeling and sunbathing that occurred this morning; how odd life is, and i'm only nineteen.

but fear not, Faithful Reader (that's you, scott)... i will not be reduced to melodramatic star-crossed-lover blogs.

what have i done since i bothered to think about telling anybody what i've been doing? i swam with sea turtles - the giant kind, the kind that held worlds on their backs. i've gone through the world's largest hedge maze, which can be found at oahu's dole plantation, and i can confidently say that hedge mazes only seem like fun. i have played mah jongg until many important parts of my brain leaked out from my ear onto my book of mah jongg hands. i have eaten more japanese food that i should be allowed to eat. i have watched the gilmore girls season finale, and gleefully guessed the plot twist moments before it unfolded (and shrieked in an excessively girlish manner). i have gazed out my window at the majesty of the u.s.s. nimitz, an aircraft carrier (fun facts about karyn: i love aircraft carriers... no joke). i have stayed up until three in the morning watching episode three, and cringed at a blazing and legless darth vader. i have snorkeled at the beach voted america's best in 2004. i have visited the arizona memorial, stood in pearl harbor and silently read names of the members of the armed forces who lost their lives in the attack. i've revisited the honolulu zoo. i've seen diamond head crater. i've been caught in the rain at the pali highway outlook. i've been alone on a beach at night when the moon was low in the sky and bright orange. i've driven for miles and miles on a highway to get to a beach without a name, and searched for shells in the sand next to an abandoned car halfway buried. i have cooked a meal for my family.

if you skipped that big paragraph, it's important to remember that i cooked a meal for my family. that never happens. beach at night? sure. swimming with an endangered species? no big deal. cooking lunch? i want a trophy.

i'm going to go around my neighborhood collecting fallen plumeria blossoms with robin, and make some leis for his family now. i will finish this post after we're back from the airport. in the mean time, enjoy this photograph:



i don't know who those people are, but they must have been in hawaii when they took this picture because they are what i found when i ran a search for "hawaii" in google images.

anyway.

robin is back in texas now, because i waited a whole night to continue the post. checking bags and crying in public aren't my favorite things to do, but i have emerged from the day with only the tiniest hint of eye-puff. i think we will be alright.

indeed, it's going to be a summer of letter-writing.

sometimes i get angry about things that happened a long time ago that i really wasn't personally connected to and can't do anything to change.

i get mad about john lennon being shot.
i get mad about bobby kennedy and john f. kennedy.
i get furious about martin luther king, jr.

i even get mad about socrates being made to drink hemlock. that was 399 b.c.

i just hate it. oh, and finals.

that's pretty much it.

until yesterday, i never associated lust with the bombing of cambodia. you did a breathtaking job with the trial, robin - i am honored and delighted to be your girlfriend. =)

the only thing i halfway care about doing today is finding an old love song in my library that katie and carrie can stand. why, finals, why?

my alarm went off this morning at 7:30. when i woke up, both of my arms were asleep because of how i had been laying on them, and i flailed around like a seal throwing my arms here and there trying to turn it off.

it was pretty funny. guess you had to be there.

my poetry chapbook is all finished and there's really nothing more to do for any of my classes but study for the finals... finals are my least favorite part of the semester. i really don't feel like there's much i could do to change the grades i have now, though.

i'm strangely looking forward to packing. i think it's because i won't be graded on it.

here's to hawaii... in a week and a half, i'll be back in the pacific.

back to a summer reading list.

i needed a new cd for my car tonight, because i had listened to the same two or three over and over again when i kept forgetting to bring something new down with me for running errands. i grabbed a mix cd i made when i was really upset about jared (wrye, not williams) because i knew it had a lot of songs i hadn't listened to in a while.

and it did have a lot of those songs. at first it was really nice - songs from albums i bought the summer before my junior year. i thought about driving in james' dark green dodge neon and listening to the starting line on those two-person afternoons. he was my absolute closest friend and we were always together, always always always.

after a while, those bands just made me upset. albums i listen to are so powerfully woven to the emotions i experienced when i first bought them and played them over and over. i really shouldn't open musty closet doors by listening to desperate prose. thank you, chandra mckenzie.

thank you and goodnight.