Lake Life

The heat here in Western Missouri is fairly obscene. Actually, its grotesquely obscene. But irrespective of this fact I have come to really begin to appreciate living on the lake in a new way. Typically, my stays in Lotawana have been very short and filled with as much water skiing and lake activities as possible. But with a month of time on my hands, I have taken things much slower this time.

This has, however, lead to an unusual position for me. On the one hand, I have slid too much into daily habits of being 'home.' I am not overly eager to wake up because there is no pressure to sieze the day in any meaningful sense. Instead, I sit around most mornings far too committed to my computer or day dreaming. I look out over the lake and enjoy the relative quiet of life out here, but I am not animate in the world. Part of that is due to the heat, but part of it is do to what I see as a tendency to become a creature of habit almost instantly.

But on the other hand, living here begins to fulfill another side to me that I often do not embrace or exhibit. I love being outdoors and engaging with my world- though I must often force myself out the door in order to do so. Last night I ventured out to investigate what I thought was a boat jacking, and after realizing all was well, I looked up. Stars. A multitude of stars I hadn't seen in such a long time that I had come to disregard them as central to this world. But in peering up through the shadowy impressions of trees and rooftops, I recognized an old but very aloof friend.

I have lived and loved the city for four years now, and though I will return to it as a field of study, I hope that I may maintain a place "away from it all." What "it" is I don't really know, since wherever you are, an "it" can be found. But what I want is the ability to step back from our light-flooded world and enter a kind of false frontier. A place where it appears that nature and human habitat are truly facing each other and all one must do is simply cross a thin line to traverse the two worlds.

Still, I'm too connected to all of this Internet nonsense. I'll readily admit it, even if I don't immediately fix it. I have an expectation that at any moment something critical and important will happen that demands my immediate response. But 99.99% of tweets don't demand my reading. 99.99% of facebook notifications aren't important (unless you count all those farmville requests- those things are critical) but still I wait. And wait. I think that being at the lake has really brought home just how overly connected I am, and the importance of doing something outside of Internet procrastination.

With a long camping trip ahead of me, I hope that I can satisfy this need to be out and away from my habits.

P.S. I have been working my way through all the Harry Potter movies in anticipation of the final film's release. I have to say, I did not like Prisoner of Azkaban much at all. </nerd>