Autumn Leaves!

So the leaves are starting to change colors here, which I'm really excited about for two reasons. One reason is that the leaves don't really change in LA because we don't have seasons.  It will be hot and leafy outside until November or so, and then there will be a cold snap and everything just dies, including stuff that's supposed to stay alive through the winter (like oranges) if we're particularly unlucky.  We might get pretty leaves for a week or two, but there's no gradual autumn-ness that goes on. 

The other reason is that I've had a song stuck in my head for about three weeks now that talks about autumn leaves.  It's an old jazz standard and the lyrics start like this:

"The falling leaves outside my window, the autumn leaves of red and gold..."

It then goes on to talk about lips and sunburns and other stuff that sounds poetic if you're not just artlessly glossing over it the way I'm doing right now and ends with this line:

"Since you went away, the days grow long, and soon I'll hear old winter's song, but I miss you most of all, my darling, when autumn leaves start to fall."

So I was really excited to be able to sing that song while watching the autumn leaves slowly drop off the trees outside my window so I could be all thoughtful and pensive, which are my two favorite things to pretend to be.  Unfortunately, I forgot that I live in the heart of the Downtown district of Seattle.  Here's what the view from my bedroom window looks like:

...Bleak.

So if I'm going to look wistfully out my window at the falling leaves, I'm going to have to have to pay someone to ship them in from somewhere outside the city limits, and then pay my upstairs roommate to drop them slowly outside his or her window, which doesn't have quite the same effect. 

Luckily, all is not entirely lost, because Capitol Hill, where the music campus is, looks like this: 

So all is not lost!  There are some change-y leaves in my future after all!  I'm just going to have to let my dream of being perceived as all mournful and deep die quietly, which is probably for the best.  I don't do pensive or thoughtful or wistful or deep very authentically, anyway.  People would probably see me gazing listlessly out of my window and shout things like, "That doesn't look believable at all!" or "Take an acting class, failure!"  or "Are you paying that poor girl to drop dying leaves out her window? What is wrong with you?"

It's really better this way. 

Some People Have Real Problems.

I'm getting a little worried about the shape of my skull.

Now, I realize that "head shape" is the sort of thing that people who don't have enough real problems complain about, but hear me out. 

When I was in my junior year of high school, I developed these migraines.  They were blindingly painful, nasty little things that would come out of nowhere and take me down for 12 or 16 hours at a time.  After the third or fourth time my mother came into my room and found me face-down on my bed moaning pitifully and trying to smother myself with a pillow, she made an appointment to take me in to see a neurologist.  This neurologist's name was Dr. Impus, or Impington, or Imp-Jones, the sort of name that made me picture a balding and pointy-eared creature rubbing its hands together mischievously while looking at me over the top of his gold horn-rimmed glasses.  Kind of like one of those things that run the banks in Harry Potter.  I don't remember whether or not he actually looked like that at all, but that's how I remember him because his name had the word Imp in it. 

 This may or may not be exactly what he looked like.

Anyway, Dr. Impwhatever took me into his office.  After feeling my head for a little while, he turned to me and said, 

"You have some pretty severe clefts in your skull right here.  Are you sure you haven't already had corrective surgery?"

As surprising as this may be to you, "Severe skull clefts" is not one of the most reassuring things to hear at a neurologist.  My mother assured me that I hadn't had any kind of surgery, but dark images of secret brain operations, perhaps to implant some kind of obedience chip in my brain, had already begun to surface.  I don't remember the rest of the neurologist appointment, or whether he figured out what was wrong with me, but the important message came through: I had a weird-shaped head. 

Also, he made fun of me for being fat.  Seriously.  He said something along the lines of, "You must spend loads of money on groceries," something that cracked my mother up and filled me with shame.

What a jerk.

Anyway, that all came back to me last night, when I was at my school listening to a jazz concert and feeling how lumpy the area just above my eyes is.  I know brows are supposed to protrude at least a little, but I've got what feels like twin mountain ranges just above my eyes.  I don't know why I've never noticed it before.  On top of that, I've got a weird head bump on the top of my head that causes me to always have a cowlick, no matter how short my hair is.  At first I thought I was just sleeping on my hair funny every day for my entire adult life, but no.  There's a tiny hill on the top of my head that prevents me from ever having a normal hairstyle.  It's like a top hat, but made of bone and not quite as stylish.

You'd think with a head as lumpy as mine, people would be chasing me through the street with torches.  "Hideous lumpy-skulled boy!" they'd shout. "Go back to Geneva with the rest of your franken-family!"  But no. They've left me to discover it on my own, possibly as some kind of Truman-Show-scaled practical joke.   "Let's leave this kid alone and wait for him to realize that everyone's been laughing at his severely-clefted head the whole time!"  

 Like this, but crueler because everyone was just letting me lead a normal life.

I exaggerate, of course.  I'm sure that the shape of my skull isn't keeping me from getting a job and starting a family and living a relatively normal, lump-free life.  I guess the point of all of this is that I shouldn't be allowed to be left alone with my thoughts.  Now that I'm living on my own and am alone in a dorm room most of the time, I have nothing to distract myself from the nagging fear that maybe I'm secretly the guy from Mask.  

Except I've got better hair than he does.

Even if the only style it's capable of is, "just rolled out of bed, no time to shower or brush," even if I just stepped out of the shower and have brushed my hair until my scalp bleeds.

Oh well.

Introduction?

I'm so terrible at introductory posts.  So instead of doing the whole, "this is who I am, this is what I'm going to be talking about" nonsense, I'm going to assume that there's only going to be like four people who ever read this and skip all that.  Here's a story instead.

Last week, the Provost of Cornish College came into my writing class to make an announcement.  If you're wondering what a Provost is, so am I.  The Internet tells me that a Provost is "the equivalent of a pro-vice chancellor at some institutions in the United Kingdom and Ireland," which is one of those rare answers to a question that actually brings you further away from the answer you were looking for.  Our Provost doesn't actually seem to do anything, but her name is on all the e-mails that I get from the school so she must do something.  Maybe she's just, like, a figurehead, like the Queen of England, and her job is to look rich and important and official while the deans and teachers and other faculty get all the real work done.   I feel like 30 seconds of Wikipedia will tell me every facet of a Provost's job, but I kind of like not knowing because now I picture our Provost waving serenely from the back of a chauffeured car on the faces of stamps and postcards and whatnot, and knowing what she actually does would probably ruin that image for me.

Anyway, that wasn't the point of my story at all.  The point is that she came in to make an announcement, looking all official and Queen-y and standing in the back of the room, waiting for our teacher Chris to notice her.  When she finally got the chance to speak, she moves to the front of the class and says,

"Hello everyone!  It's so good to see you!  I just wanted to come in and ask you all to treat Chris gently.  She's not one of our more stable faculty."

AND THEN SHE LEFT.

No more words. No second, more administrative announcement.  Not even a moment to laugh and be like "Just kidding, you guys!"  She just glided away all classily, leaving us stunned in her wake, wondering whether that was a serious warning, given out of concern for our safety, or the greatest administrative practical joke ever.  Should we laugh like carefree children, knowing that there was a chance the sound would set off the bestial side of our ever more sinister-looking teacher? Should we start coming to class armed, just in case?  Was our teacher's quick, loud laugh after the announcement legitimate, or an attempt to throw us off the track by making the genuine warning seem humorous?  Nobody knew, and after a moment of silence and a few confused and quickly-stifled giggles, we returned to our discussion, each of us mentally calculating the quickest route to the exit in case our teacher should have one of her "episodes" and reflecting on the bureaucratic mystery of our school's Provost.