Late-Night Metaphysics

Remember those chain letters that appeared in email boxes almost as soon as email existed?  The ones that threatened misfortune, death, or eternal loneliness if you didn’t send them on to ten people in the next hour?  Don’t worry, they still exist, just in less vicious forms.  I was recently pulled into one on facebook, and so here I am, responding to a friend of mine who was ranting about a comment from an article which was ranting about the ranting response of many Christians to the suspension of Phil Robertson from his show “Duck Dynasty”. 

Go ahead and take a moment to digest the syntax of that last sentence.  I’ll wait.

Confusing, right?  I admit that I got lost in most of the wandering of the chain.  Both pieces I read—the last two “links”, if you will—were enjoyable and had some excellent points, and both had some lines that I skipped over, because it’s been a long day and I don’t have much energy for theology and metaphysics.  But the one that has me hooking myself onto the end came from my friend’s rant via facebook.  She wrote (originally in all caps, but I don’t want to scream at you):

            Words are life.  Or death.  And your heart speaks that life.  Or death.  Words kill.  Words                 bring things into being.  Scripture says God made the world that way.  He created us in his 

            own  image; He gave us all languages, and the ability to communicate our thoughts and 

            feelings to each other.  Therefore, words are important.  They can move the very heart of 

            God through prayer.  They can change the world.

As a writer, I’m inclined to agree with her—words are my business, my daily bread.  But there’s more to it than that.  I would argue that it’s not necessarily words that have the power she speaks of, the power to “move the very heart of God.”  I myself hardly ever pray in words.  My prayer is either music, or it is a wordless reaching out, trying to connect myself emotionally to a greater presence.  That is the power that we possess, the power that comes from human consciousness; words are simply a near-physical manifestation of it.

That being said, I agree with her wholeheartedly.  Our ability to communicate—to speak, to sing, to argue, to rant—is what sets us apart from the rest of the world.  It is what makes it possible for us to build our own tiny worlds in our heads, worlds that we call “selves.”  It is what makes it possible for us to reach out from those tiny worlds and get a glimpse of what someone else’s microcosm identity looks like.  That is the true power of words—to connect us to one another and to the greater meaning in the universe around us. 

Again, a bit much for me to digest at 11:42 PM.  But it’s thinking about this kind of thing that leaves me with a sense of wonder at being alive, and that’s never a bad thing.  Honestly, I don’t think we human beings don’t spend enough time doing that: not only being grateful to be alive, but grateful that we know that we’re alive.

I Have No Answer

The other day, I was running late for work.  It was one of those mornings when you just feel very slow and dull, when you don’t want to do anything at all.  So I was running behind, and I went out to see a mover’s truck blocking my usual exit from the apartment.  Unwilling to wait for the truck to move, I went out the farther exit, only to see that traffic was being held up there, too.  I remember how I groaned; What now? I thought.  And then I saw.

There was a deer in the center of the road, half on, half off its feet.  At first, I couldn’t see why it didn’t just get up and run away, but as it struggled to get onto its front legs, it turned around and I could see that its back legs were both broken.  One of them dragged across the pavement at an impossible angle.

I don’t know how long I sat motionless in my car, watching the poor thing’s futile struggle.  Even when I did drive away, I watched in my rearview mirror, seeing the cars edging round the poor dying thing on their way to work. 

I thought about it on and off all day.  It must have been in so much pain, and so afraid.  There was absolutely nothing I could have done to help it, either to fix what had been done or even to end its misery.  Even if there had been, I’m not sure I would have done it, as it would have involved stopping my car in the middle of a busy intersection.  People are usually not very understanding of that sort of thing.

I don’t know what happened to the deer—by the end of the day, I had forgotten to look for any sign of it by the road, and there was nothing left the following morning.  And honestly, what I want to say about this.  Am I angry at being a species which has come so far from our natures that we pretend this kind of thing doesn’t happen, that we turn our eyes away?  Do I admire the creature that had so much desperation to live that it continued to fight, even at that helpless, hopeless moment?  Or am I simply made sad by the pointlessness of it all?  All of the above, but the last most of all, I think.  I like to believe that there is meaning and significance to life, and I spend a lot of my time looking for it.  But there is nothing I can do to give purpose to a young creature’s lonely suffering and slow death.  Why does this happen?

This Is a Test

All people deal in metaphors.  It is a unique capacity of human brains to make connections between disparate things.  We use them to make sense of the world, the people in it, and ourselves.  Writers are particularly good at this.  I know I spend a lot of my time considering the connections of the world, and my current position in life makes life itself one of the objects I try to compare to other things.  Life is a pain in my heel which comes and goes.  My hair doesn’t listen to me, wanders in every direction, and takes lots of work without much return, but sometimes it just falls neatly into place—like life.  And life is a test.  That last one has been on my mind all week.  It makes me think of myself sitting at a desk, pencil tapping, my feet swinging—and yes, my feet did swing occasionally into high school and even college.  They still do, and I’m still laboring over the test.

When you’re a kid, that test is true-false.  You’re given a question that is the answer, and you just have to say whether it’s right or not.  Join the soccer team?  Yes.  Go out for the musical?  No.  Camp again this summer, or take a trip instead?  The choices you make are simple, with low-risk, and often you’re told what the answer is or what is should be.

As you grow older, getting into college and beyond, those questions become multiple choice.  Do you major in A) chemistry, B) theatre, or C) education?  Will you go to A) Chicago, B) New York, C) Tokyo, or D) back home to live with your parents?  Should I A) stay at my minimum-wage job where I’m relatively happy, B) look for a better-paying, perhaps higher-stress job, or C) start trying to freelance in what I really want to do (throwing myself out there with no net—how’s that for a metaphor)?  At this point, you know the choices, and maybe all of them are right in some way.  But as every obnoxious test directs us to do, you have to choose the one that is most right.  Good luck on figuring that one out.

So what happens later in life?  When the earth stops shifting under your feet—if it ever does—and your choices are no longer life-changing?  Well, I can only guess, as I haven’t been there yet, but I like to think that at that point, life becomes an essay question.  Most of my peers hated essay questions, growing up.  They were the ones that required the most work, the greatest knowledge.  But I always liked them.  They gave me a chance to fully explain my position, the best chance for me to say what I thought and why I thought that was right.   At that point, if you explain your position well and use a strong argument, you can get points even for an answer that isn’t the best. 

That is what I want for the life I’m going to build.  Even if it isn’t everything I hope it will be, even if I struggle and have to give an answer I may not have expected, I hope that I will always have the eloquence and the wisdom to pass the test.  

In the Eye of the Beholder

Driving around on my errands today, I was looking in my rearview mirror, and I saw the mist curling over the mountains, putting out tendrils like hands and shrouding the gray-blue slopes with white.  I thought, I am so lucky to live in a place where, even on a day like this, where the rain is indecisive and the air is thick with moisture, there is still beauty.

But then I started to think about it.  Really, is there any place on earth that does not have beauty of its own?  

The desert, where earth is stripped bare and its essential colors shown, and life is rare and precious. The ocean, where the water becomes white foam on the shore and darkens the sand to a silvery gleam.  The forest, where the sunlight turns the trees into emeralds and gold, and the leaves coat the ground in a carpet of renewing life.  Even the city, with its lights and colors, and the sunlight on the glass and steel.

It really is true, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  The trick of seeing beauty around us is to be a beholder, to be someone who is looking for beauty.  If you don’t ever look up, if you always keep your eyes on the ground, you will see nothing but mud, nothing but concrete, nothing but the scuffs on your toes.  But if you look up, then the sky is always there, and the world is beautiful, and we are all lucky to live here.

Adulthood?

There is a running joke that I’ve shared with my friends several times.  Whenever we have a particularly productive day or accomplish a small task such as going to the bank or setting up an interview, we brag about being adults.  The concept of adulthood is often on my mind, since it’s a recent achievement for me.  I’m wondering, today, what it really means.  Merriam-Webster defines “adult” in the following ways: “fully grown and developed” and “mature and sensible; not childish.”  This is ironic to me, since the jokes we tell about it (“I made myself dinner—I’m an ADULT!”) are rather childish in tone.  They show a child’s pride in accomplishing something for themselves. 

The thing is, as children, we’re shown a certain standard of living for adults.  Most of our parents have stable homes, secure families, long-term jobs, and a place in the community.  They keep their houses clean, have pets and framed pictures and real furniture.  They usually don’t shop for their clothes in Goodwill, and they buy things at the grocery store that are not microwavable or frozen.   

Now, legally, I have been an adult for five years.  Biologically I’ve been one for much longer.  But culturally speaking, most people are not considered adults until they’ve completed college.  It’s the twenties, then, that begin our membership in the realm of adulthood, a time of life known for its uncertainty and reckless living.  I have been out of college for a year and a half now, and I’ve lived in two different apartments in that time, neither of which was particularly special.  I work as a waitress, and I typically try to dodge questions about what I’m doing to get out of that job.  I have friends who are in the same position—working the night shift, scrambling for freelance positions, or moving from city to city to find work.  Sometimes I think we’re more like children playing house than actual adults.

The trick of being an adult, of achieving that dream of stability we envision, is we have to build it from the bottom up.  If we really want to do it on our own, we have to take crap jobs, sleep on a mattress on the floor, pinch and scrape and save for years until we finally find the rhythm that gives us a steady uphill climb.  To be an adult means to do what needs to be done, to take care of yourself, and to keep at it and stick with your dreams.  That’s what I’m doing; that’s what my friends are doing. 

Come to think of it, the pride we take in that no longer seems quite so childish.

"No"

I’m going to tell you a story today.  Well, the beginning of a story, anyway.  The story is about one year of wishing and hoping, of plans and dreams and excitement.  It ends—I warn those of you who don’t like sad stories—with worry, panic, and finally, disappointment.

In the fall of 2012, I was beginning my adult life.  Fresh out of college, I had just moved into my new apartment and was getting started on my dream: to live my life lost in other worlds—and, naturally, taking note of what went on in those worlds and selling my adventures to publishers for lots of cash.  As does any young hero, I took a chance by sending a piece of my fledgling novel—hereafter dubbed “Snapdragon”—out to a big-name publisher which was part of a big-name corporation.  Now, I had confidence in Snapdragon.  I still do.  It had been my honors thesis, and it's a good book—strong characters, good writing (if I do say so myself), and an exciting story involving assassins, spies, sex, coming-of-age, true love and love that maybe isn’t so true.  I sent it out.  Five months, the submissions guidelines said.  Five months before I could reasonably expect a reply.

I didn’t hold my breath for those five months, literally or figuratively.  I knew it was a long shot—everything I’ve ever read about being a writer is that you fail, and you fail, and you epically fail, and you fail again, and then you fail some more, and then finally someone sees your true worth.  Persistence, right?  So I didn’t spend all my time waiting around.  I went out, found myself a day job, continued to send little things out for possible publication elsewhere (most of the time failing on those, too).  I lived my life.

Then, in March, just as I was beginning to think, huh, that’s my five months gone—I got the email.  An unassuming little note from a secretary, saying thanks for sending your excerpt, would you please send along the full manuscript?  I read it, read it again, stepped away from the computer to breathe for a second, and read it a third time.  That’s when I screamed.  I screamed, I danced, I laughed like a maniac.  And, of course, I sent Snapdragon along.

This time, I was holding my breath.  I knew this had to be good news.  They had recognized my skill and my talent, in just the first ten pages!  Surely they would read the book, love it, and contact me immediately with a lucrative contract.  I tried to hold myself back, and maybe I succeeded in public, but in my mind I was already talking to an editor—who loved the book just as it was, by the way, and didn’t want me to change a thing: a delusion if there ever was one—and seeing my book, colorful and in hardback, on Barnes & Noble’s shelf.

So I waited.  I waited, and I watched the calendar, and every time the phone rang with an unknown number, my heart jumped.  I waited, and I beamed whenever someone mentioned it, and I made plans for a companion book.  I waited, and checked my email more often.

I waited, and I began to wonder whether it would take more time to read a longer piece, or less because there were fewer pieces to wade through.  I waited, and people’s questions about it no longer excited me.  I tried to email back the secretary who had asked for the full manuscript, and when the email bounced my imagination—which had gotten me into this mess—ran off with a panicked scheme of fraud and scams and intellectual thievery. 

Finally, today I got up the courage to call the big publisher’s switchboard.  I delayed as much as I could—I expected it would take a long time to reach the people I was after, or I wanted to see if I could find a more direct number, or I was just plain too nervous to make the call.  But I did it today.  The call lasted maybe five minutes, and an operator informed me that the publishers contact within three months if there is any interest.

So that’s that.  I said thank you very much and hung up the phone, and my year of hoping and dreaming was over.

I really only have one problem with this whole deal.  I don’t mind them saying no—I expected it, after all, and it was my fault for letting myself get too excited over the first step in a very long process.  I believe in Snapdragon, and I’ll try again.  No, what I mind is the fact that they didn’t say no to me—that they didn’t say anything.

I’ve worked in a publishing house.  I know how easy it is to write refusal letters.  You hire an intern, and you get them to write five or six a day.  There's a technology that lets you fill in different names over the same letter.  You edit the letter slightly to suit the recipient, print it out, stick it in an envelope.  Done--took ten minutes max.  Now, the publisher I sent Snapdragon to is at least fifty times bigger than the college press where I worked for a month two years ago.  They obviously have a lot more submissions to deal with.  But in this day and age there has to be a way to do the same thing above with email.  Type a few corrections, hit send, and bam—you’ve ended your association, the writer has closure and can move on, and both parties are happy.  Well, maybe not happy, but at least capable of going to find another publisher.

Three months, the operator said.  Which means I’ve wasted the past two months in which I could have sent Snapdragon somewhere else.  Two months is a long time, forty percent of the time I’d have spent waiting on some other publisher.  Two months of hoping, of worrying, of wishing and dreaming.  Gone.

I’m okay with them saying no, I really am.  It’s part of what I am to be rejected, and to keep going despite that.  But I wish they had taken the time to actually say it, and let me move on with my life and my work.

Guts > Brains?

“That is a gutsy young woman.”

This observation was repeated to me this morning, and for a moment I wanted to ask who it was referring to.  The context of the conversation indicated that I was the young woman being described, but that didn’t quite make sense.  Me?  Gutsy?  Not the word I would have used.

I was talking to my friend Mary, who has adopted me into her family over the past year.  She brought me into her church family, too, where I have recently begun to play the piano for worship.  I accepted the job with much trepidation, for I don’t consider myself much of a pianist—it’s been five years at least since I had a piano lesson, and my practicing since then has been sporadic at best.  There was no one else, though, and so I took on the work.  And every week I have sat at the front of the church, stumbling over a bad keyboard and trying to make music.  This, apparently, earns me the title of “gutsy”. 

Maybe it’s my English major soul that makes me balk at this word.  There must be a better adjective to describe this situation, I tell myself.  What springs immediately to mind is the southern expression of amusement, pity, and faint scorn, “Bless her heart.”  But gutsy, no.  It’s been a long time since I considered myself to have the brash, confident courage that makes up “guts”.

That doesn’t mean that I’ve never had it.  My mother used to tell me when I was a child that I had more guts than brains.  Not necessarily a good thing, as you may guess.  It usually meant that I was willing to throw myself into situations without really considering the consequences.  I was proud of the description, though.  I wanted to be seen as brave, and of course, as a child consequences are so rarely a factor in decision-making.  Sometimes I wish it were still that way.

It does seem, however, that there is more of that brave child still in me than I thought.  After all, I am still stepping up to that keyboard every Sunday, and spending my days in practicing so that every week there will be less stumbling and more music.  And an unknown someone—the kind of person whose perception of you is occasionally more accurate than your perception of yourself—called me “gutsy”, and meant it kindly.  Maybe in time I can come to believe it.  As my mother used to tell me, if I can balance guts and brains, I will be much better off.

Return Your Angers

I got angry today.  I don’t get angry often; usually I call it “upset” or “irritated.”  My temper, I flatter myself, is relatively cool.  But today, I was absolutely furious, and what’s even rarer, the direct object of my fury was not a concept or a situation, but a person.  He’s a coworker of mine, and most of our fellow coworkers find him difficult to deal with.  He is brash, self-centered, and conceited.  I say this with full honesty, though also out of pique.  Anyway, normally I have no problem dealing with this guy.  Sometimes I even feel sorry for him, because he seems to have no idea why other people don’t like him.  Today, however, I wanted nothing more than to get him out of my sight. 

I brought a book with me to work this morning, which will surprise no one who really knows me—whenever I can get away with it, I bring a book with me wherever I go.  Today’s selection was an old classic, a Regency romance written by Georgette Heyer.  Called “The Foundling”, it is a story set in early 19^th century England, with style and plot much owing to Jane Austen--all in all, a classy book.  My errant coworker, however, took one look and exclaimed, “The Fondling?  That sounds like a dirty book.”  He later found the word “ejaculated” in the book, and try as I might to explain that this was an old usage referring to speech and not semen, he loudly teased me for reading a dirty book at work.  The embarrassment and the idiocy I could have forgiven; what threw me into a rage was that he picked up the book while I was away and highlighted the “dirty” word in bright yellow.

I’m sure I surprised him with my reaction.  I carried the book up to him and thrust it in his face, demanding to know what he’d done.  He tried to deny it at first, which only made me angrier, and I told him not to talk to me for the rest of the day.  I spent a good ten minutes stomping around the restaurant and complaining to my coworkers, most of whom were gratifyingly sympathetic.  And though the culprit apologized and ordered me a new copy of the book, I didn’t even look at him for the rest of the day.

The interesting—and slightly alarming—thing is, everything that happened only made me more angry.  The apology and attempts to make amends infuriated me even more—“as if that makes it better!” I snapped to a friend.  Now that I’m finally cooling off, I can admit that it wasn’t so very terrible, that yes, I am a bit irrational when it comes to my books, and that it should be possible for me to forgive him.  Even so, I doubt that I will be able to forget so easily or quickly.

Anger is a force, like magnetism or gravity, that keeps dragging you back.  It takes time and distance to fight free of it, and while certain people have more difficulty with this than others—no comment as to which side I’m on—we all have trouble with it.  In my case, rationality often comes too quickly for me.  While my intellect tells me it’s not good to still be muttering under my breath, my fists and teeth still want to clench and my face still wants to scowl.  In a strange way, anger feels good sometimes.

I think that everyone has a right to anger once in a while.  It’s inevitable, after all, and it’s better to release it at once than to suppress it where it festers.  But we have to be careful to put it away again when it’s time.  In the end, however good it might feel to be angry, it does very little good in our lives or relationships and is better off as a short spark than a blaze that burns us out.

Photo credit: http://chugginmonkeys.com/here_is_your_pick_me_up/6904

Simply Amazing

I am watching Dreamworks’ “The Prince of Egypt” for perhaps the twenty-seventh time.  It is a marvelous movie, full of beautiful artwork and some of the best music anywhere.  Currently I’m at the scene with the burning bush, and it makes me think.  God introduces Himself to Moses as “I Am.”  That’s always been a confusing statement from God, at least for me.  Every time I heard this story, my impulse after hearing that statement was to ask, “You are what?”  I didn’t expect the God of the universe to introduce Himself in such a simple way.

But now that I think about it, there is no better way to do it.  That simple statement is the summary of self-awareness.  To say “I am” is to say that you know of your own existence.  This is something that we take for granted, but if you think of it, there are millions of living things in this world, which is one of millions of worlds in one of millions of galaxies in a universe too big for comprehension.  And only one species we know of has truly realized where we are.  That, in the words of John Green, is “the miracle of human consciousness,” and it really is rather miraculous, whether or not you believe in a God who gave it to us.

I’m not really trying to figure out this miracle, or answer any big life questions.  I just think it needs to be said more often.  I am.  And it’s amazing.

Deep and Wide

Tonight I attended a recital by a good friend of mine.  She was part of my student recital last year, and so I felt I should be there, but more I wanted to go and support her.  And she was playing Debussy, and I’m always up for some Debussy.  She did very well, a beautiful performance.  Afterwards, I spoke to one of our teachers for a while, and she mentioned just how much work goes into such things.  I remember it well—the practicing, the scheduling and the decorating and reception-ing.  With this in mind, I looked around and I saw just how many people there were helping with the recital.  Someone had brought lights, and someone was turning pages, and someone was reading the French poetry, and someone had made the food.  So many people were there to help and support my friend on her night.

Thinking back to my recital, I remember that I did most of the work myself.  I bought and prepared the food for the reception, wrote the notes for the program, purchased flowers and arranged the stage.  I had a pair of friends to help me with what I absolutely could not do alone, but for the most part it was me.  Now, part of the reason it happened this way was that I am a bit of a perfectionist (gasp!) and I wanted to make sure everything was just the way I wanted it, but the other part was that when it was suggested that I get a few helpers that evening, I couldn’t think of many options.  On a night that was special to me, in a tide of emotion that was all mine, there were very few I wanted to share in what I was feeling.

This makes me think about the friendships I have with others, and the nature of those friendships.  I think of them in two ways: their width, or in how many a person is able to welcome into her heart, and their depth, or how far these people can penetrate.  Some people, like my friend from this evening, have the gift of friendships that are both, and they allow many, many people deep into their hearts.  My friendships tend to be one or the other.  I care for a lot of people—friends from work, friends from high school and college, friends from church—and I want them to be happy and am concerned when they are not.  But when it comes to my unhappiness, my needs and desires and loves, I keep these people out, hiding what I think behind a smile or a few half-true words.  There are precious few friends who truly share that with me, who have worked their way into my guarded heart.  I can probably count them on one hand.  Well, maybe two. 

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to love the wide world.  But I do hope that when I do love, I love deeply, and that those I love know just how precious they are.

When Conscience Bites

Sometimes I really don’t like being a good person.

At work, the servers tend to hang out by the bar in slow moments.  There are three high-top tables where we can sit and take a short break, get a drink of water, etc.  I was sitting there this afternoon, only a little while before going off the clock, caught between running one table’s food and waiting for another to finish eating.  There’s a reason we’re called “waiters”—there’s a lot of sitting around involved in my profession, especially when the restaurant isn’t busy.

Just down the way, one of the bartender’s tables had been seated, and three women were perusing their menus.  I thought nothing of it—my attention was elsewhere, thinking about my tables or maybe my break, I can’t remember.  So I didn’t notice when the women set their menus down, when they started to glance around impatiently, when they probably looked pointedly at me, sitting close by and obviously a server.  The hostess had just buzzed by, asking if the bartender knew she had a table, when the women got up and left the restaurant.  One of them snapped at me as she went out, “Thanks for the great service.”

Now, this was not my fault.  These women were not my responsibility.  I had just come from taking care of my own tables, had hardly been sitting for five minutes.  And yet, when that woman said that to me, the nasty words sank right down into the pit of my stomach and stayed there.  I felt guilty, and I started thinking of all the things that I could’ve done—maybe I should have gotten the women’s drink order, or at least found the errant bartender and told her to cut her cigarette break short.  The thought that these women blame me for their poor experience, that they think I’m lazy or bad at my job, bothers me, and it bothers me that it bothers me.  Why should I care?

Without a strong conscience, I wouldn’t have worried about that woman’s comment at all.  I wouldn’t have had to spend ten minutes rationalizing why she was wrong in her sentiment, and I wouldn’t have spent a further twenty minutes wishing I could explain to her why I hadn’t helped her and her friends.  Thirty good minutes of emotional energy, wasted.  What was the point?

When they teach you in school how good it is to think about others, how impressive it is to have compassion and empathy and conscience, they never tell you how hard it can be.  It would be so much easier for me if I didn’t care what others thought of me, if they were angry or disappointed with me.  But I do care, sometimes too much, and I’m still learning to deal with the disappointment or anger of people who may never learn otherwise of me. 

I don’t want to spend my life regretting silly little things like this.  I want to be a good person, and I want to understand and appreciate the feelings of others, but I hope I always know my own self-worth enough to know when I truly deserve their censure, and in all other cases, to let it slide off me and away.

Three Minutes and Thirty-Two Seconds

I spent much of today working on music, which is something I usually enjoy very much.  Today, however, I had a bit of trouble with an aspect of my work that I haven't come across before.  In the past, I've composed music purely for myself--it was always an artistic expression, nothing more.  But recently I took on a project writing music for a short film a friend of mine is shooting, and suddenly I have to deal with time.

Of course there is time in all music--without it, music just doesn't exist.  But I've never before had to fit music to a specific span of time, and it is more difficult than you would think.  Music is so elastic, so changeable, that each repetition can be and usually is different, and either longer or shorter than the time before.  Repetitions, ritardandos and accelerandos, mistakes, and pure, simple artistic expression all can make a difference in the minute and second count of a piece of music.

It makes me wonder--if I can't get a song to fit into a certain length of time, how on earth can I expect time to measure out my life?  I write out schedules for myself, spending an hour writing, an hour break, an hour with music, etc, but I find myself straying from the schedule after a matter of days, if not a matter of hours.  So often, we want things to fit neatly into the set parameters of organization, but the human mind, the human life is not neat.  It is chaotic and harmonious and free and beautiful, and it takes as long as it takes.

Who I Was

This year is starting out with a great deal of bustle for my family.  Both my mother’s parents and my father’s mother have moved out of the homes they’ve been living in for years.  I’ll spare you the emotional turmoil that goes along with this, not that it’s been advertised.  On the surface, at least, what this means is that Mom and Dad have been running back and forth between both houses, beginning the enormous chore of cleaning out the houses and divvying up the spoils between children and grandchildren.  I’ve done moderately well.  I didn’t ask for much—my mom is still keeping an eye out for a few of my cherished childhood books and games, and she’s already delivered a box full of kitchenware.  From my Grammy, my dad’s mom, I received a beautiful music box I always loved, a toaster (for practicality, not sentiment—her toaster was only ever a toaster to me), and a stack of photos. 

It’s this last that holds the most meaning to me, though I never actually thought to ask for them.  I’m sure most people have their own family photos almost memorized, but not all of these were familiar to me.  Flipping through them, I thought, who is this girl?  I don’t remember her as well.  This was back when I wore purple patterned leggings under a red shirt with bows and overlarge sneakers.  This was before I started caring about looking pretty for pictures (and most of the time I didn’t anyway, but I like it better than what happens now.  Get away from me with that camera).  It was like discovering parts of my childhood that I had lost, a time when I did backflips and climbed trees and had no idea what to do with my hair.

Growing up is a funny business.  How did that girl become me, who is sarcastic and hermit-like and solitary, whose idea of fun is a day at the computer, who is secretly afraid of the world?  How did I turn out this way?  What was the turning point?  And did anyone notice the change, or does it make perfect sense to everyone else that I was who I was and now I am who I am?

This is the impossibility of what I do.  I’m supposed to be a writer, capable of putting into words feelings and ideas that others can’t articulate.  Yet even the complexity of myself is something that I can hardly work out.  If a single life is so huge that you can get lost—so many memories, so many thoughts and events and things that change you—what about a story, which is the intersection of many lives?  What about a world?

I think that for everyone, no matter what they choose to do with their lives, it’s a process of figuring out who they are.  I only hope that as I go along my way, that fearless little girl with the messy hair walks with me, lending me courage when I need it most.

Neurosis, Party of One

My neighbor came over to chat for a while yesterday.  I was glad to see him—he’s a good guy, and since we have very similar tastes in books and movies, we can always find something to talk about.  However, I was dismayed when he mentioned work.  Joel disapproves of my day job as a waitress: he thinks it’s beneath me.  Yesterday he pointed to my degree, beautifully framed in dark wood, with its gold seal and glimmering “summa cum laude” on it.  “You didn’t bust your ass for however many years just for ‘table for two?’” he scolded me.

He has a very valid point, of course, and I’ve addressed this before, mostly to reassure myself that there is a good reason for what I’m doing.  But the fact is this isn’t what I want to be doing, and somewhere in my gut I’m embarrassed by my position in life right now.

I tried to skim over it, explaining that I was just taking a break from school and I needed something to survive.  Joel, who is a no-bullshit kind of guy, wasn’t having any of it.  “You can find a better job than that,” he said.  “What is that degree, creative writing?  You can do anything with it.  The world is your fucking oyster.”

And that, I tried to explain, is exactly the problem.  Joel is an EMT; his career is very narrowly focused, but there will always be a job for him somewhere.  I, on the other hand, can set my liberal-arts-educated mind to almost anything—administration, editing, journalism, management, and all those other vague words that people use to describe their careers.  Anything, in nearly any field.  This means that there is no one place where I can look for a job—there are thousands of them, and many with other candidates who are more specifically appealing to employers.  Yes, I might be good working at a magazine, but someone with a journalism degree would be better.  True, I might be an asset to that firm, but so would a person just finishing a business degree.  My focus in my education wasn’t a focus at all; it was an all-encompassing acceptance of the educated world, and while that may make me a very well-rounded person, it doesn’t make it easy for me to find a job.  And of the jobs that are out there, there isn't one I want.  The one I want is not one that can be given to me: I have go and get it myself.

When I had failed to make this clear to Joel, he shrugged and moved on to a new point, suggesting that I go back to school.  “It’s a way to dodge the world for a while,” he explained.

I will admit that dodging the world sounds enormously appealing.  Not to have to worry about paying back student loans would be a huge relief in and of itself.  But I know I’m not ready to jump back into being a student.  I’ve had quite enough of that in the past eighteen years.  I want to be in the world, to be part of it, to let it knock me around a little bit and learn from it.  More, I want to overcome the world, to live consumed in my art and still be able to buy groceries each week.

So what is the point of this rambling post anyway?  After all, I’m just making the arguments I couldn’t make yesterday to respond to some very strong opinions.  Well, the point is that I’m human, and I have doubts, and it’s scary chasing a dream that seems so incredibly unrealistic in this world where most artists are always starving.  It’s terrifying sitting up late, unable to think about anything but taxes and rent and how I can cut back more when I’m already eating the same thing for lunch every day.  In those moments, getting a better, more full-time job seems like a rope offered to someone drowning in quicksand.  But I’m too stubborn to give up yet.  So here is my BA in b.s. at work, rationalizing the life that I lead.  Yes, I am waiting tables.  Yes, I have been avoiding looking at that shiny piece of paper on my wall.  And yes, I know what the chances are of my success.  But I have to try to be who I want to be.  If I don’t, I’ll never become who I’m meant to be.

Ain't it Great to be Crazy

I woke up this morning certifiably insane.  It was an hour before my alarm, and I was wide awake—and what’s more, I was happy about it.  I rolled out of bed and spent a good ten minutes dancing in front of my mirror in my underwear.  I sang songs, talked to myself, and laughed like a maniac.  I threw myself on my bed, curled up in the blankets, then rolled to the floor and pretended I was a dying bug.  Even now I feel that mad energy running through my bones.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been so utterly delighted with life.

Happiness is insanity in this crazy, fucked-up world.  (Forgive my harsh language, but you have to admit that it’s true.)  In a world that has things like war, starvation, murder, rape, disease, slavery, treachery and so much worse—a world that is slowly dying from the poisons we have created, a world where our fellow man suffer in every second of every day—how is it possible to be happy?

But there it is.  Happiness is here, and sometimes it swoops down on us and grabs us up, and no matter what we do, no matter what we think about, we can’t change it.  That’s what happened to me this morning.  I woke up, and I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time, and I saw my red eyes and my mussed hair and my pudgy stomach and inflated thighs and I thought, how wonderfully beautiful I am.  How glorious it is to be alive.

This kind of crazy happiness is a gift.  I am so utterly grateful for it, so thankful that emotions can’t always be explained, that sometimes they just happen.  More than that, though, I am hopeful.  If we can have happiness in this crazy world, then maybe there’s enough good insanity out there to balance out the bad.  In the grip of my madness today, I can’t help but believe it.

A Wordless Thought Fulfilled

One of my friends posted a thought on facebook tonight that really caught my attention with its insightfulness, poetic strength, and its similarity to my own feelings.  She said, “Sometimes I am so overwhelmed with the desire for some grand and magical adventure that it physically hurts.”  Those words ignited a fulfillment in me, a feeling of “Yes!  That is just exactly what I have been trying to say for years.”

I think I have always had this feeling, this yearning for more in my life.  When I was a girl, I remember I tried to keep a journal for a while.  It didn’t last because I didn’t believe anyone would want to read it.  Who cares about the day-to-day life of a teenage girl?  Or that of a woman in her twenties, for that matter.  For me, life was dull, monotonous, boring.  It still is, sometimes.  I get up, go to work, come home, change my clothes, put on makeup, turn the heat on and off.  Who really cares? 

I live for the magical moments in life—for that bright red bird who sits above the door to my car, the autumn leaves dancing as I sit at the bench of peace and light, singing a lullaby to myself as I swing in an empty playground.  I sustain myself on beauty, on poetry, on wisdom and kindness, and I live my life to the fullest in those cracks in the monotony of “everyday.”  And yet it is not quite enough to satisfy my longing for magic, for adventure, for grand-ness and magnificence and things that one doesn’t seem to find in this world anymore.

This is why I am a writer.  This is why I compose new worlds for myself: to fill my life with the brightness and the vividness of the magic this world has lost.  Sitting here in this very spot, the energy of new words, new idea, new stories to tell runs straight through my dancing fingers and up into my mind and my heart, washing clean the cobwebs and making me good as new.  This is why I do what I do.  This is why I am who I am.

Lonely is a Freedom

I am alone a lot.  I’m a loner, an introvert, antisocial, solitary.  I like my privacy, my space, my me-time.  We have a lot of ways to describe being alone.  It’s a facet of not just our culture, but of all of humanity that we know what it means to be alone.  Sometimes we yearn for it; sometimes we fear it.  But like any good English word, there are many meanings to the word, many shadows cast by this one idea. 

In the connotations of the word “alone,” you find negativity.  There is something about being alone that is up to no good.  People who are alone too much are maladjusted, awkward, maybe even creepy.  I understand this—it’s part of human nature to seek out human interaction, and so I do…from time to time.  But there are ways to make loneliness work, to make something out of alone.  There is comfort to be found in the solitude, in the many ways that we are separated from others.

Tonight, I am alone in that there is no one around me.  I live in a tiny apartment that wouldn’t have room for anyone else.  There is no cat or dog or fish or gerbil or snake or lizard to keep me company, and though my computer and my car have names (George and Baxter, respectively) I don’t really count them.  I am alone.  This, however, is what I call solitude.  It is the mental space where ideas are born, the blank canvas in my mind.  Without solitude, I wouldn’t have my art.

In this stage of my life, I am alone.  There is no man (or woman, in case you were wondering, and no, that’s not the way I’m looking) to speak to me, to call to ask me to dance and “murmur vague obscenities” as Janis Ian would have it.  There is no commitment, no connection, no fireworks, no deep understanding between myself and anyone else.  This doesn’t really bother me.  I fully believe—maybe because of blind faith, or my romanticism, or because of that one tiny relationship line my friend read in my palm last year—that I will find that person, that one, and I look forward to that day with all my heart.  In the meantime, I’m enjoying not having to tell anyone to flush the toilet, and the fact that things stay where I put them, and the fact that I can look at photos of a naked man reclining on a motorcycle if I like.  And I do, when that man is Adam Levine.

And in this world, I am alone.  As far as I can tell—and I’ve only had twenty-odd years to explore, so I could be wrong—there is no one else on earth who thinks exactly like me.  There are a few who have come close, but there is no one I have met who puts thoughts together the way I do.  I think that everyone is alone this way.  And that’s the hardest one of all to bear, and sometimes I don’t manage it.  It makes me wonder, sometimes, how we understand each other at all.  But then I think about a quote from a movie I saw recently, some rom-com that is only memorable while you’re watching it.  Except for this quote: if we’re all alone, then at least we’re all together in that.  And that is true.  We can all understand how it feels to be different; we can all understand what it feels like to be alone.  And there is a wonderful paradox, because it means we’re not alone after all.

So here I am, alone, and I don’t mind at all, because it turns out alone is a wonderful thing.

The title of this post is borrowed from a wonderful poem by Tanya Davis called How To Be Alone, which says much the same thing as I do here, but in a more beautiful and captivating way.  As for the Janis Ian song I referenced, it is called At Seventeen. 

Where the Heart Is

I met a good friend for lunch today.  It had been a while since we’d seen each other, so we were catching up, talking about the holidays, what we’d done, where we’d been.  As we talked, I was reminded of a moment during the holiday that stood out to me as it was happening.  I don’t remember what was happening in detail, only that I was talking to members of my family—I couldn’t even exactly say who.  But I remember someone talking to me, asking me what I would be doing the following day, and I answered, rather absently, “Going home.”

My own wording made me pause.  At the time, I was at Carrigafoyle, the brown house on the mountain, the house in which I’d grown up, where all of my family was gathered for the holiday.  Wasn’t I already home?  The answer is yes, I was.  But now here I am, alone in my foxhole apartment where I’ve been living for less than five months, and I am just as much at home as I was there.

“Home” has been a strange concept to me for some time.  I’ve learned of myself that I don’t like to be on the move.  Living out of a suitcase, always aware that in a few days or weeks or months I will be leaving again—this is repugnant to me.  I want to be settled, to spread out my things in a place and stay there for an indefinite period of time, or, if it is defined, at least a good long period of time.  Nevertheless, I never could bring myself to call my university “home.”  Even though I didn’t really live in that brown house with all the dogs and cats and people anymore, it was more permanent in my mind than Hollins was, and so it remained my home.

Now, I’m not talking about the careless “I’m going home” at the end of the day’s work, as in “I’m getting out of here”.  Everyone has said that, but it doesn’t mean that the place to which you go is home.  For me, the various dorm rooms at Hollins, the various cabins at my summer camp jobs, and the room on the third floor of my London homestay all held a certain amount of affection for me, but they weren’t home.  Deep in the back of my mind I always knew I’d have to move on and someone else would take my place.

This apartment is different.  Perhaps it’s because I don’t know when I’ll be moving on, but even knowing that I will someday doesn’t bother me.  I come here and I sink into my red chair or settle down at my desk and I know that I am home.  This place is mine—this life is mine.  And so, though I will always love Carrigafoyle, though I’m sure I will return many a time in the years to come, it’s no longer home, or not the only home in my heart.  Here in the Foxhole, I’m deeply content, and I freely use the word “home” to describe it.

Year-Long Resolve

At the beginning of the year, people seem compelled to analyze their lives.  They look at their choices and their actions in the past year, and they make promises to themselves to do better, to be better.  In the interest of learning a bit more about what kind of things people resolve to do, I looked up a page of statistics on typical New Year’s resolutions, and this is what I found.  Forty-five percent of Americans usually make resolutions.  The most common, according to my source, is to lose weight.  Others include spend more time with family, spend less and save more money, get organized, quit smoking, and help others.  Only eight percent of people succeed in these resolutions, while twenty-four percent fail every year.  On the other hand, people who explicitly make resolutions are ten times more likely to reach their goals than people who don’t.

I have to admit that I’m one of the latter.  I’m an observer in the great game of New Year’s resolutions, and I do think it’s that, a game.  In my experience, people don’t usually take them very seriously.  Certainly it’s a nice idea, to have a period of time once a year when people are thinking about self-improvement.  But I also wonder if it’s a bit of a cop-out.  When people fail at their goals, they can say, well, there’s always next year.  They have an excuse to put off making the change.

I don’t think we should parcel up our lives so very much.  Time is really just numbers and dates, squares on a page.  Everything I did and learned in 2012 is still with me, still just there over my shoulder.  I want to keep it with me as I move forward into this year, and I want to continually, every day, resolve to be better, stronger, wiser.  Maybe, if I keep making my resolutions all year, they’ll begin to stick.