Summer in the City... is ending, ending, ending

July already.  Where has the time gone?  It seems that just days ago I was moving, and now.. a month.  Unbelievable.

While I know part of me will lament shaking off the remaining crumbs of lazy summer, I am eager to get working and thinking again.  It’s been nice to reread some American classics, but my online class has been far from stimulating over the past few weeks.  Every cursory “discussion” question or exam typo drives me further and further into a pit of extreme apathy.  But in what I’m not learning about American Lit, I am gaining a clear reminder of the consequences of teachers/professors with low (or no) standards.  How can I be expected to care, let alone try, when a professor comes into class expecting mindless drool?  I mean I know it’s community college, but come on…

Regardless, mindless drool will prove immediately insufficient beginning tomorrow.  Tomorrow I start my life as a graduate student.  That seems so strange to say.  …Reflections on that to come….

But today… today I am on a bus home from New York.  I spent the Fourth of July weekend there with my lovely friend Lindsey and her poet friend Chris.  I hear Philadelphia is pretty serious about her 4^th of July celebrations (that historic July 4^th took place in Philly after all…); it’s one I should like to see someday.  But on this holiday, spent perched on a fire escape in Brooklyn with good friends, good wine and good conversation, there wasn’t anywhere in the world I would have rather been.  It was a lovely trip.

Today in the wake of the holiday, the city has been flooded with the briny somnolence of a heat wave.  It is the kind of inescapably heavy heat that twists like taffy on fan blades.  Even without AC my friends’ apartment offered much more comfort than the sunny streets, but they braved the heat to walk me to the train station.  I gave them sticky hugs goodbye and descended the stairs to the subway.  The instructions Lindsey had written out for me were limp within a few minutes, but they led me with little stress to a coffee shop near SoHo where I met up with my friend Brian.  We had a great time catching up, then he saw me to Penn Station where, after wilting on the cusp of consciousness in line for far too long, I got on the bus that would bring me home.  Despite the late start it looks like we will get in only a few minutes late.  I’ll walk home, turn the air back on, make some dinner and  do my best to shake off the effects of too much coffee before going to bed on this… my last official night of summer.

Best, 

Em