Notes from class

I don't like to throw things away, especially anything that I've created. It's the mortal streak inside of me tainted by ego. In any case, here I sit in the kitchen, going through my notebook, weeding out every scrap of paper related to my Chem class. I want to throw it all away. There is barely a thing from that class that I really want to remember. In principle, it's all good to know: why the ozone layer is rotting away, why the world is warming up, the difference between an unsaturated fat and a saturated fat, or the purpose of glycogen. The remembering would be healthy. But I care not. The class was all note taking, dashing my pen across the paper, absorbing knowledge from a PowerPoint. There is nothing interesting at all in the margins. All that paper, ink, and arm muscle is going in the scrapper.

On the other hand, my senior seminar was ripe for margin-wanderings. I drew a Cheshire cat smile, a cat stretching, a tiny mouse running, the word Japan with the 'J' and 'p' as Koi fish, an origami star, and a fox wearing a sheep hat. Not bad for my semester but frightening for Kandinsky or Gogh. Good thing my aspirations snuggle with bears in dark caves or else I might be dispirited. (You couldn't hear but somewhere close a baby rabbit called.) Here are some journeys from class:

"It's amazing the people you meet, sit in class with - wish they'd notice you. I saw that they didn't and I grew used to not caring. Now the faces that turn are those that I didn't know. Those that remember me, I didn't. I realized we were all sharing the same pair of shoes. We all walk blind in some ways. When I realize - the hope to realize - the joy, the privilege of realization sets the mind free, unpinned, unchained to float and simmer above in lofty exultation."

"EATING A BLUE SMELL
DRINKING A GREEN SCENE
Touching a white taste."

"She has set herself questing in the sea of knowledge,
Mining in the mountain of thought,
Harvesting in the field of dreams."

"There once was a girl who was not so young. She saw tigers where she used to see kittens. In the light of a dying sun, herself at the beginning of a long road, she knelt in the brown earth outside her door to say a prayer. Words fell from her mouth with the slow consistency of cold oil. She had not sent a prayer upon the wind in a long time."

Don't forget, self.