Sunday in CinCity

Theories of Time and Space

by Natasha Trethewey


You can get there from here, though
there's no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you've never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion – dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on the mangrove swamp – buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry – tome of memory,
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph – who you were—
will be waiting when you return.



Back to CinCity.

I will not even begin to estimate the time I have taken simply to try to get access to my required readings off of a modern invention of torture called BlackBoard. I was starting to take it all personally and feeling blacklisted when a fellow student informed me the course name and ID number had been changed and the professor had to manually add him on. Wish I had known that before I went to the Medical School library only to find out NONE of the articles or journals are there.
Oh, for the days of the mimeograph machine. I would gladly kiss one right now if it would give me a copy of any of the assignments, even the boring one about setting up a hearing loss testing clinic in the workplace. yawn....

And so goes my first week of school. Not being able to get assignments off BlackBoard is a big obstacle. Apparently it's a little like the wizard in Oz. All powerful and all knowing.

Now that I have wasted a huge portion of my day chasing my tail, I'm up to wash dishes, fold clothes, clean bathrooms. Then and only then will I come back to the computer and read the articles that my fellow student and new BFF emailed over to me. The first of four being "The Chronological History of Occupational Medicine." I think it goes a little something like...employers place their workers in unsafe working conditions and then the public finds out about it and the unions have a hissy fit and then the employer takes the jobs to a third world country where they expose the workers to unsafe working conditions. Too cynical, you think?? :>) Sorry. It's my new persona. From our new all black scrubs at work. It's good for my coloring and emphasizes my eyes, but brings out the Darth Vader in me.

However, in light of the big and beautiful full moon that many of my blogging friends have written about and captured in photos, let me leave you with a little Harvest Moon tribute that can soothe souls.



please note: photo by Jason Langley, and that lighting was actually a full moon in Gulfport, Mississippi.