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I spent over six hours in the library, though I suppose techinically I was inside several different smaller libraries but they were all part of the same labrynth of catalogs and collections. I left dazed and weary -- I did not have the stamina to stay for three more hours to save myself a trip back to Evanston on Wednesday. It was no longer worth it.
I wandered through the downtown streets of Evanston, heading towards a drugstore to buy epsom salt for a bath at home, as my legs were tired from standing all day. I was reminded of how I felt when working retail, which made me think of working at Borders, another flashback to another time and person and dimension known as my college career. School has started on campus and there are dozens more people at every juncture and several times today I thought they everyone looked exactly the same as when I started school there nearly ten years ago. Except with cell phones and ipods. I mean, literally the same. Not just clothes and hair and style, but the same way of holding their bodies while waiting for elevators or talking on campus phones or leaning onto information desks. Same ways of calling out to each other and moving in groups and saying hello and goodbye. I couldn't really wrap my head around it. I assume it's just me, it's my filter that's causing these visions, if I were to actually look, there would be marked differences.
But at 7 pm, it's even more blurry and as I moved down the streets I could name every single store and business that wasn't there before, but I couldn't ever remember what was. Everything is brighter and cleaner and gutted and renovated, and if it was a Land's End catalog before, now it's something bigger and more generic with the feel of sudden renewal of borderline hipness. Maybe Sears or Target. I'm looking at the stores and not really the people until I come up on a woman who's stopped mid step and turned around to look over her shoulder, frozen and waiting. Behind her is a girl, maybe four, who's wearing purple pants and pink tennis shoes and a sweater with both colors and she's stopped to button the front. She's giving running commentary but I can't hear the words, only the tiny lilt of her voice going up and down and I look at her fingers and the buttons and the shoes and what is it about small things that is so appealing? What makes the essence of 'tiny' so interesting, so cute, so fascinating to us? Is it evolutionary, so that we'll not abandon our young ones? I was fascinated not just by the girl but by my own reaction.
I notice kids fairly often -- I'm not having parental pangs, nor am I anti-children, which seems to be the two extremes I encounter most. I seem somewhere in the middle. But for some reason this little lavender sweater got into my brain even more than usual.
I wandered through the downtown streets of Evanston, heading towards a drugstore to buy epsom salt for a bath at home, as my legs were tired from standing all day. I was reminded of how I felt when working retail, which made me think of working at Borders, another flashback to another time and person and dimension known as my college career. School has started on campus and there are dozens more people at every juncture and several times today I thought they everyone looked exactly the same as when I started school there nearly ten years ago. Except with cell phones and ipods. I mean, literally the same. Not just clothes and hair and style, but the same way of holding their bodies while waiting for elevators or talking on campus phones or leaning onto information desks. Same ways of calling out to each other and moving in groups and saying hello and goodbye. I couldn't really wrap my head around it. I assume it's just me, it's my filter that's causing these visions, if I were to actually look, there would be marked differences.
But at 7 pm, it's even more blurry and as I moved down the streets I could name every single store and business that wasn't there before, but I couldn't ever remember what was. Everything is brighter and cleaner and gutted and renovated, and if it was a Land's End catalog before, now it's something bigger and more generic with the feel of sudden renewal of borderline hipness. Maybe Sears or Target. I'm looking at the stores and not really the people until I come up on a woman who's stopped mid step and turned around to look over her shoulder, frozen and waiting. Behind her is a girl, maybe four, who's wearing purple pants and pink tennis shoes and a sweater with both colors and she's stopped to button the front. She's giving running commentary but I can't hear the words, only the tiny lilt of her voice going up and down and I look at her fingers and the buttons and the shoes and what is it about small things that is so appealing? What makes the essence of 'tiny' so interesting, so cute, so fascinating to us? Is it evolutionary, so that we'll not abandon our young ones? I was fascinated not just by the girl but by my own reaction.
I notice kids fairly often -- I'm not having parental pangs, nor am I anti-children, which seems to be the two extremes I encounter most. I seem somewhere in the middle. But for some reason this little lavender sweater got into my brain even more than usual.
