the likenesses of leaves under a ripening sun

The weekend was: a slight amount of partying/substances, then work and recovery, in balance. Saturday night I stayed in and watched Donnie Darko on Showcase, which must have been the 5th or 6th time that I've seen it, but it was still just as excellent as the first time Sarah Cashman showed it to me. Then Sunday Patti and I trucked over to the park (Odell, 5 min. walk) and spread a brown-and-orange blanket and sat and did our work (except for when we were napping) on a sunny afternoon.

Now it is Monday. Another Monday, a sunny day, leaves on trees are turning red and more fall every day, something about thier organic make-up makes them leave brown stains on the white concrete as they rot, so it looks like some art student has come along and painted the likenesses of leaves on the sidewalk.

The view from campus is that of the St. John river (le fleuve St. John, this is a bilingual province) and the far hills, that are slowly turning (patchily) to red, gold. The sky has no clouds in it, and is traced with twin jetstreams from time to time, straight lines on a round bowl of sky, fading fast.

In Biology we are reviewing the organelles of cells, all those words I left in Ms. Haley's classroom two years ago are back--mitochondria, lysosomes, nuclear membrane--only without the coddling of high school. We are meant to make these things make sense, for ourselves. The professors are helpful, mind you, but university is a different beast. They figure, here, that if you here it is because you want to be here, and so, your self-motivation they take for granted. But I don't want to be back in high school, as a classmate of mine said last week, by any means: I much prefer the adult life, having a key to my own (shared) apartment, dragging my own groceries back up the hill, taking responsibility for my own slackness.

After Biology I sat under a tree on a short brick wall and talked to a new friend, Kathleen from Bio, about various academia-related things, ate my lunch of bread, carrots and cheese, and swatted away wasps. Latin was my other class, we discovered neuter nouns, substantive adjectives, and the verb sum, essa--to be. Nice little one to get us going with irregularity in verbs.

So I will end this post by saying that I, like Gail Armstrong, wonder if sometimes there isn't an end to what someone has to say. Not that I won't be posting ever again, oh no, but I am going to have to work harder to make my everyday seem sublime. When I was travelling it was a little bit easier. Now my writing has a task before it: make the pedantic events of living the student life in Fredericton, NB, sound beautiful and relate to world events, thoughts on, etc. I think I can do it, it will just take a keener eye.