Notes from the state of Montana

“Hey TASPers,”

Happy Labor Day. I hope you’re all doing well! Now that Lynn and I have more or less finished writing our reports, we both have been freed from the post-WashU TASP burdens that were consuming vast amounts of our time. Of course, Lynn begins school tomorrow, so I’m sure she’s going crazy at her summer comes crashing to an end. I, on the other hand, will be hanging out in Sidney, Montana until September 23, when I’ll hop on a train for an almost 24-hour ride to Chicago.

Besides working on the report, I’ve been doing lots of reading, running, playing tennis, and hanging out with friends and family since I’ve been home. I’ve also been working for a U.S. Department of Agriculture ecologist that studies grasshopper population cycling; suffice it to say that I’ve been catching many ‘hoppers, as we in the business call them. I have failed in an attempt to start my journal again, but this is a customary defeat, and by now a comfortable one. I’ve also had the opportunity to attempt to catch up on non-TASP culture: I’ve been going through Dvorak’s complete symphonies, gearing up for a John Ford movie marathon once my last few friends in Sidney return to college, and eagerly awaiting the arrival of Bob Dylan’s new CD Modern Times and one of his older that I shamefully didn’t have, Blood On The Tracks. (Amazon… Two day shipping, my foot.) And while I haven’t been able to enjoy any Muppets movies lately, I did watch Mean Girls last nice. Funny. Also a guilty pleasure. Finally, despite trying to force myself to like every single poem that Carl Sandburg wrote, maybe out of some sort of ill-placed prairie solidarity, so much of his stuff is terrible, aside from a handful of gems. He’s like a second- or third-rate Walt Whitman.

It has been very nice to be home. I was back for just under four days before TASP, and this is first chunk of time that I’ve spent in Montana since Christmas. My grandmother does my laundry, so new t-shirts don’t shrink to perverse sizes. It’s good to catch up with the people you know, which in the case of a small town means almost everybody. I recently beat my other grandmother at Scrabble, a seemingly petty but actually important landmark in my life. From the very start of August, 90 humidity-free degrees is Montana was a great improvement over 90 degrees in St. Louis swamps. And now, the nights are growing chilly, which means the days won’t get so hot to begin with. You may wonder why I am bothering to talk about the weather at all, but you’ve just received a careful (and free, and important ) lesson in Montana (and for that matter, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wyoming) linguistics: weather is always germane and always safe to discuss.

I’ve enjoyed “lurking” on this blog to hear about your lives, and I’ve also enjoyed your emails, your Facebook messages, and in general wondering how your senior years have been treating you. Perhaps you will experience something like I have—the years go by so quickly that, at one moment, you’re a hormonally imbalanced middle school kid and, the next, you’re a junior at college. I suppose the next development is being an old man, wistfully reminiscing about a life already led. But then again, I’ve got a long time before that happens.

See what happens when you’re not back at college like the rest of the world? Shameful nostalgia and sentimentalism. Beware! I think I am ready to begin the fall quarter, though I think it will be obscene amounts of work.

And now for something completely different: Labor Day was, in at least one way, a very sad day: the great Steve Irwin, the so-called “Crocodile Hunter,” died in a freak accident with a stingray. One of these sea creatures, generally docile and even friendly, punctured Irwin’s chest and heart with its stinger while he was filming a new television series. For those of you who don’t know, Irwin produced and starred in a television show that aired on the Animal Planet in the U.S. He was a passionate conservationist and lover of the wilderness, and the source of many hours of entertaining enlightenment for my brother and I. He will be missed.

Some of you have noted that my address on the contact sheets seems incorrect. You are right to say so: Montana’s abbreviation is MT, rather than MO, which will actually send your correspondence to Missouri. (And who wants that?) So, if you do want to pass something along to me, send it to one of these two places:

(will arrive before September 23)
507 7th St. SE
Sidney, MT 59270

(will arrive on or after Sept. 23)
5540 S. Hyde Park Blvd., #305
Chicago, IL 60637

All right, I think I’m going to celebrate Labor Day some more. Take care,

Tyler