After some brief discussion about the weather and the cost of taxis, we decided to bring the car. It would cost about the same anyway, right?

Wrong.

Because with the car, there came the possibility of shopping. Specifically the possibility of buying things that were too large to carry on the boat by hand. I spent enough money to get to California and back.

A rough inventory:

Bamboo rug for my kitchen
Four pairs of pants, two of which are a bit goofy
A gigundo thing of toilet paper
A ruffly shirt the color of a cartoon mango (yes, I said ruffly)

…and here’s where the evidence of island fever begins to show…

Two “mystery” Matchbox cars (the packaging is opaque black plastic)
Two boxes of Barbie miniature fairies, one of which looks like a less attractive Maleficent
Two whoppingly huge bags of Cadbury mini-eggs
Plaid shoes
Orange-flavored body wash/shampoo/bubble bath
Heart-shaped Everlasting Gobstoppers
A time-wasting card game that I used to play back in the stoner days of high school
A battery-powered sparkly lava lamp night light
Two boxes of dice
A partridge in a pear tree

Okay, so I was kidding about that last one. But you get the picture.

Thankfully, we didn’t make it to the Christmas Tree Shop. I might have come home with several garden gnomes, a dozen stained glass window doohickeys, Spiderman flip-flops, a stuffed jellyfish and a stray child or two.

 With the terribly premature passing of my Dad last week (I thought we had years left, maybe decades–they said they’d get him a liver, and they lied), I inherited a bunch of stuff. I am now the proud owner of a house in the middle of a town I’ll never have a desire to live in (and my father knew this–he wanted me to use it as collateral to buy my own home, which I will do). I also own a grey minivan that I’ll probably never use as my own because it’s so old and run down that it only makes sense for a gearhead like my dad to own. I’ve got a half-built hot rod, and a shop full of incredibly cool tools I don’t know how to use (but hopefully will someday), and a cherry red 1953 GMC 630 semi with a white Coke-bottle stripe that’s fully restored. And a decent chunk of change, too, the amount of which I will not specify.

 And I have the freedom to go wherever I want to go, without feeling guilty about it, or missing the most important person in my life. Because the most important person in my life is gone.

 And I thought about it, too. Years ago, before he got sick, I thought to myself, when he goes, I’ll be able to go wherever I want without getting lectured about being a bad daughter. If only I could bitch slap the face of my old self now. Oh, how stupid I was, and so willing to take for granted that he’d always be there. Sometimes desire can be a truly terrible thing; can make us think of things we should never think of.

 Nevertheless, I have the freedom now. I can go wherever I want–New Zealand, Europe, California–and I’ve chosen to go home. Back to the place I came from. I’ve chosen instead of running away to some glorious faroff place to return to the tiny island that spat me out all those years ago.

 There are some who think that I’m using my father’s death as an excuse to make a foolish and un-thought-out decision. That I’m going to drop out of school and be absorbed by the island, transformed instantaneously into a lazy, pot-smoking Island-duh, and that I’ll never leave again, never get anything accomplished.

 It couldn’t be much farther from the truth.

 For the first time since I left home in 1997, when I was 18, I realize what made my parents move there and raise a child in the first place. Although my father later became embittered with the forces that were acting upon our tiny island and left it, he could never say that the magic was completely gone. There is a community aspect of living in so small and isolated a place that’s hard to achieve anywhere else. And not only are the people on the island familiar and isolated, they’re smart (most of them, anyway). And they’re artistic.

I’m not going home to hide out, or to escape my demons. I’m going home in search of something I think I may only find there–solace. I’m going for the trees and the ocean, and the deep dark of the winter night sky. I’m going for friendly games of wine-infused Scrabble, and heaping pots of homemade chili. I’m going for the fresh-baked smell of pastries in coffee shops, and the knowledge that every door I walk through will reveal a face that I know. I’m going for free concerts by local musicians, and dinner parties that happen every week, and people who will band together with or without your consent and throw a benefit concert when your dad dies suddenly and you can’t afford to pay for a memorial service for him.

The things are mine, much as I wish I could trade them in for another day with my Dad. And they, too, mean freedom. Wheels to take me anywhere, if I want to go. A house to live in if I ever need a roof, or a rest. Something to show the bank when I want to buy my own home that I’m good for it. And a little money to help me along the way.

I want to believe that my father would have approved of my decision to move home. I’ve almost convinced myself that he would. What I do know for sure is that he would have believed I had the right to make my own decisions, and that if I’d taken the time to think them out, they were probably the right ones. The only time he ever told me not to move somewhere, my destination was Texas. He told me the whole 8 months that I was there that I had to pack up my duffel bags and get back on the bus and go back the way that I came–and he was right.

I’m not exercising excuses, I’m exercising freedom. And I’m using my freedom to stay nearby, and look for a quiet life instead of adventure. Dad, I hope you understand. Nobody else’s opinion even matters.

 I miss you, but if I can’t have you back, I’m grateful for the freedom.

I approached the table and posed the inevitable question: “Were you a counselor at Brantwood Camp in New Hampshire in 1992?” As I’d expected, the man gave a sort of stunned smile and confirmed that yes, he had been. “Mr. O’Connor,” I said. He nodded and smiled a bit wider. “I was one of your campers for three years,” I said. I told him my name, and he remembered me, then he introduced me (or should I say re-introduced me) to his wife, who had been a camper and later a counselor while I’d been at the camp. As soon as she said her name, her face became familiar, too. “Wow,” they both said.

We spent a few minutes recounting old memories, and they filled me in on some happenings at the camp (they’re involved in the Alumni Association, which I haven’t managed to join yet, though I should). They showed me a picture of their two sons, who are adorable. We agreed to exchange email addresses before they left, and they said they’d pass on my information to another former counselor who lives in Boston, who I made a failed attempt at contacting last year.

This story would seem incredibly surprising if this sort of thing didn’t happen to me all the time. For example, not more than a month ago, a guy came in at the end of the night and I had the same “I know you” feeling–I asked him, and it turned out that he was the ex-stepson of my former Big Sister from Big Brothers/Big Sisters, and I’d met him while she and his father were in the final stages of planning their wedding. My instinct that time had been “I know he’s someone I know’s older brother…” and sure enough, it was his younger brother Charlie who I spent more time with, because he was closer to my age.

I have run into people I know from the Vineyard in Eugene (OR), Big Sur (CA), at least half a dozen in Monterey (CA), and a dozen or so on the T and in passing here in Boston, and a few more in other places. I ran into a couple I’d met in a bar one evening in Monterey at the San Jose Airport months later. I found out that a former bartender at my current place of employment spent part of her honeymoon hanging out at the bar I used to work at in Monterey–and it was a Sunday night, which meant that I was there, working–she described every person I worked with and a handful of regulars to a tee. The new waitress at my work used to hang out with the group of kids I partied with when I lived in Hyannis, only she hung out with them years later. I’ve seen Monterey friends unexpectedly in Portland and San Francisco. I was once on a plane from Oakland to Boston and was seated in the row across from a girl I went to school with on the island from kindergarten through high school.

About nine years ago, I ran into another former Brantwood camper when I knocked on her dorm room door to ask for a lighter because my high school friend (who my friend Jamie and I were visiting at college) said the girl in that room would be the most likely to have one. I wasn’t as practiced at my “don’t I know you” spiel then as I am now, so I simply rattled off her name and address like an automaton and waited for her to realize who I was (we’d written for a short time after camp ended). Sure enough, she did. We are still in touch. A few years before that, I was working at the Flying Horses Carousel in Oak Bluffs, and in walked Cathy and Tracy Freel, two sisters I’d raised a bit of hell with at camp my second year (one of them, I can’t remember which, had hidden cigarettes in the cinder block beneath her tent).

I’ve run into a girl named Else, who I met on a bus in New Zealand four years ago, twice–once on Martha’s Vineyard the following summer, and once in Boston last winter.

I don’t know why, but it seems like these random run-ins happen to me exponentially more often than they happen to anyone else. It could be accounted for by the fact that I have an exceptionally good memory for faces and therefore perhaps I tend to recognize people in situations that others would not (9 times out of 10 I’m the one who recognizes them). Perhaps it’s because Vineyarders are well-traveled, myself included.

But how the hell do you account for Else?! That shit just doesn’t happen twice. But I’m sure it will happen again. In a few months or a few years, I will be in New York, or Toronto, or Guatemala, and I will run into Else–again. The last time, we exchanged phone numbers and didn’t call. Maybe next time we’ll become friends.

The sculpture is of the goddess Nike, the goddess of Victory, and dates back to sometime B.C. (I’ve forgotten the date and am not feeling the necessity to look it up). It was discovered, partially destroyed, centuries after its creation. The goddess’s head and arms are missing, but a massive set of imposing wings are intact, outstretched behind her. I stopped in the stairwell and stared, while my ex anxiously shuffled his feet–to him, this visit was merely a “must-see,” and he didn’t appear truly awed by much of anything we saw, much less paralyzed on a stone step as I was, completely transfixed.

Ever since I saw the Winged Victory, I’ve wanted to get it as a tattoo. I’ve spent hours online looking for the right image–one that would translate correctly to the flesh, retaining the power of the image as much as possible. About a year ago, I was trading images of the sculpture with my friend Dave, a MySpace buddy who I’d never met in person. He sent me a few shots that I liked, and I added them to my library of “Winged Victory” images. In addition to finding the right shot, I needed to decide where on my body I’d like to have the Victory. I pondered putting it on my upper arm, but I’ve shied away from tattooing my arms for unknown reasons. I concluded that the best place to put it would be on my shoulder–my right shoulder, so that the wings would reach up and out from my shoulderblade and appear almost as though I had a wing of my own.

A couple months after the initial image trade with Dave, I received a picture message on my cell phone from an unknown number. The photo was of a girl’s back, with an amazing tattoo of the Winged Victory in exactly the place I wanted to get it. Damn, I thought. I guess I’m not so original after all. It took me a minute to realize that it was Dave who had sent me the message. I figured, since Dave is sort of an internet research guru and can find almost anything online, that he’d found the image on a website somewhere. Still, I asked: Whose back is that? For a couple hours, I received no response. Finally, a message came in: My psycho ex.

For a moment, I considered the possibility that my cyber-friend, whom I’d never met and should therefore not really consider a friend (though I did, and still do, and we’ve actually met now), had thought my idea was so cool that he’d shared it with this girl and she’d gone and swiped my idea. No, Dave told me when I asked him if this was the case, she came into town and boasted of a new tattoo, and when he saw it, he was shocked.

Though there is an incredibly small chance that I will ever meet Dave’s “Psycho ex,” or even encounter anyone who has met her besides Dave, I am nonetheless reluctant to get the tattoo now. The tattoos I do have, with the exception of the first one I got professionally (the Chinese symbol for “pleasure” on my back, which I had done when I was 18) are carefully chosen, and as far as I know, unique to me. While I understand that it’s a near certainty that there will be other people in the world who have the Winged Victory tattooed on them, as there are millions who have seen the sculpture and surely some of them were as taken aback by it as I was, still it makes me uncomfortable to know that I have a friend who’s seen the tattoo. In the exact spot I wanted to put it.

I’ve toyed with the idea of putting the tattoo in a different place, but the only place it belongs is on my right shoulder blade. That’s all there is to it. So, I either get it where it belongs–and have the exact same tattoo as someone’s Psycho Ex (not exactly someone I want to share a taste in ink with), or I do not get it at all. This, along with poverty and procrastination, is the reason my flesh is not currently adorned with the goddess of victory in all her stone glory.

My friend Jamie is coming up either tomorrow or next week, and we are going to get tattooed. Jamie knows exactly what she wants, and where she wants it. I would love to get the Victory, but a) can’t afford it, and b) have yet to make up my mind as to whether I want it at all anymore.

I know that my reluctance may sound unnecessarily indignant, but to me, a tattoo is a statement of identity–a marking which makes a claim not only of that person’s likes, loves and history, but of who they are. With this thought in mind, I’ve considered my other tattoos–”Belonging to the ocean” in Sanskrit; “Wander” and “Experience” in Japanese on my ankles; a Beastie figure on my neck in honor of my mother–and I’ve started to wonder if I have any business putting the Victory on my body at all, regardless of the other girl who’s already done it. After all, victory and the quest for it are not very high up on my list of important ideals. I don’t believe in war, and I feel most often that people who are on a quest for victory are willing to do almost anything in order to attain it, including damaging other people without regard–and that is an ideal I do not agree with. On the flip side, what the mythological significance of the sculpture is was never what drew me to it, or had me eager to preserve the image for posterity on my skin. The thing was just so goddamned beautiful, and I do appreciate beauty, particularly damaged beauty.

On Wednesday, I will most likely have a Latin phrase inked on the inside of my right wrist: Verba volant; Scripta manent. Translation: Spoken words fly away; Written words remain. As far as I know, this is mine and mine alone, tattoo wise. And it’s small, which means it’s cheap, and that’s what I can afford.

On a more philosophical level, a writer cannot afford to go chasing after victory, anyhow. They must be satisfied instead with the pursuit of small, indelible truths–because in time, the ever-pursued victory will spread its legendary wings and fly away too, ceasing to matter in the long run. But then again, there’s a certain melancholy beauty to destroyed victory…

The night before last I was unable to sleep because my apartment had been converted, in the course of twelve hours, into a sauna. The air was so thick and heavy that as I lay in my bed drenched in sweat at three a.m., I kept rolling around as if by moving I could shake off the weight of it. It’s only May, and already I’m beginning to regret that I didn’t take the financial and emotional risk of returning to the Island Of Misfit Toys for the summer. To have enough trees to generate sufficient shade, to be free from the sounds and smells of city, to have the ocean–swimmable ocean–only a 15 minute walk away…

I am not a city mouse. With two short exceptions, both of which made me moderately miserable, I have never lived in a place where I couldn’t walk to the beach. Though the water in Monterey was unbearably cold, it was there, and if I’d chosen to swim in it at any given point, I wouldn’t have been arrested or poisoned (with the exception of Lover’s Point, that beautiful shit-filled idyll in Pacific Grove, which we locals all knew to avoid). If it got too hot during the day, I could just take a dip in the drink and cool off. I’ve never been able to understand how people can reconcile the germ-ridden ick of public pools enough to actually get in them–until now. Though public pools will retain indefinitely their title of “bodies of water I’m least likely to step into,” I can understand the desperation that the sweltering hell of summer in the city can bring a person to, particularly if that person is a child and countless hours of nothing to do while their parents are at work.

Since I’ve been on my summer schedule (four days of working in the city, three days off on the island), it’s as though I’ve been living two distinct and separate lives. In one, I do very little apart from working. I wake late, laze around for longer than I should, and on the very hot days, I pray for rain. In the other, I am up before noon, out in the sunshine, the fresh ocean breeze taunting my nostrils and inviting me to go for a swim (I haven’t yet, and I have no excuse). Half of my week is spent looking forward to the other half. Though the social aspects of my life have not changed at all in the city (all I did was work to begin with), I feel I’m constantly missing out on something that’s going on on the island, something that I should be part of because–and it’s taken me years to even consider saying this–I might belong there.

I have spent many years pining for faraway places–California, Europe, New Zealand–and I pine for some of them still. I never thought, however, that I’d come at some point in my life–and certainly not so soon–to pine for where I came from. But then, everything is circular, isn’t it?

Whatever the reason for the urge, I feel most comfortable, most okay with myself, when I am moving. When I’m going somewhere, I have a purpose, a destination—and sometimes, as the old saying goes (and I can’t remember who said it), the journey is the destination. I have crossed this country by bus, train and car (if you count going from Texas to LA in a stuffed station wagon as crossing the country, which I sort of have to because Texas lasts forever). I have backpacked and bussed it around New Zealand and traveled through pokey little towns in Eastern Europe with ten other people in a spitting and whining hired minivan. Aside from the trip to Eastern Europe, the majority of my distance traveling has been done alone, and I prefer it that way. There is a feeling I get from traveling—even short distances, like the bus trip I’m currently taking from Boston to Woods Hole—that I just don’t want to share or have interrupted by other people.

Although I am capable of relaxing in other ways, for me there is no more pure relaxation—unfettered, unstressed, reflective—than sitting on a bus or a train and watching the scenery go by, either listening to music or simply to the engine. Sometimes I read or write; most times I just sit. Though I often stay awake, I find that when there are wheels beneath my seat, I can fall almost instantly asleep, which is not the case on stationary ground, as many of you know. It’s as though the moment I board a bus or train, I leave the anxiety of everyday life behind me on the platform, and it can’t possibly catch up with me until I’ve reached my destination.

Occasionally I’ll find myself gazing lazily out the window and thinking of the departure scenes in a number of movies, where the main character gets on a train or a bus (usually in the rain, which I also love), sits down and begins to think about what they’re going to do to change their life. They are leaving a lover or heading toward one, leaving a place which holds them down or taking a chance on a new place they’ve never had the guts to go to. They are running away, or they are going home. In film, buses and trains tend to represent beginnings or ends, fractured happiness or the pensive first steps of self-reconstruction. Often in the scenes I’ve just mentioned, the main character winds up staring out the window of the bus, crying. I’ve done this before, and on the few occasions when it’s happened, it’s been perhaps the most cathartic, simple release of emotion that I’ve experienced. Crying alone is awful, even more depressing than the catalyst for the tears has been in the first place. But crying alone when you’re in motion somehow doesn’t feel so bad; for me, it’s like a cleansing. Sometimes—and I’ve done this, too—the character will be looking out the window and a big, uncontrollable grin will spread slowly across their face–a satisfied, triumphant look–a look of confidence bordering on invincibility. Sometimes a smile can be just as cathartic as tears.

I do not drive. I’ve never driven, really, so I don’t know whether I could achieve the same sort of peace behind the wheel, or if part of the magic is the ability to let go and not think about the logistics, to let someone else drive. I imagine that it would be both better and worse—better for the freedom to veer from the chosen route, to speed up or slow down or stop at will; worse because driving is often stressful and requires undivided attention, which leaves much less time for rumination and renegade bouts of tears.

Also, I despise traveling by airplane. I am not afraid of flying—though I was for a time—I just do not like the entire process. From the check-in charade to the fluorescently lit waiting areas to the well-dressed, time-neurotic yuppies that pepper every airport from here to Timbuktu, air travel is just plain uncomfortable, even before you get on the plane. There are just too many people, and they’re all in too much of a goddamn hurry. Smashed between dodgy-smelling strangers on a vehicle that [I believe, contrary to most people’s opinions,] doesn’t make nearly enough noise, it’s quite impossible to attain my little narcissistic nirvana. Simply put, on an airplane I just can’t convince myself that the rest of humanity doesn’t exist because it’s so close to me that I can feel its collective anxiety pressing in on me and it’s crushing.

I am one of a rare breed of people who actually enjoy traveling by bus. I have even managed to enjoy parts of a bus trip from Phoenix to Dallas on a Greyhound bus whose air conditioner was a bit shy of fully functional. And I love train travel. If I had my way, I’d go everywhere by train. I love the backward lurch just before the train starts moving forward, I love the clickety-clack, I love the melancholy announcing whistle. When the train’s going fast enough, it rocks side to side like a boat, and I love that, too.

Somehow, when I’m in motion, on wheels that are controlled by someone other than me, I feel for a moment or an hour as though when I get off at my destination, I will emerge as an ideal: the wild girl with wild hair, big heavy boots and a guitar or a knapsack slung over her shoulder, ready to take whatever the world might want to dish out. And for a few minutes after my feet touch the ground, I walk like that girl—independent and unencumbered—and people notice. I notice. Which is, perhaps, why I keep repeating the process.

The thing is, my father is a morning person. A five o’clock in the morning person. Which means that yesterday morning, after having gone to sleep at two a.m., I was awake at six and sitting in a car, listening to my dad talk. I think I might have talked back, but I couldn’t tell you what I said because I had the approximate mental acuity of a grapefruit. My father is also a principled traveler: when traveling with him, one must not read, listen to a portable music device, sleep, talk on the cell phone, or any other such activity that does not involve either talking to him, listening to him talk, or looking out the window. By the time we reached Camden, Maine, late yesterday afternoon, I was a pretty useless human being–so useless that when we dove into our motel room beds for a much-needed nap, I couldn’t sleep. Nor could I sleep last night when I went to bed at midnight and lay awake until about two a.m. listening to my father snore. Six a.m. came around and he was awake, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and pissed off that the weather was still bleak. I woke, showered, attempted to smear a smile across my drooping face and climbed back in the car. And listened to him talk. For another seven hours. But, as I mentioned earlier, when I got home, the sky was a brilliant and joyful shade of black, and the rain was coming down hard enough to lull me into a peaceful and prolonged sleep. I didn’t have to smear the smile, it was there.

Five minutes later, my roommate (I think I’m going to start calling him “Murphy”) came home. My roommate who likes to mix arbitrary harsh synthesizer sounds, seemingly endlessly, and seemingly only when I am in desperate need of sleep. My roommate who, when approached and asked politely if he can turn down his [what can only be called noise--and I have a liberal definition of the word "music"] responds that he should be able to play whatever he wants during “normal” hours, and I am the rude one for expecting him to turn it down, as it’s “weird” to want to sleep in the late afternoon. My roommate who I’m convinced has lost part of his hearing, which is the only possible way to account for the deafening and bone-rattling volume at which he plays sounds which create visceral reactions, even at low volumes, in most people.

So here I sit, in my room, afraid to begin an argument which I know I will lose, listening to distorted amp-buzz and eighties wee-oo sound effects, with NO RHYTHM WHATSOEVER, at a volume which can likely be heard in New Hampshire. A friend who I talked to on the phone during this onslaught informed me, unsurprisingly, that this particular form of audio assault is one way that torturers extort information out of prisoners–by playing music or sounds at extremely high volume, with no predictable rhythm or regularity, until they crack….

I stole a pack of gum when I was five. I stole hundreds of dollars worth of things from stores on Martha’s Vineyard between the ages of 12 and 15. I once changed a fifty dollar bill and the cashier gave me a hundred back and I said nothing. I pay my phone bill a week after it’s due EVERY MONTH. I’ve been the other woman, though I didn’t know it at the time. Last semester I sort-of cheated and handed in a paper I’d written for another school two years ago, and collected another A without doing a minute’s work. I run red lights on my bicycle every day, and I curse at drivers when I’m probably the one in the wrong. If you want to know my friends’ and family’s sins, I’ll tell you them too, just MAKE IT FUCKING STOP.

If anyone happens to drive by my house and find an extremely expensive keyboard smashed to shards on the sidewalk, rest assured that I am sleeping, in comparative comfort, on a concrete bench in the closest jail. Do not bail me out until I’ve been in for at least twelve hours–I need the sleep.

The way I see it, this endeavor will require me to do the following:

1. Buy A Book.
I just finished a semester in which I had two literature classes and two writing classes, the reading loads of which required a remarkable amount of ocular tenacity and a fair amount of sacrificed sleep. What this means is that I have not read anything (I mean, truly, nothing) that was not assigned since September of 2006. That’s nearly eight months without voluntary reading. I have been looking forward to this day–the day I’m allowed to buy a book that no one told me to read–since about a week after the Fall semester began, more than half a year ago. In my quest for a book, I intend to simply meander around the book store, preferably one which allows beverages so that I can meander with coffee, and look at everything I feel like looking at until something hollers, “Buy Me!” If I find two, I will buy both. If I find six, I will buy them all. I will not rush myself, or give myself a budget, or feel guilty for buying something that one might not actually be able to count as “literature.” If it’s Michael Crichton I want, it’s Michael Crichton I’ll get (not that there’s even a remote likelihood of this).

2. Get A Sunburn.
In the past few weeks, as the weather has been getting gradually more and more fantastic, I have practically become a shut-in. As I do my best work in the middle of the night, I have been up until five or six a.m. almost every night for nearly a month. As I also need a pretty tremendous amount of sleep in order to function properly, and have great difficulty actually getting to sleep, I have wasted a great number of sunny days away in the grey cave of my room, restoring myself to a passable level of lucidity. It is almost summer (though my gut tells me we will probably get walloped with another Northeaster before the end of May), and I intend to celebrate by turning my pasty (redefining white) skin the color of ruby-red grapefruit juice. I will then go into my sister’s garden or living room and find the biggest, juiciest aloe plant she’s got, maim it severely, and slop the goo all over my toasted self until I feel better.

3. Wear A Skirt.
When I think of the word “leisure,” which is normally used in reference to other people, what comes primarily to mind is comfortable, flowy clothing. Light, soft garments which lift and switch with the wind, swirl around your arms or feet when you walk. I am in possession of a rather sizeable collection of hippie skirts, that I wear almost never, which just so happen to epitomize the term “comfortable, flowy clothing.” I’m going to bring them with me to the island, and I’m going to wear them, in true beach-bum style, with hoodies–because there is nothing I can think of that’s more comfortable than a hippie skirt with a hoodie.

4. Go Barefoot.
I hate shoes. I love boots, but I hate shoes. I love (love, love, love) walking around barefoot, particularly if I happen to be wearing one of the aforementioned gauzy hippie skirts. It makes me feel like I am allowed to relax, to do nothing, to sit in a hammock in someone else’s yard (I have neither a yard nor a hammock) and read a book about nothing in particular. As I currently live in a city with icky, dirty streets, and work in a business that requires full-coverage footwear and an inordinate amount of standing on concrete in said full-coverage footwear, the only times I’ve been barefoot since Labor Day have been in my bedroom. I can’t wait.

5. Have A Cocktail.
I do not intend to get uproariously or pointlessly drunk–I have done that enough during the semester that it need not be repeated for as long as possible. However, I am looking forward to sitting on stool by the harbor–preferably while the sun is shining and I am wearing a hippie skirt and no shoes, carrying with me only a freshly-purchased book of no literary merit whatsoever–and having a (1, one) colorful cocktail, mixed and delivered by someone else who is getting paid $2.67 per hour to stand on their feet all day, delivering food and beverages of dubious quality to complete asshole strangers. After I have consumed said fruity beverage, I intend to give the monumentously underpaid liaison of liquid a tip so large it will make them gasp, slip on my flip-flops, and wander aimlessly down the harbor, perhaps down to the beach to slip my un-shod feet into the too-cold ocean just once–a baptism of sorts, in the only water I consider to be holy.