The Last Day Of My Vacation (pt. I) in Elephant Architecture

It is bittersweet. I will be glad to get back into a routine and back in (summer) classes. Vacation was somewhat anticlimactic. One seems to romanticize all about vacation time when one is in the thick of it at work and school. I was hoping to put myself on a 2 week fitness regiment and eat super healthy. And in betwixt hot yoga sessions reading, writing and practicing my penmanship with a calligraphy set I was planning on buying. However, the first two days of vacation were melancholic. I know I was just detoxing from an imbalanced work world one is sort of forced to embrace. Most of the workers are obese and to get along one sort of has to share the lifestyle and psychology: life is depressing and this is what it is, and snack time is the best part of the day. This is obese psychology. After detoxing from it, I began studying for my final. Upon completion I felt something exceptionally rewarding. It was like the gears of the institution cranked over, crunch and I felt reward; I felt accomplished. I never felt it this way in my early college years. Maybe because I am older or maybe because I pay for each class out of pocket or maybe because I am doing something more rewarding to me than I was in my early college years.

The next few days I felt some emptiness and the need to reach out for work at my supplemental job but I will not allow myself to be a workaholic. This empty space I am feeling needs to be filled with myself. It was tough. I took myself to hot yoga a few times and went through some intense internal pain sort of like new growth or training an old tree to grow in a different direction. I need to cool off. I feel like I’m dying. This is vacation? I need to drink. It’s vacation after all. At least sleeping at night feels good. You sort of feel used by all the folks you worked alongside. I felt pushed out of existence because I wasn’t at work with the people you spend 40 hours or more a week of your life with.

Anyway, I made myself rest. I hit the hot studio at least 3 times a week. I was hoping for more but I also was not going to make myself miserable over sticking to a creed. I began reading some favourite novels like Ulysses by James Joyce and then realized I needed to finish Portrait. Portrait hurt a little bit. It didn’t feel like the right time for it. And upon reading the first paragraph of Ulysses with the notes realized I would like to read The Odyssey word for word before I embark on Ulysses. The first paragraph with Stately, plump Buck Mulligan beginning his Crucifiction of Stephen in yellow began an internal crisis along with the companion book of Notes and Stephen Dedalus in Portrait induced some feelings I just wasn’t ready to handle. O Stephen reading The Count of Monte Cristo and being punished for breaking his glasses caused some internal turmoil I just wasn’t ready for on vacation. The scene of Stephen’s broken glasses upon cobblestones on his way to class juxtaposed with Virginia Woolf’s Solid Objects: I saw T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland with Stephen wandering on the Beach of Solid Objects and his glasses being one of them. This is too much for vacation. I am experiencing pain and turmoil and so I reach into my pocket for the warm tender feel of a smooth, sand filled hacky-sack and begin kicking it at Manderson Landing overlooking the river. The smell of honeysuckle and my hacky-sack comfort me. The internal turmoil simmers and I am happy. I watch the hacky-sack glide through the air with my feet keeping it afloat, kick kick, tap tap, lunge that was a taekwondo kick and lunge. It’s back in control near my body and I cradle the sack with my feet with steps I’ve practiced for many years. There is a cradle of safety for the sack in this series of kicks. I am not performing any spectacular tricks however I am treading water or the equivalent for a hacky-sack and there is peace and there is serenity in tradition. Like the sound of the clocks ticking or tolling as you keep it all rolling. Up and down the familiar steps of academia. The muffled thuds of dad’s paws doing his thing.

Last updated May 14, 2024