Expectations: "I am Godzilla"

I haven't written in a while.
I've posted kind of recently, but
the bulk of my last two posts were written a long time ago, and only edited on the days I posted them.
This post is the newest.
It is a desperate cry.
It is a rough draft.


I am small.
I know little.
I know so little.
We all have so much to do.

Within Blarney Castle

New insights into Ireland?
I've been tracking some of the novel differences in culture. I'll publish the list for you some day.
I still haven't made friends with an Irish girl so I can listen to her accent.
It's a vain endeavor, anyway.
I remain surrounded with my wide circle of friends.
There are so many of us.
We celebrated Laura's 21st birthday tonight. She's French Canadian.

Escaping my problems through celebration,
losing my academic traction for the sake of 'seizing' these days,
brings me to wonder where on
this
awkwardly shaped wardrobe
this
"the day" to be seized
Where
are the good handholds?

I've only just now hit expectations.
Classes dead from 9-1, Meeting from 1-4, class again from 4-6, then much studying to catch up on.
Presentation on Wednesday, and there's a lot to consider for it:

[Slab depth
Scheme design
Column spacing
Live loading
Dead load of the building itself,
Mitigating risk of flood damage during construction
Qualitative analysis of wind loading from two directions
Quantitative analysis of an element
And worst of all...

Sketching the damn thing.]



Confidence, Riley.

It should be noted I drank a whole pot of tea on my own.
Not to impress, but only to my own surprise
[And delight]

So
Tonight
in my writing, I commiserate with anyone who reads this.
We are not working here. Not here or now. We are surviving for surviving. We are looking for energy. We are relieving tension, just a bit. We are children on the playground.

My mom, bless her and all of her grace, patience, and wisdom, has recently picked up work again.
 [This is relevant, stay with me].
She tells me about kids on the playground. Everyone on a playground is de-stressing [you see where I'm going]. They're coping with growth. With learning. You may not have noticed when you were playing on the playground, but my mom noticed this: Everyone on the playground copes differently.

Smitty? He sits on a bench and holds his hands close to his eyes, probably (if I may speculate) enveloped in a mix of exploring his own texture, and finding comfort in simplifying the world to his hands. He stays at his one bench, and politely moves out of the way to a different bench if someone else's coping disturbs the air.

Dylan? He is Godzilla. He roars, breaking barriers between universes and acknowledging his surroundings only as the monster might. Other days, my mom asks him who he is: today he is a blue whale, of course. A blue whale is the most intelligent sea mammal, he tells her.
Why would he be anything else?

[And now, we tie it in...]
If my observations on maturing count for salt (see: value, weight, worth anything), I'll say that I don't think growing up or living doesn't ever get easier or harder, in a relative sense. It feels too obvious to say, but imagine, we are still here, on this playground. We keep coming back.
Coping.
De-stressing.
Here, we are monsters. We are whales. We run and jump and laugh when we can.
We just look at our fingers, fractions of meters apart.

There is so much to do. So much to learn. To experience. To love. To hold, capture, print, paint, dance, explore, explain, and share. There is so much.

But tonight.
Tonight,
I am a faraway writer.
An amateur poet in a notebook and a ballpoint.
I am a blogger.
I am Godzilla.

(A construction site I got to visit. They were building a harbor.)