I am probably not wearing enough layers and it is completely my fault. The campus walk is the same as yesterday and the day before, the brick and snow patches illuminated by white winter sunlight, and a tirade of other students walk beside or against me on their way to class or library or food. Even with my hands in my pockets, shoulders hunched up against the chill, the wind cuts through the fabric with practiced ease. As I walk, it brushes through my hair, ruffling my clothes against my skin and repositioning my outfit. The wind says I should open my collar, pushing it out to expose my neck, says I should let my flannel blow back behind me like a cape. I don’t disagree. Who can argue with the wind? I stop fighting it, both the wind as my personal fashion expert and the cold in general. I let the frigid air permeate my skin, my muscles, veins, and arteries until it touches my bones. It feels like cleansing. Like the cold is freezing off all of the detritus of the day, all the nagging leftovers of all the moments before this, letting me just be. Just walk down through the tunnel by the bridge and be a cold boy on his way to class.
“People often forget about how beautiful the world is, the way the trees blow in the wind, how flowers bloom in the spring, and how amazing the grass feels on our feet. We come from a generation where the only beauty we actually see is over an electronic. Go outside every once in a while, smell the fresh hair and the flowers, lay down on a blanket in the grass and look up at the sky and see how the clouds look. We don’t really live in a bad world, you are just blinded by what you see. Show me what you see.”
ds106 Assignments: another day
It is probably no surprise that this is a true experience, what with the weather we have been having recently. As you have just read, I love it. I find that there is something refreshing about the cold and I wanted to write about it here. It was the first thought that came to my mind in response to this assignment, besides the more overdone topics like flowers and sunrises and the like which I pushed to the side. Not that those things are bad, they are not, but they are talked about a lot. I wanted to give a view to something not really talked about. I wanted to try something a little more risky than just ‘look at all the pretty colors’. I hoped it worked, maybe it just made you shiver. I’ll take whatever response I can get.
This took a couple of days to come back to it and get it right, and I made very good use of a thesaurus. There weren’t too many roadblocks, but I am noticing that if I don’t have a way in, if I don’t have a first sentence that is interesting to me, I can’t start. I remember staring at the blinking cursor on this page for a good while before something acceptable turned up.
