poking poultry and time travel

I've been feeling particularly happy the last couple days. Whether it's due to the sudden command over all my time, the lovely communal dinners I've helped prepare and eat, or simply my own determination to be lighthearted, I'm not sure.

It might have also been my admittance to both my parents and myself that I want to write, and whatever else I have to do will always feel secondary to that drive. I know that I need to make it a central part of life, and I've spent more time recently deciding how to make it a commitment on top of all my schoolwork. (Here my train of thought begins to veer off into The-Education-System-Is-A-Mess territory, which is another story altogether. Watch this anyway.)

I spent last night drinking various white drinks (wine, Russians) and preparing chicken for the host of the dinner party I was attending. My job involved using an incredibly sharp and expensive knife to cut the meat from the bone (carefully, to keep it in one piece). After this, I rolled the meat around some sort of stuffing made principally of mushrooms, stuck through pins to keep the whole affair together, and then tied it up with string. I couldn't eat the end result, but creating it was an interesting experience nevertheless.

This morning I had yet another eye appointment, and I finally got my new contacts and a new solution to go with it (mystery, by the way, partly solved: my old solution got RECALLED in May, and here I'd been using it for months.) I only get to wear them four days a week, but it's still much better than wearing glasses all the time.

After my appointment, on a spontaneous whim, I decided to get my hair cut. It's a short layered deal, with legitimate bangs, and it intermittently makes me feel like a 5-year-old tomboy, or like a 1920's flapper girl in need of a long, stylish cigarette--both of which are more fun than my dull, longish hair with halfhearted waves.

What really comes back in full force when I look in the mirror is a picture taken of me when I must have been either four or five. In it, I am wearing a dress with apples on it and a pilgrim-style collar, and a ridiculously serious expression. I have roughly the same hairstyle.

I feel funky and weird. Which is mostly how I felt as a little kid, too.

I ran quickly on the way down to the basement laundry room tonight, in an effort to keep from getting really wet on the soggy wooden stairs. The result of this was a fall that would have been more the mildly entertaining to've seen, in which I actually did the splits on one of the platforms (a flexibility feat I've never been able to pull off.) These were my feelings, in succession:

1. Embarrassed, because I'd fallen.
2. Pained, due to the fall.
3. Impressed, that I'd done the splits for the first time.

You know what I thought?

That's like a metaphor for life, man.