Radio Free Akron: Turning Points

As there is little more invigorating than the first nice day of the year on a college campus, there are few things of such limited consequence that make one feel more abandoned than the last day of classes before spring break.

I'm sitting here, listening to alternating purrs of Blur's Parklife and Modern Life is Rubbish and Beck's Sea Change albums (a playlist of the three albums on shuffle is the subject of my iTunes currently), glaring out at the ultimately crappy weather day that is so typical of northeastern Ohio. Stretched horizontal, neatly striped stratus clouds that tease you with the promise of a glance of the sun, fill the sky out to the horizon, where the Kent State University airport is visible some three miles from my third-floor hilltopped office.

The only people remaining in the building right now are Mary Lou, the department secretary who's like contractually obligated to be here every weekday from 7:30 to 5:00, and some annoying geology puke who keeps moving big cabinets from a classroom out into the hallway neighboring my office with giant booms.

I emerged from my office briefly to give this puke an angry glance, trying to silently imply that his overly dedicated (and tremendously noisy) labors are disrupting my work.

I guess that means there are three of us in the building, if you include me.

I've worked to make a plan of attack for my break work. I've got a three page list of things I need to do. I need to write somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 lectures to finish the year. Luckily, in terms of content, there will be tremendous overlap for these. In actuality, I'll probably only have to write around 10, considering the addition of videos as contact-time spenders.

I hate fatalism, but alas, everything does happen for a reason. Amy'd been on my case to harrass said Mary Lou to get her permission for joining the already-fully Lake Erie fieldtrip class for summer intersession, in which I have enrolled. When I visited Mary Lou today, I got her registered for the class but also got her a job lead as a veterinary technician (a compound term that's unusally difficult to spell correctly). Unfortunately, it's in Garrettsville which, while I'm sure is a fine town, appears to be about 50 minutes of driving separated from our steep gravel Akron driveway. That's a lot of gas and time for a harder (though more rewarding, no doubt) job.

I don't know what will happen there. Possible life changes are scary, indeed.

I've been dutifully working throughout my shortened day here, stopping at the beginning to enjoy a vegan hot chocolate (which probably contained trace amounts of caffeine, making my substance-free year over, though I'm going to declare that chocolate doesn't count) at Starbucks with Mary and Shawn at Shawn's expense. We talked dissertations and theses, and philosophical bases and how we're (should Mary stay for her first year of PhD since funding has apparently dried up nationally) going to work on a couple of papers. All kinds of crap no one would care about... except for three nerds who actually went to school/work on the last day before Spring Break.

Actually, I was talking about doing these joint papers, almost as a carrot for Mary's motivation. We work well together, and it'd be a good and fruitful experience. We're going to write a paper on the construction of the man-made Johnstown flood as a natural event, and the use of New Urbanist ideas in the redevelopment of New Orleans. Good papers, both well within our theoretical frameworks and of ideas that make us happy to study. Nothing bad can come from this.

All of this may happen, if she gets funded here... which due to paperwork problems outside of her control, is in question. Fingers are crossed, no doubt.

As we drank our "coffees" (though Dunkin' Donuts ruined that term, even though mine wasn't a coffee and actually a coffee replacement used to avoid caffeine and animal products), Starbucks tried to punch us full of suburban-pseudo-hipster music. You know, stuff that Ian "Ray" from High Fidelity and his genre of generalized losers would enjoy, simply to make people think they're cool enough to know about the music even though they got it from the kiosk at the middle-of-the-parking-lot Starbucks outlet.

One of these songs even sounded like something you'd hear at the ballpark, with the happy little organ tune, before some jazz garbage was brought in.

It's just too hip.

Unfortunately for my self-esteem as a holier-than-thou suburban-pseudo-hipster (yes, I am one of them as little as I like to admit it, and as much as I hate just about everything Starbucks stands for, especially their capitalizing of the institutional center of most modern revolutions, the coffee house), one of the songs that played during the end of our visit was Beck's "Lonesome Tears," perhaps the most haunting and emotions-on-the-sleeve song of his extensive catalog.

Ironically, as I end this post and prepare to vacate my office for the remainder of the break, taking with me a massive pile of work and goals that can't possibly be completed in such a time, "Lonesome Tears" seems like an appropriate song. I guess it'd better be, since it has come up on iTunes.

Even the loud geology fucker has seemed to disappear, leaving myself and (perhaps) Mary Lou as the building's only inhabitants. The streets below are entirely vacant and seemingly devoid of life.

But with this loneliness comes my prime time. This next week is truly going to be a make-it or break-it week for my semester, my studies at Kent, and (intentionally risking the deployment of an extreme amount of hyperbole), my career. I have a whole week with no cares, no appointments, no constraints, and no distractions. If I can get a lot done in a lonely setting this week, I will be able to reap benefits for the next five years. It will put me back on track.

And it will make it so when the weather changes from the two weeks of bullshit-spring in Ohio to the very first eighty-degree-plus-humidity bullshit days of Ohio summer, I can be out there enjoying the wonder that is a college campus on that first nice day.

Until then, I have to survive the desolation, and come through.

Thankfully, Beck has finished singing.

The drive home, and the crucial week, now begins.

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