dr_pretentious | Apparently My June Hasn't Been Disrupted Enough Yet

The good news is that we had an excellent time at festival and came home unscathed but for minor sunburn. Maybe before I head for Seattle I'll have time to tell you about one of the most sublimely beautiful sights I've ever seen, which comes wrapped in an anecdote complete with fire, mortal peril, and a happy ending. We spent lots of time with good friends we rarely get to see, participated in many lovely rituals, and danced more than we have occasion to in the whole rest of the year put together. I was a good girl, and kept it down to four hours of dancing a night and a moderate dosage of painkillers this year, which is why I now feel spent, whereas last year I came home feeling wrecked.

The bad news is that my ancient car's alternator is very nearly dead, and my mechanic urges me not to throw any more money at repairs. I wonder if I'd have been able to wring a summer's worth of teaching commutes out of it if I hadn't taken it on this one last interstate pilgrimage.

This is not a good time for us to have to buy a car. Quite apart from the expense (which is not trivial), there's the difficulty of cramming one more massively time-consuming and attention-consuming project into a month in which we're spending every weekend out of state. And here, I thought it was going to be a stretch to fit all the laundry and dry cleaning and packing for Seattle in around the week's worth of student appointments that I've crammed into two days. Seeing all those students and doing all those tasks while driving Dan to and from work so I can have the use of the car is going to be really tricky. There's no way I can start car-hunting in earnest until next week.

Well, this year is still an improvement. Last year, the four days of festival took me from having a minor overuse injury that annoyed me once or twice a week, to having a foot injury that left me intermittently cane-bound for six months. Given a choice between having to replace my car or having to go back to the cane, I'd rather replace the car any day of the week.

This isn't actually what my life is like, you know. We're not usually big on drama around here. I have an uneventful life: I write, I teach, I love the people who are dear to me. That's it, and I like it that way. Everything else is just...everything else. I could do with a little less of everything else right now. When people ask me how things are going, I want to be able to say, "More of the same, thank goodness."

I can't believe I'm going to be on a plane in three days. Once I'm there, I'll be delighted. I always am. Feel free to remind me of that, if you catch me looking dazed.