Hello again blogland, gee I missed you. I'm back in school, second week now, and thankfully, things are beginning to feel routine. Two nights a week I stay in Bemidji, in the dorms, which is sort of nostalgic, and at the same time, one of those 'thank god I don't have to do this all the time' things. Plus, they are laying carpet in all the rooms surrounding those they rent out to commuting students like me, so the banging and the classic rock starts around 8 am. This is okay, for it gets my ass out of bed, and in a wierd way reminds me of living in the city, where it seems you are perpetually awoken by some kind of construction all summer long.

Also, cute perk: the rooms are above the day care playground, and the high little voices drift up to me as I lay on the bed and read - the Power Rangers theme song (which, as far as I can tell, goes something like this: Power Rangers, da da da, Power Rangers, da da da), shouts and songs, and inevitably, tears. It's nice, after the isolation of Toad Lake, to live in a populated zone, to hear the cars rumble and bump by at night, catch snatches of conversation from people walking below.

Yeah, I think I'm ready to live in a city again. When we moved out of Chicago when I was a kid, I couldn't sleep for weeks in the cricket chirping silence of the way north 'burbs. Where were the sirens, the voices, the cars, the purplish streetlight drifting through the curtains? Even though we left when I was twelve, whenever I get back into a city, lying in the bed at night with the window open, sound drifting through, it still feels like home.