For tonight, there is only emotional exhaustion to blame for my lack of blogging ability.
http://katiebarryincapetown.blogspot.com/ (It’s got a sort of actual post about things relevant to my life currently.)

I’ve been on the go since I got back to Denver. I’ve done wonderful things with wonderful people and I’ve had a great time.
I miss Chicago. It tears at me sometimes, but then I think of how nice it is to be here and I’m just grateful that I got the chance to experience such a beautiful and dramatic place.
I hope to not fall in love with too much of the world; I already find it hard to think of the places that I’d like to live someday.
I hope to stay in love in the way that I am now. It’s tender and new but it’s also fulfilling and correct.  (Correct is phonetically sharp word but I love the way it fits there. This is nothing if not correct.) There’s no inequality or untruth; it simply is a connection that is quickly building on experiences and shared thoughts. It’s comfortable and exciting and new and so very old. It’s my first kiss and my last, and it’s nothing I can quite wrap my head around.
I hope to find the things I’m looking for when I’m in Cape Town. I want to find myself and my ability; I want to find confidence for employment and skill sets.
I want to read and write and fall in love with another city so that someday I won’t know where I want to live.
I want to be safe and happy.

Tomorrow I’ll write about the slight emotional block that has prevented me from thinking clearly tonight, but it should be insightful and promising, I hope. Revealing, perhaps.

This is the post-camping trip post.

You’ll be surprised to hear that I survived four nights in the wilderness. John and I left on Sunday for a three night adventure in Rocky Mountain National Park. By the time we got there, the camping spots were all nearly full, so we ventured a little further out of Estes to a spot where we proceeded to set up the tent at dusk.
The days have all blurred together, as they are wont to do when one is lost in the woods (not necessarily lost, but you’ll understand the idea of it all). Three different campsites in the four days, the second being my favorite.
We ended up following Trail Ridge Road all the way through, which was something I’d never done. I was amazed to see people biking the road; I’d be terrified to even try to do that. They are paving the road at higher elevations and this seems to cause a back up in traffic. So there was a lot of sitting.
We stole salt and pepper shakers from the Alpine Center. This is only because they sold nothing of importance or mountain value. It was all souvenirs, which under normal circumstances are acceptable and even welcome, but when I had already been in the woods for hours, days nearly, and was in dire need of salt and pepper (among other things), finding decorative vases was an unpleasant experience.
We ended up at Willow Creek Reservoir near Grand Lake for our second and third nights. It was a wonderful escape, quiet, removed, beautiful view. We specifically chose our campsite for the sake of the view and were sad to leave, but forced to do so because of a sudden influx of unruly children.
And normally I love children. (That’s a proven fact.) But these kids and chaperones were annoyingly present at all hours.
We hiked around the lake and up a path that we found but were unable to drive up to. Once we got down to the water, we went swimming (sort of a shower, sort of a swim, mostly a freezing cold mountain water experience) and then sat in the sun.
It was wonderful.
The last night, I laid awake for most of the night and was glad that we didn’t get to do the hike that we had planned. Exhaustion would have overtaken me. Instead, we headed into the National Forest and did some hiking there.
Two things I love: my mountain backpack (obviously) and my new hiking boots.

This post isn’t done but I’m too tired to finish and I have a wedding to go to tomorrow.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AUNT SALLY!!!!

I never thought I’d say this, but today, I’ve got nothing left to say.

I do, of course, things have been running through my mind all day. I’m not content with contemplating, but instead of trying to spill and organize here with words and easily discernible truths, I’d rather just sleep for the half hour I’d spend mulling.

9 hours of sandwiches will do that to you, zap every little bit of life you thought you still had.

Until the rest has settled on my weary bones, adieu.

I can’t say this enough, I never could, I’ve not stopped trying to get the message across: I love my cat.
It’s ridiculous, really. You’re thinking, Right, Katie, he’s an animal. Stop caring so much.
But then you must realize that he has a sly sense of humor and some odd sense of direction and purpose. Currently, his only goal is to escape from the room he’s in.
John likened him to Rapunzel, which made me laugh. Stuck in his tower, crying out the window for rescue. It’s true. He did spend the better part of an hour one night hollering for other cats to hear.
We installed a new baby gate at the top of the stairs to keep him and the other cats separated. Whenever I open my bedroom door, he’s ready to make the leap to freedom, which usually means he gets to spend a minute or so wandering the upstairs hall and maybe he’ll make it as far as the tub before I am hauling him back to sanctuary. Last night, Dad left him and he somehow managed to open the baby gate. This thing is metal and requires lifting before you can open it. When he got back from moving his car, Cat was sitting by the open gate.
Ah, Carlos, you scoundrel.
I watched this happen when I got home. He puts his paws through the metal bars and when he can’t simply pull it open, he squeezes his head through and once it’s mostly stuck, pulls back with his entire body until the gate opens. Clever creature I have here.

Dentist this morning. Nothing wild to report. Just shiny enamel and some sore gums. (That woman seriously needs to learn her way around my mouth. Every time it’s, “you have such sensitive gums.” jab. stick. poke. bleed.)
Off to Dillon this afternoon to see Aunt Sally. Back tonight or tomorrow due to the doctor’s appointment which should hopefully provide me with malaria pills.
Then it’s a weekend of work before an extended camping trip. (By extended, I mean three nights. Ugh.)

Check it, kids:

http://katiebarryincapetown.blogspot.com/

It’s official. The countdown has begun; the end is slowly closing in on me but I’m not yet afraid. I keep waiting for it to settle in but I can’t seem to find it.
This is the strange feeling that has marked this summer, made is so much more different than the others. Contentment.
Odd.

Things I’m wildly not content with include my employment status, but that is what it is or will be and ther is little room for negotiation, especially at this point in my life.

This week brings relief, perhaps. Days off to accomplish things, including meetings and lunch dates with all the grandparents, something I’ve not been able to do in a long time.

Tonight, however, movies and sleep. Precious sleep.

It’s not something you feel, really. It’s something you know.
After a night of odd adventuring that ended with me a titch late to the airport (as usual), I did a good bit of jogging through the airport to get to my gate. Perfectly timed, I must say. I asked a cute elderly (not very elderly but close) couple what rows were boarding. “Oh dear, you must be going hiking,” she said to me. I looked down. Mountain backpack complete with sleeping bag strapped in at the bottom. I, however, was wearing loafer-esque shoes, skinny jeans, jewelry and had the essence of exhaustion floating about me.
“No,” I told her, “I’m just going to clean my old apartment.”
My old apartment. 
I was asleep before the plane had even hit cruising altitude. I slept for a solid two hours, waking only as we were descending over the rows of houses that surround Midway.
Home.
Home is nothing and everything, it’s the way the humidity rushed to fill the plane after the doors were opened. It’s the way that everyone hustles around, staring quietly at the people next to them. It’s the man behind me yelling at a woman who wouldn’t turn down her stereo and who refused to use headphones. It’s her telling him to get off the train. It’s the way the other passengers look at each other and then smile as they turn their heads away. It’s the small glint of fireflies in the darkening night. It’s the buildings, the bricks, the smell of concrete and the silence of the oppressive heat. It’s walking through the green and gray landscape and hearing no one but knowing you’re surrounded. It’s life. It’s neighbors. It’s human interactions, the smell of mens cologne as they pass in the street. The giggles of young girls who don’t know what life isn’t yet, pouring out of the train with their bras exposed. It’s metal, metal on metal and the screech of brakes grinding together.
It’s hot oppressive bars filled with warnings about fake IDs. It’s the sound of throbbing music filling another space. It’s the art on the walls, robots with big gleaming eyes. It’s the women’s restroom and it’s the pictures of the other women, the solidarity and the beauty. It’s the bartender closing the bar, locking the doors, cleaning and then following us into the night. It’s the smell of the Oasis, familiar and grotesque. It’s the icy buckets, the familiar faces, the pretenses. It’s the clock ticking, tick tick tock.
And then the morning has been slept away and there’s work to be done but there’s too much to do. And there’s not enough time and the city’s calling and I’m answering and off to something else, of course.

None of us are adults quite yet, we’re stuck in that post-collegiate rut where we’re still treated like children but expected to act like adults.

We were sitting, drinking Italian sodas, and discussing men. Of course.
“But he doesn’t have a job,” she said.
I clucked at her appreciatively. Of course we want to date men with jobs.
But then I started thinking.
I’m twenty two. I live at home, split between two homes, actually, and then a little bit in my car. I work at Subway. Does that make me undateable? Probably sort of.
On paper, absolutely.
I’d reject a twenty two year old man-boy who worked at Subway.

I’m not a girl anymore, but I’m still not a woman. Lately, it’s been interesting to try and shift my identifying noun from girl to woman. But am I that yet?
I keep thinking in a couple of years I will be a woman. But what defines a woman, really?

Am I worth someone who’s anything more than what I am? Do I hurt the reputation of the people I associate with based solely on my current paycheck source? Hardly, but maybe a little.
Is it worse to be unemployed than to work in the worst industry ever created? (Sometimes I think to myself: It could be worse. I could be working at Forever21.)

And am I any less of what I am because of my current occupation?
Yesterday in court during jury selection I had to give my occupation. Somewhat begrudgingly, I said “sandwich artist.” Silence, followed by a lot of turning heads and some smiles, possibly muffled laughter. But following that with “Bachelor’s degree in communication studies” made me feel a little better. Being the forewoman definitely made me feel better. Authoritative.

Also, on a sidenote, being a traffic prosecutor must absolutely suck. It’s a simple open and shut case that never should have gone to trial and some man in a badly tailored suit had to stand up and pretend like it was legitimate. The lines of questioning were uninspired, unintelligent and boring. The defandant was self-represented and even worse. My annoyance at her surpassed my annoyance at the prosecutor, but doing my civic duty wasn’t about feelings (of hostility), it was about fact.

I did laugh a little during the selection process when they asked if anyone had been in that room before. I have. I flashed back to that night my senior year of high school, the night I had to go up in front of a magistrate and have my hide tanned (because the words I want to use aren’t appropriate) because of that speeding ticket. The big one. I told the judge, prosecutor and defendant that “I made some decisions that necessitated my presence here.” Prosecutor asked me if the police officer sitting there was the one who’d pulled me over and I replied, “I certainly hope not.”
Somehow I got on the jury.

By the way, jury duty is way less exciting than I thought it would be. I don’t want it to happen again. I like the law but I wish it wasn’t so repetitive and dumbed down for the masses. It’s not a difficult concept, really.
Either way, I’m not any less of an intelligent human being than anyone else, even though I have to wear a stupid uniform and kill my back, knees, legs, brain cells and patience to get through the day.
Here’s hoping I survive the amount of disrespect I deal with on a daily basis. Blegh.

I’m the kind of woman who begins to read many books, sometimes more than one at a time, and then never finishes them. I’ve consumed the beginnings, and sometimes the middles, of more novels than I can count, but the ends seem to always be lacking, or aren’t to my taste, and so I never read them.
I’m distracted, true, but leaving the story open-ended is something of a novelty, enjoyable in its own right. To not know what happens is to be able to write the end for myself.

I’ve entered a chapter of my own life I’m going to call “The Weird Chapter,” in which my own story seems to have done some looping and rewording of its own and I, as the protagonist and probable heroine, am merely a character in this book, bound hopelessly to the text as it is being created, following the words, the story arc, the plot details at a fervent, relentless pace. I’m blind to the next page, running through sentences and structure but finding neither for myself.

The main characters of this self-titled “Weird Chapter” are myself and Cat-Carlos, sometimes addressed as Boobs or Chicken Nugget, who in actuality should just be renamed No on account of how much the word is directed at his curious creature self.
He is my animal companion, the constant and trustworthy yet fallible creature sent with me on my adventures, and although he stays locked into the room I now temporarily call home, there are times when he is let out, usually as far as the hall, and will follow me, only to sit curled into a black cat ball of fur and watch me intently as I wash my face or apply makeup in the bathroom mirror. He’s ever watchful, wary of intrusion and desperate for things he’s not seen before.
He’s currently in a dresser drawer, having attained that height by stepping carefully from the bed to a suitcase oddly situated in the middle of the floor and then leaping from there to the neglected drawer, left open by its user (me). He’s sitting on a stack of clean, hairless clothes, which won’t be hair-free for long, a task he finds quite to his liking.
Other characters go in and out. Of course there’s Mom and Dad, the two figures never present at the same time but always present in some form, whose authority overlaps but is inconstant and no longer legally binding. The girlfriend, whose house I reside in and must seem to her merely a shadow who slips in during the night and sleeps the morning away. Sometimes there is no sleeping at all. This chapter involves a lot of living and not very much rest.

This is the action chapter, hopefully, the chapter in which the heroine (me, obviously) comes to certain realizations about herself and her world and ultimately her life and fate and then attempts to fight them, or go along with them, or do whatever she might do with them in order to survive to continue on to the next chapter.

But this chapter stretches on.

There is the past, so intertwined with the present it’s hard to remember that we’re in the weird chapter and not staring down the high school chapters, those unruly things, or the odd moments of college that left me confused and the readers baffled and sometimes rightly alarmed.
But this chapter has a lighter feel to it, even though it is arguably the most muddled and oddly contrived bit of the whole piece. It radiates the inner beauty that may have been ever present but is slowly starting to seep out, it radiates confidence and joy, both feelings flowing around it and through it but having no specific origination point.

And on a side note, the heroine has realized that sometimes what the people in her chapters seem is the complete opposite view of what the reader may perceive. She’s truly blind. Perhaps the narrator should start suggesting the future with a better bit of foreshadowing? Or perhaps wouldn’t mind writing in some dialogue or thoughts for the heroine that she might consider to take seriously?  As this chapter began, there was the law and now there is the reminder. Not of the law, that’s been left behind, for every character has their own subplots in which they are engaged.

The reminder is the memory, brought back to life, resurrected in its own right, which now stands fully formed and present. So perhaps it shall need redefinition, as it now occupies a newer, brighter, clearer segment of the book of Life (ah, for lack of words). The heroine is finding herself engaged in dialogue, quick and comfortable, and memories, reminders, those foolish emotions that come along with everything that is now. Entirely enamored, she can’t feel except for what she’s feeling now, there truly are no time for those silly consequences. We can find those later, we’ll hash through them in some upcoming chapter full of thought but hopefully lacking regret.
For now, there is the memory, growing stronger daily and the possibility, which drives our narrator to keep creating and pressing time into the pages.

This is how the weird chapter is progressing. Ever onward, flying, as the reader and the heroine attempt to keep up with the breakneck pace of the author’s work, but momentous in each daily evolution. Momentous is a horrid word to describe this chapter. Perhaps we shall go with quixotic.  Yes, that.

Quixotic, dear readers, is the weirdest chapter yet.

San Francisco has come and gone, and with it went so many things.

It closed the chapter of the book I’ll later call college and it tied up the ends of friendship. Not in any negative way, but in a way that will cement the bonds I have with those girls. They are all contained and were expressed perfectly in that week.

I returned to Colorado lighthearted, which seems to be the theme of this summer so far, having made a decision and set of realizations that would free me from something I had mentally shackled myself to.
And then it happened, change and chance and perfect timing and thus my life began again, reinvigorated with a sense of freedom.

I’m hanging in the strangest balance at the moment. I am nowhere and everywhere, yet I’m no longer worried or wavering in my steps. I told Mom the other day that I think I’d find myself in South Africa and she gave me a look and said something about me calling her to let her know where I was once I’d figured it out.
I returned her look with one of equal exasperation.

But here we are now staring down the end of July and I’m wondering where all the time went. Summer is almost over and weeks are slipping past me without me ever thinking about it. Hours, days, I’ve no time for anything. I feel as though that sense of urgency is actually adulthood approaching but I’m trying to stave it off as long as I can. You only live once and that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.

There are also some things that remind me that the past is never really quite the past and that friendships created can be maintained or preserved even if they are forced to languish in a stagnant state for a long time. Sometimes it’s just the people you know that can make you believe in yourself and in your life and in your dreams. (That was way too happy for my usual outlook, but for some reason, this summer has brought with it possibility and intrigue and all the wonderful things I so adore.)

I’m excited for my next few weeks in Denver.

P.S. – Aunt Jan wins awesome Aunt of the Week points for gifting me with an exciting assortment of Clinique swag. I’m always so thrilled with funny little stuff like that, because somehow it’s always exactly what I needed. I’m going to wear the eyeshadow out tonight, so I’ll report back on my findings.