I need the summer off.
I need the summer off so I can think about everything I've seen. All the stupid images that I forgot to write down that I'm really going to need if I ever want to write poetry again. I'm forgetting them already--the little boy named River who was on the first leg of our Egypt tour; there with some relative for what seemed to be a sympathy trip. The memorial in the stones of a Munich university--looked like scattered pamphlets on the ground, anti-Nazi propaganda. Those students got killed for it. The woman in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh who showed her granddaughter Monet's The Church at Vetheuil, reaching up with a naked finger to run her print across the canvas.

I decided what I want to do for the next three years, which is a big step considering Oxford has left me completely devoid of any academic interests besides twiddling my thumbs and goofing around. I want to do really well on the GRE, spend next year photographing everything that goes on at Mercer, hang out and have a bit of fun, then please please get into UGA's MFA program so I can live with Ellie for two years and write before I come to terms with either (a) real job or (b) teaching highschool or (c) going for a degree that might get me somewhere else. I want to get a Collie and have a big bookshelf and a very comfortable chair and write really neat, organized poems for two years while I think about what I'm doing with myself.

I'm afraid of anything else, mostly because I've inherited Papa's condition of needing to take naps all the time. I've noticed it getting worse over the past few years. I'll be working, then I'll get incredibly sleepy and unable to concentrate until I have a fifteen, forty-five, or sixty minute nap. Jake says, "Why are you sleeping? You sleep all the time. You're always sleeping." And I say, I know. I eat the right things. I go to bed before 1.00 and wake up before 9.00. It's not a case of getting too much sleep and therefore tricking my body into wanting more.

I digress. I need the summer off to get back into the habit of taking really good notes. I'll only get six weeks, but somehow I have to be relaxed and lazy enough to get pumped up for a million hours of boring academia in the fall. Boring Spanish, boring boring history, boring literary theory, boring Brit lit that I probably already know.

It's ironic, really. Tomorrow I have to write a paper on whether Tom Stoppard's plays are "too intellectual"--when I'm coming to think that everything and everyone is too intellectual. I want to photograph weddings or lead punting tours down the Thames or work behind a desk somewhere backwoods, where I have the best grammar and neglect to use it by choice.