6:49. Eleven to seven. Not hungry for dinner since i’ve been snacking all day: Mary says there’s a biological explanation for study munchies, I say there’s no better distraction from the glow of the computer screen than a snack on my right.
It is officially finals time. Tomorrow I will attend my last two classes, and submit my first two major papers. I’ve been working on them for days and days, in this stressopolis I call Butler Library. The nostalgia and anticipation for California sunshine tugs at my fleece sleeves and woolen socks.
I’ve effectively located three good albums which have soundtracked this nonsense. The formation of outlines, the inputting of quotes, the endless “The implications of this idea are…” sentences which always make me want to end them with “…that this assignment blows and i wish i wasn’t paying a quarter of a million of my parents hard earned cash for this shit.” But instead I blow my professors mind with some fancy wordplay about analytical frameworks, and then go tell the creepy construction men to fuck off. Again. Why are they so awful, anyway? I mean, I look like shit, I feel like shit, and aside from one particular mistake of a moment, I don’t talk to them and wish they would do the same. But instead their sex-deprived half smiles overcome their tired faces and they make some comment about my ass. Which, by the way Mr. Bricklayer, hasn’t seen the gym in a few weeks too many.
Anyway. finals. They’re going okay, and my consolation is that this is my 2nd to last! I’ve made a huge decision and although impulsive, is going to be great, I’m sure of it. I decided to move to Boston next year. I’m ditching this school bullshit, and enrolling just to write my thesis. I’m living in a house with eleven other people, only two of which I know (and love). It’s going to be great. No more elitist institution, no more repetitively quiet saturday nights of wholesome monotony, no more dirty New York. Sadly, no more buddies here, no more free-loading off my parents, no more maintenance staff or Vamoose Bus home to visit my parents. But every decision has its consequences, and this one is MINE ALL MINE. I did it on my own, and i’m going to do it on my own. yessss.
I want Winter Break, I want airplanes, I want to go dancing, and I do not want to go finish these papers but its 7:02 and its two after seven, so its time to go.
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I returned today to this city I live in, with brand new eyes. Looking around this misty neighborhood, I wound up wandering across the wet streets, peering up at the old and beautiful architecture, greeting the familiar yet nameless faces, and feeling generally uplifted. Where has this negativity about this place gotten me? It has gotten me downtrodden and dismissive, yearning and searching elsewhere for something I know can’t be given by change in place. I lost touch with the magnificence of this place, the opportunities disguised as intrusions, the community disguised as disregard. I always knew there was something deeper here, and I lost track of it in the last few months.
In realizing this, i’ve confirmed a leson that I’ve been learning too frequently in the past few years. Where you are is not so key: happiness is an ideal and getting close is about your attitude towards the status quo. I find myself always yearning, which in moderate doses is healthy and safeguards against stagnation. Yet to feel deprived of something more when lacking momentous change is to constantly chase after an unfullfilable answer to this ideal. So: what I have here and now is everything I could ever want. I have love, I have choice, I have chance, I have hope.
This doesn’t mean staying in one place, stopping the eternal journey, it just means accepting the place i’m in on the journey, and continously evaluating and reevaluating.
good.
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where will this post take me, i’m not sure. its late and i’m really really tired. i have a lot of feelings and things to reflect on, and before too much time goes by, I want to try.
So, home. What is this place anymore? Inside my house, the comforts and relaxation, the calmness (generally) and safety. Outside my house, the familiar haunts and routines of suburban life. Liberty by a steering wheel, friends from high school, bad radio music and the predictably tacky Christmas decorations emerging a few weeks too early on the corner. Its a home with all the charm of “home”, and all the strangeness as well.
Coming back here will always be a constant reminder of high school, because those were the years that made this place what it is to me. All the sports games, weekend adventures, high school dramas, the stories and the places and everything is immortalized in this place, and I can’t come here feeling like the person I am now without feeling a strong sense of confusion, disbalance, and nostalgia for a time that is well and truly in the past.
So, third time around, where do I go from here? The life which was built around always returning back here is slowly fading. I love home, for my friends here, for my family, for my cats, for the familiarity and ease with which being in the place brings. But I go forward, ready to make my own home. I want space from all of this, I want to know that I am whole without any part of me holding on to parts of this existence. For the most part I think that is true already, but I have to…check.
I guess this means i’m becoming an adult. It is a simple truth that being ready for ownership of my own “place” in this world, with all its responsibilities and encumberances, makes me an adult. It makes me accountable for myself in new ways, and these are scary and wonderful at the same time. It gives me a legitimacy i’ve never felt myself to have, and I feel pressure of all sorts, as well.
But for now, I will crawl into my flannel sheets, and fall asleep, with no alarm set and no place to go tomorrow. I will revel in the homeyness of this home.
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mid-november rain erupted in reverse from the sky tonight, as another vigil at the sundial came to a close. For almost a week now, students have been actively working towards bringing down racism at Columbia University. I am involved, I guess you could say, on the periphery. I know what is going on and why, I know many of the people involved, I have attended some of the events and planning meetings. I get this whole activist stint like I was born to do it. And the last few days have been spent mulling over my place in it all, wondering if all of this has space for me.
A fan of insurrection, of challenging authority, the system, and the status quo, I am behind the four students and one professor who are abstaining from food in protest of the the administration’s unresponsiveness. But as a Barnard student I have a strange position on all of this. Is it wrong for me to protest against the CORE curriculum and its eurocentricity? Is it wrong for me to challenge Lee Bollinger for his lack of responsiveness to the hate crimes on campus? Are these issues really my own, and is this doubt coming from a sense that this isn’t something I can be angry about– I don’t attend Columbia, and had I attended, I would’ve made that choice of my own free will.
And yet, I am graduating from Barnard with a degree that says Columbia University whether I want to or not. And as my professors have to go through Tenure Review at Columbia and I attend classes there and I am a resident in this community and I am for all intents and purposes a member of this institution, I can not shrug off the burden not to support this struggle. I can’t say that the expansion policy of the University, based on eminent domain and designed with disregard for the residents and businesses that exist there, is something I can shake my head at and move on from, all in a days work.
Can I be a supporter and not an activist on this one, and where are the lines drawn? This is a tricky one.
What I do appreciate about this, even if I don’t get a strong sense of place and self from it all, is that I am at an institution where its fundamental makeup (us students) are fighting and we aren’t complacent. I can look around and see people more eager and frustrated and angry than me, and that is so nourishing. To know that I am not alone, and that I can constantly be challenged by the work of my peers, that is a good GOOD thing.
In consequence I have begun to look at this semester, this school, this city, in a brand new light. Yes, I lack community and communication and I lack the kind of relationships and feelings with strangers that I can expect in places where life is slower and time is a weaker force. I lack emotional nourishment from rich soil and expansive sky and clean air. But despite those things, this is fucking New York City.
The people I do know and love here are endlessly challenging to my mental and emotional state. They force me to think about myself and other people in ways they don’t even know. And the grind of this city is making me stronger, and more in love with the chance to escape it. Instead of a negative disengagement from it all, I can now dive head first into everything it has, I will learn the life in this place for my remaining time here.
On the horizon, dotting the investment I am giving starting tomorrow morning, are changes and plans. I am following my nose to California once again in December, travelling the coast with Scott for ten days (we seem to enjoy the ten day vacation period) after spending a week or so with family in San Diego. Then the spring break plans are yet to be filled. The summer plans are similarly up in the air, and next year is the biggest question of all. So, time to fill and thoughts to ponder until then: a winning combination for my mental state.
Plus, I cleaned my room today and have a new set up in my desk area. Good things.
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what goes into the texture of a rainy night with tea to drink and studying to do and worlds of thoughts to banish in favor of focusing? its a slippery silvery liquid texture, a good feeling that you know is good because on the edges of the feeling the silver softens to gray. And not that sad gray you can’t reach, but the warm woolen gray of sunday mornings in a place far away from urban pavement which you can arrive at with only closed eyes.
Something I have figured out:
Who you are and what you do in life is eternally frustrating if you want to be good enough for everyone’s judgement. I realized today that being genuine isn’t easy if you’re trying to fit in. In fact, to fit in you must disengage from your impulses and adapt. So, to please each social group and follow their rules, you must morph into the adaptable self and where does that leave you?
So when i’m in a group of inauthentically commited activists who are in fact competing for approval, attention, and possessing the greatest nunmber of incestual club secrets and stories much more primarily than getting all riled about an issue, I dive head first into that competition. Where is my emotion, where do I feel connected? Is wednesday night at 9:15 a time for me to feel like i’m outside the confines of college academia or is it a time to put on my shield and sword and fight through the masses for some kind of recogntion atop my social high horse?
Today I sat with two girls. Two girls who make me TALK. And when I talk I feel what i’m saying and if I can’t get the words fast enough or don’t get to the joke with the appropriate pauses its unimportant because the quality of my words is what matters and there are no rules in a space like that. That is a safe space. That is an opportunity for genuinity.
I’m getting over adapting. If I am not invited to parties, if I can’t get attention from that guy, if I don’t succeed in the social world of being smooth and socially adept, its okay with me. It has never really been okay with me, and part of me has clung eternally to the skill I have in that area (i’m quite good at it, once given the chance). But I don’t want that ability to adapt and remorph myself in a variety of social situations to define me. I want ME to define me.
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One of the things I love most about fall is the leaf piles and the cold noses and hot drinks and everyhting that you can enjoy about being inside and out, awake and asleep, studious and reckless, its all so alive.
Two nights ago I was in Philadelphia walking on Walnut Street amongst old colonial townhouses and deserted streets discussing the legitimacy of our childhoods. Mary was bringing up all of these perspectives on being a child I’ve never considered, namely that being a kid is no less legitimate than being an adult– that what we think and feel is equally as substantial and worthwhile. I think I agree. I think I am no better versed in truth or reality than I was at eight, and in fact there are days when I feel like truth is the furthest place on earth.
I am twenty. Jamie Cullum’s twentysomething song is finally real for me, and I am embarking on an extension of the last year or two in which vascilating confusion conducts my personal orchestra, so atop moody and crazy harmonys sings an erratic and sometimes beautiful melody. I don’t get this life i’m in, and after prematurely beginning with all the questions, I think i’m ready to let them all go. Not to believe I have the answers, but to understand that the lack of answers is what this time in my life is about, and perpetual agony is not productive. Yet I will wake and sleep with the questions, sometimes shackled to me like deadweights, sometimes perched on my shoulder lightly, like gentle butterflies.
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It has been months and I’ve dropped the ball on writing with the chaos that was losing my hard drive and nice security net of chevy chase.
I’m back at school, returning to this insane city, with a much more climactic dance than the one I left performing. Living atop a ten story building that looks and feels like a member of a patient crowd, the walls bear our constant voices and desperations and concerns and moments of cheer and destruction. The space we occupy is institutional but it is a we that I want to focus on: this year I am anything but alone. I live with five other people, one inside my own room (and often another who sleeps on our floor due to a bad case of sleeping-alone-insomnia). We watch the Morningside laziness meander by on the weekends, and take part of the rush in the weeks as we hussle back and forth from our various responsibilities. I am rarely found in a moment of silence or peace, but all things considered this is a good thing. In my transitions this semester I’ve needed the distraction of five very girly girls to catch what could have been a very heavy fall.
In other news my disenchantment with college is back in its fullest glory, as I continuously attend classes with disengaged, dispirited, apathy. It isn’t that what we’re disussing isn’t interesting or important, its just all so lofty and insulated. I don’t want to sit in classes anymore, but I know i’m not so naieve to believe getting into the “real world” is that much better. I just want to create my own learning environment in which every time a question popped into my head I’d be commanded to pursue it until I could produce on the issue. And that every time a thought would occur to me I’d be instructed to write upon it until my hands hurt and my brain couldn’t wrinkle with thought anymore. What a fantasy!
As usual the future lingers and in it I see potential and plans and I look forward to it all, but in a new twist, I am feeling unprecedentedly cynical. “It’s going to be great” feels like a strange phrase. In working out what I want with my life, the lure of adventure burdens me in ways it never has, and the fear of settled-calmness doesn’t spark the kind of revulsion i’m so accustomed to.
On my radar is social psychology. What is social psychology anyway? Off to do some research.
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there is something that goes unsaid about the seduction of travelling. Yes you are constantly stimulated and everything is new and exciting and it is liberation and…yes, thats what I want to think about. Why is travelling liberation? Is it because things are unpredictable and uncommon, things happen that are unusual and certainly unexpected? Perhaps. But I think its more. I think its because people sever their responsibilities when they travel. Particularly when you’re alone, your journey gives you the chance to revert to the carefree days of childhood where your responsibilities to life and particularly, to other people, vanish entirely. Your friends and family sit at home doing what they do, expecting little more from you than to check in and give updates and perhaps a few photos logging your journey.
Indeed, your suitcase and the open road make you entirely free. No bills to pay (except maybe for the hostel), no elderly relatives to visit, no friends to apologize to for not being around, not parents to reconcile with, when nothing is permanent, nothing is an encumbrance.
Is travelling a sign of immaturity then? A way to say: I can’t deal with you right now, i’ve got to go travel. Or instead, is it a way of taking a break from reality because as individuals, it is all too much to bear. And are those things really different?
So as I ask these questions, I look at the people in my life. So many of them are on their own adventures, keeping track of “life back home” without a moments hesitation because its pretty easy to ask the questions and give the answers when you’re time is running low in the cyber cafe. But if you look closer, all of these people are taking on their own kind of struggle through their travels. In fact none of them have escaped life entirely, they’ve just started buying a new brand of it. For some friends, they’ve taken their emotional troubles and poured them into the stale air of an airport, into the majestic mountains that will remain an open ear for all of eternity. But they know that the world is only so large, and for as far as you run, finding solace in another time and place is only temporary.
For others they’ve traded in their name-brand lives for a few weeks or months of enlightenment at what this world really is about. In leaving their own responisibilities behind, they’ve taken on a new one: forgoing ignorance and staring the worlds screw ups in the face.
Travelling is not always a bliss of isolation and freedom from real connections and complications that make up “life”. But often times thats the purpose of a plane ticket, and we learn that whenever we go places, the truth is, we always end up back where we started (the earth is round and T.S. eliot is right).
For those people who remain home, or at least grounded in one place, sitting still is an opportunity to look at those responsibilities and make good with them. It might be harder, might be frustrating and boring at times, but we can go visit our elderly relatives. We will never regret a lost friendship, and our bills will all get paid (or at least, we’ll have them to pay). Bearing these responsibilites at a time like this means learning to live with them, because we can’t travel forever and this is a growing experience.
I’m glad I didn’t go away this summer. I am thankful for all that the suburbs has brought me. Who’d have thought it?
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all we can do is wait.
The end of another college semester is drawing near. I am sitting in my bed on a saturday morning, up early with the intentions of getting to the library fairly early and working all day long (sigh). This semester has two weeks of life in it yet, but with the weather finally turned warm, and my life fixated on whats to happen afterwards, it feels as though i’m leaving much sooner.
What do you say to a semester that has been so volatile? What do you say to the death that slapped us all in the face, why is it that this death has been splashed on every newspaper across the globe but the daily massacre of people in countries all over the world has hardly made the back pages?
What do you say to amazing trips and weekends, to painful phone conversations, to peaceful moments, to chaos, to exhaustion and to elation? What do you say to still feeling so muddled in who you are and where you’re going? And perhaps, what do you do with the realization that you might be getting closer to something more whole: to being in a way you’ve been longing for?
A summer approaches. The summer in which I say hello to all the old familiar things, and in which I feel it is time to love them to death as it is my last chance. The last summer of “childhood”, because next summer i’m moving to Santa Fe to write my novel. Or something.
Its good to grow older, I think. I haven’t made a final decision on that, but i think my twenties are going to better than my teens. I have that plan anyway.
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I had a dream last night, in which the apocalypse came. It was set at Olivia’s graduation party i believe, on the top floor of a tall building in Annapolis. It over looked some kind of canal/river in the middle of the city, in which boats were coming and going. I looked out the window while we were eating hor dourves and mingling, and noticed a boat moving really quickly across the water. I had this feeling that things weren’t right, and started to alert other people to it. They started to notice, and just then the whole world turned into this swirling cloud, and began to suck everything into it, like a vortex. Somehow this is how I saw the apocalypse, and although I was initially gripped with indescribable terror, once i was being sucked in to the cloud as well, I breathed out and realized I had to let it go– had to let it be okay to die. I felt this desperately huge sense of loss and agony at losing absolutely everything in my life, but I just breathed out deeply and said, “it’s okay to die, don’t be scared”. Then I remembered the mayan prediction that the world would end at 2012, and I felt a sense of comfort in the fact that they were right, and we were just following fate’s course.
Then, instead of dying, I arrived in another world, in which everything was cartoonish. Not quite fully animated but like it had a hint of cartoon overlaying the “real” world. Something like a lego city but with very real traces of the old world (i.e. the one we know right now). I had no chance to get to know that place, because then I woke up.
I have some theories on why this dream happened, and what it means, but I won’t go into that. It was scary.
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