the calm before the storm

I'm having this weirdly intense dilemma. I've been rolling around town with a flash-pack--the bare necessities strapped to my back. Notebook, pen, water bottle, wallet, keys. Light jacket for the unpredictable NC summer weather. A paper I'm reading for a rotation.

The problem is that I've been using one notebook for everything. Random thoughts, things Lena says. Grocery store lists and blog post ideas. Science ideas, fellowship proposal ideas. Short stories and imagined monologues. Poems and notes on papers I'm reading. You get the idea.

The 'problem' happens when I open up a page for notes on the dopamine pathway with a professor I'm working with, and on the page before it is a short story about a one night stand that I've been working on.

I'm pretty sure this means it's about time I have two separate notebooks.

Y'all, grad school starts next week or so, and I've found my home. I'm sitting at Open Eye Cafe deriving the Michaelis-Menten equation, and I forgot that I LOVE MATH and writing things out. And getting stuck and getting myself unstuck. I'm reading a paper and I'm literally rewriting every equation in the paper until I get it. I'm not moving forward until I completely understand each figure, and how they derive their model.

I can't tell you how awesome this feels to be learning something. I mean I 'learned' a ton when I was a tech. And I know that grad school, it is work, and things like that, but right now I am so excited to be learning something and to be going back to school. What is demanded most from me right now is learning. And I love that. I love that!

Well, so also it's kind of a lie because I'm actually sitting at Open Eye right now and writing a blog post. but I also ran out of loose-leaf paper in order to derive all of my equations, and I was just thinking about how I might have to move to the notebook, but it seems really weird to be thinking about kinetics right after I've written something like this,



There is nothing new under the sun.

You are not the first to hide money in your bra. 

It has rained when someone else has been sad, too.
The weather did not choose you, as the first, to reflect a mood.

There has been a beautiful sunrise for someone else, before you.

We were not the first to be harmed, humiliated and confused.
(If only we were the first to harm, to hurt, to break a heart)

Hearts have been broken before this, yes.

You, poet are not the first to write a poem.
Not the first to pluck words like flowers,
hold them gently in your hands
then give them away.

You are not the first to hope that your words reach someone other than yourself.

You are not the first to discover water,
to cross a desert,
to climb a mountain. 

We are not the first to have loved, and lost, and loved again.