My Fourth of July was unremarkable. Given where my apartment is I tend to lay low during anything that can be considered a "drinking holiday." Fourth of July isn't so bad although there was plenty of weirdness that woke me up at 3:00am but I hold to the principle that when one lives in a building primarily with 19-23 year-olds most holidays are drinking holidays. All I have to say about St. Patrick's Day was I was glad I didn't live on the first floor or I would have put plywood up over my windows.
I tried to do some writing, finished about 1000 words between two different projects and spent most of my time tinkering with edits on the pieces I'm sending out on submissions. I have sent out just over a dozen submissions in the past week. This is timely because about two months prior I had a flurry of submission activity which resulted in a flurry of rejection slips the past two weeks. My adviser has told me that I'm not allowed to change my story "Cake" until I get thirty rejections and I'm not allowed to be discouraged until I receive fifty. Working on it.
People set off all sorts of fireworks around here. I couldn't see any of them but I could hear them. The cats woke up from their perpetual naps and sat wide eyed with ears twitching for the first hour after dusk. There was this rumbling, rolling, ominous stretch that really had me on edge. It was easy to believe in those moments that it was more than just fireworks outside. And the rolling--approaching--nature of the sound gave weight to the question in my head is this what it sounds like when there's actual fire fights? But it stopped quickly enough and I retreated back into my mentality of suburban safety.
The big confrontation of the week came earlier when my father asked his new Canadian girlfriend if Canada Day (July 1) was a lot like the American Fourth of July, and she told him no: The Fourth of July is a lot like Canada Day. My father suspects she's something of a nationalist -- no reason that she shouldn't be. But do I tell her that the only three Canadians I can name are the governor of Michigan, comic-fantasy author Tanya Huff and the Bachelorette?
