So, all my summer traveling adventures are over now, and I'm home until I leave for Columbus in September. I'm glad. Murfreesboro may not be the most exciting place in the world, but with only a month and half until I leave it, I want to spend as much time here as possible. I really do love it. And pretty much everyone I care about in the entire world lives here, excepting a few relatives.
This summer has been so nice. It's weird, actually. Absolutely nothing in my life is going badly right now, for the first time since probably January or February. I have good friends and money in the bank and my family is getting along well and everything is ready for OSU in the fall...I've been incredibly blessed, and I'm content. I thank God for times like these. They are nice contrasts to the harder times. Life is so funny, the way it works. I don't know. I look at my experiences, and the experiences of everyone I know, and the experiences of the vast majority of people on Earth...everyone's lives are so different, but then there are fundamental similarities. People are so interesting. The stranger you meet in a gas station in Georgia who's buying pork rinds and Diet Vault...they have a life story. It may be incredible or horrible, exciting or dull, but it's unique to them. And it makes you want to care about everyone and their stories, but you really can't. You can't care completely about everyone, there's no way. So we develop relationships, and in these we come to care very fully about a few people in our lives rather than marginally about everyone we meet. If that makes any sense. Which it probably doesn't. Anyway, the point of this is, I love the people in my life. Well...in other news...my current new musical theater love is the show The Last Five Years. And because I find them ironic, I'm posting the lyrics to the song "A Summer in Ohio." It's quite funny. Enjoy: I could own a mansion on a hill, I could lease a villa in Seville, but it wouldn’t be as nice as a summer in Ohio, with a gay midget named Karl, playing Tevia and Porgy. I could wander Paris after dark, take a carriage ride through Central Park, but it wouldn’t be as nice as a summer in Ohio where I’m sharing a room with a former stripper and her snake: Wayne. I could have a satchel full of dollar bills, cures for all the nations ills, pills to make a lion purr. I could be in line to be the British queen, act like I was seventeen, still, I’m certain I’d prefer to be going slowly batty forty miles east of Cincinnati… I could stick an ice pick in my eye, I could eat some fish from last July, but it wouldn’t be as awful as a summer in Ohio, without cable, hot water, Vietnamese food… or you. I saw your book at a Borders in Kentucky under a sign that said “New and Recommended!” I stole a look at your picture on the inside sleeve and then I couldn’t leave. Richard, who was with me, got uncharacteristically quiet, And he said, “All things considered, I guess you don’t have to buy it.” So I smiled like Mona Lisa and I laid my Visa down. He wants me, he wants me, but he ain’t gonna get me! I’ve found my guiding light, I tell the stars each night: Look at me! Look at him! I guess we’re doing something right! I’m finally doing something right! No…it’s not Nirvana, but it’s on the way. I play Anita at the Matinee, then I get on my knees and pray I can state in my next bio: “I’m never gonna go back to Ohio!” I could chew on tin foil for a spell I could get a root canal in HELL, but it wouldn’t be as swell as this summer is gonna be! Cause the torture is just exquisite while I’m waiting for you to visit. So hurry up schmuck, get unstuck, and get on the scene! Love, The midget, the stripper, Wayne the snake, And Mrs. Jamie Wellerstein – that’s me!
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