"she thinks that heaven will be like the Only / with everyone you've ever known sitting at the bar"

First things first: there is no part of my university years that I would want to live over again. I like where I am, and getting here was hard enough the one time, thanks. However, there are a few things about it that I miss. There was a kind of enforced proximity, both geographic and emotional, that was the result of being at a small school in a small(ish) city. "I hate this place!" Dan erupted one day "Everyone's slept with everyone else--everyone's taken care of everyone else's cat--" But it had its advantages. For one whole year when I was too depressed to go out, I never had to. I just sat in my living room and my social world came to me. When some people tell me about how their university was like a continual beauty pageant, I can only stare. Where I went to school, the overriding fashion trend one year was baggy plaid pants and do-it-yourself bead jewelry. When not attending class (there was a lot of not attending class), we did crafts with glitter and markers. It was considered perfectly reasonable to receive my guests in my pajamas, and I did so, holding court and serving tea.

We gave each other help and haircuts, cooked big meals, traded frantic phone calls about crashing computers and missing roommates and personal crises, and it never took longer than twenty minutes to walk to someone's house, so you could do it even in the snow.

All of this is on my mind because I am thinking of ways to reinvent my life again, and it occurs to me that (minus the constant emotional turmoil) there are a lot of things I want to keep from that period. The sense of having enough time, and the community of creative people who encouraged me to be creative too, for example. I look around and find that I live in a slacker apartment full of crayons, surrounded by bits of spook's latest zine efforts and my own crafty detritus which, yes, involves beads.

This morning I went downstairs to get the mail in my pajamas.