springtime fantasies

It's gotten warm here, and the past few days have been the sort of sunny days that seduce one to think of what summer might be like, and in my case, where I might be.* With the whole idea that I am graduating (barring any crazy events) this semester, well, that's all a little unclear. It's been my plan to go back to Madison for the summer, sleep on friends couches or find some cheap sublet, and see if I can find a job to earn some moving cash with. This is presuming that the jokes about me finding a Norwegian husband and not going home don't pan out. I'd like to point out that these are not my jokes and have come from various Norwegian and American sources. Just for the record.

So even if I do go to Madison for the summer, I'm going to be trying to figure out where I'm going after that. I have no intention, at this point, of staying in Madison past August. Not that I don't love the city. I do. I'm just not sure I want to marry it. I mean, anything more than one last summer fling with the lakes and bike paths, it seems too much like a commitment. I'm not ready to give up my options in other hometowns. My best girl from back in Charlotte has suggested that we both move to NYC together, and I'm intrigued by the suggestion. I have connections there and maybe I could get a suggestion on where I could find a steady paycheck that would cover rent. But I still have a wild dream of checking out the west coast. The farthest west I've been is just over the great dividing river into Minneapolis. I'd like to see what my chances would be like in San Francisco. Google maps and I have been plotting a course across the country by car, stopping off at my far too distant from each other friends' new home cities. But if I've learned nothing else from my time abroad (and there are doubts about my language skills and methods of planning) it is that I can cross an ocean with a couple of duffels and have something like a home before long. Granted, my dorm came furnished, but I'd have to fight my mum's kitties to get my futon back anyway, so why not take a couple duffels across the country by plane and buy a new bed out west? Because I'd miss seeing those friends living in the diaspora and seeing all that land.


*This might also be why the housing managers decided to wax our hallways. This seems a little mad to me, as we are all still tracking the sand used to make walkways walkable inside on our sneakers and the floor wax stinks. However, my dorm mate and I discovered that our giant freeze - for storing the deer carcasses from our nonexistent hunting trips - is really pretty light when we moved it back out into the hall this evening.