Started an internship, returned to work, started practicing piano and walking the dog and re-reading fairy tales…Recently I’ve been feeling like I’ve been doing a lot of nothing, but I guess that isn’t completely true.
For the summer I’m interning with the Chester County Historical Society. Of course, that sounds very much like work in archives or a museum doing research or cataloguing in some quiet lonely room. Much to my delight I learned that the society is in the process of moving and photo-documenting large segments of their collection. This means I spent my first day building shelves and moving objects around a hot barn with a number of other interns and volunteers. Between playing “guess what this was for” with some of the old farm tools and trying to decipher the etchings on some of the old metal signs that we were photographing, we had a pretty good time. I got to meet some interesting and friendly people and learn about a huge variety of objects. Hopefully this will be a good summer experience!
Then I went back to Waterloo Gardens, where I’ve worked any time I’ve been home since 10th grade. Which was actually a long time ago!!!! A bunch of the employees I’m used to graduated high school last week, and now I’m trying to learn the names of all the new additions. Not much has changed though, so I’ll be there evenings and weekends for the rest of the summer. As I have the past few years…some things never change.
Now most nights, I return home to a large empty house with only the lonely dog to greet me. After eating something and thinking about my friends all being terribly busy and far away (even the closest ones are rather far on nights when I don’t have the car), I run around outside with my dog for a bit. We’ve become quite close. We now eat dinners together, go for walks, jog and play and wrestle. He even watches movies with me! A few nights ago we watched Tuvalu and tonight we watched Como Agua Para Chocolate. Tonight’s movie, Like Water For Chocolate, in English, is a Spanish romance based off a novel (that I haven’t read yet, to be honest). It’s about many things, but if it were a Gallatin concentration it would be “the intersection of love-sickness and cooking.” It was frustrating and heart-breaking, but overall it was beautiful.
Last night, though, was a special night. I actually was a little social because the stars aligned so that I had time, a friend, a car, and a destination. Elizabeth from work mentioned during the day that she wanted to see Midnight in Paris, so once we closed up at Waterloo we got dinner at Wegmans and went off to the movies. We ate European chocolate while watching the absurd but cute movie in which Owen Wilson time travels to escape from…either his dissatisfaction with modern time as he lives it or he psycho fiancée, or both. On his adventures he meets the Fitzgeralds and Hemmingway and Picasso and T.S.Elliot (whose book is on the table next to me as I type this). Elizabeth and I are both nerdy enough to understand who all of the personalities from the 1920s were, so we laughed a lot throughout the movie. Deep or inspiring? Not really. Cute and amusing? Maybe only when seen with a friend, and when the two of you understand the historical references and handfuls of French that give the movie its color. Since that was exactly my situation, it worked out splendidly. Then I drove home in a HUGE thunderstorm…which I may or may not have danced in when I got home.
Today at work I got to run in the rain again, though there wasn’t nearly as much thunder or lightening. I played in the rain and blew bubbles (I worked, too, I promise!) and smiled to think that the moon is just less than full but still so brilliant.
All of these things are hardly adventures, but they’re still somehow lovely and I’m glad for them.
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