On the day after my birthday, when I finally woke up, woozy and nauseous, I chatted with my friends and had a hummus spinach omelette. My new friend Joe packed up his cooking wares and brought them back down to apartment 3A, the suite I lived in last year. I helped him carry his mason jars and whatever French coffee thing, and walked into my old space.
It was so clean and orderly, I forgot I used to live there. The walls are white and the floor is white, so without the grime I bring and attract to every apartment, the suite looks sterile and feels worse. I look at the refrigerator and am transplanted back to a year ago, with half-formed, half-true memories. The feeling is familiar, but not comfortable, like when I visited the my first room in New York for a lockout and it was unlofted, and colorful with all these stupid ass posters of bowties. It was my home, but it was in a dorm, so now it's someone else's.
And that's the strangest thing about working in student housing, it's structured to be ephemeral. I'm lucky (or unlucky) to have a place to stay, but it's temporary and so is everyone around me. I'm Matthew McConaughey. There are faces throughout the university that I recognize (fortunately and unfortunately), but there will be another batch of a thousand, all with their quirks and part-time jobs and aspirations to make a lot of difference. I'll do what I can, and I'll do more next year, for sure. I want to do a better job with residence life. Building a community is tricky work, and I haven't done enough this year.
Oh, by the way, I took that job in "Idling." I'm not idling, I'm busting my ass this semester, even if I'm watching a lot of Avatar and Dr. Who on the side. I'm in grad school, in the Julian J. Studley Graduate Program for International Affairs (recent name change) and I work in a freshman dorm in the East Village. Probs going to Turkey this summer, if I scrounge the money for it, and I'm interning at the UN. I was SO worried about idling and falling into traps, but I shouldn't worry. Worry shades members of my family terribly. We look so rotted and grave when we worry.
I'm fine. I'm busy, but I'm fine. I should update this more. I should update you more, but I get so distracted, you know how it is, yani, yani. I was worried I was doing nothing, going nowhere fast but my birthday is a nice reminder that I'm doing tons and wobbly time doesn't care at all for my worries. It'll just keep pumping.
My old apartment is someone else's, and I found some old underwear from someone who lived in my current space before me. Time's going to keep going, and my home will keep moving. It goes that way, and it should so nostalgia doesn't keep us static and stationary.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Saturday, March 2, 2013
"And I guess I'm a writer who uses italics"
(Accidentally deleted on March 3, 2013, cached and reposted from August, 2012)
Uses italics uses italics
I reread what I rewrote from one of the last posts (pieces) and I realized I was glazing my fists. Just obvious, obvious words strung together. No room for the imagination. I don't lack in imagination; I lack in narrative structure. Let me play you a song called "Narrative" on the three chords with the four strings I know how to play.
It sounds a lot like "Wonderwall."
I don't read Sartre. I read No Exit and 3 other plays and it was awesome. I am not a person who reads Sartre or writes about reading Sartre. I hate those people. Matter of habit.
I AM reading a book called "Einstein's Dreams" and it's great. Little vignettes where time acts differently and we act differently because of it. It's moving and very human, these quick characterizations and images. Long, tragic poems. Howl for physicists, or maybe not. It's good though.
There was this particular vignette about time as discontinuous parts. I finished the piece (post) and I was thinking about Portland in the winter, how the sky will hang low and gray. How the birds will chirp and Brian, my cat, will whine about whatever, how my friends will look thinner, stronger, worse, paler in their sweaters and suits. I'll say hello to them, do shots at the dive in Gateway, lose my patience, lose my resolve, miss home, miss them. In an instant of the gray Portland canopy, I remembered it's August. I won't be home (if it's even home) for 4 months. It hits me hard when I have to unpack what I've tried for so long to compartmentalize.
It's the same everywhere, all the time. I only miss where I'm not, who I'm without. What a drag and how silly!
The next vignette was about local time: all the cities are states and time passes at different rates depending on the city. Travelers pass between time zones and adjust to the new rate, but if they went back home after a month, years would have gone by, or minutes. I wonder if that's the real time, our time.
If I explore facebook, I can find all sorts of times, with classmates now Captains and businessmen and children, with children. We're seeing behind the curtain. All your time is local. You feel like everyone is getting old so fast, losing and gaining and dying and dying while you try to live. We're supposed to go back home and feel better or worse about our situation because of how our time rate differs.
I think college is a vacuum, a time suck. Once I leave, I'll speed on through the rest of my life, which was actually an earlier vignette...
Uses italics uses italics
I reread what I rewrote from one of the last posts (pieces) and I realized I was glazing my fists. Just obvious, obvious words strung together. No room for the imagination. I don't lack in imagination; I lack in narrative structure. Let me play you a song called "Narrative" on the three chords with the four strings I know how to play.
It sounds a lot like "Wonderwall."
I don't read Sartre. I read No Exit and 3 other plays and it was awesome. I am not a person who reads Sartre or writes about reading Sartre. I hate those people. Matter of habit.
I AM reading a book called "Einstein's Dreams" and it's great. Little vignettes where time acts differently and we act differently because of it. It's moving and very human, these quick characterizations and images. Long, tragic poems. Howl for physicists, or maybe not. It's good though.
There was this particular vignette about time as discontinuous parts. I finished the piece (post) and I was thinking about Portland in the winter, how the sky will hang low and gray. How the birds will chirp and Brian, my cat, will whine about whatever, how my friends will look thinner, stronger, worse, paler in their sweaters and suits. I'll say hello to them, do shots at the dive in Gateway, lose my patience, lose my resolve, miss home, miss them. In an instant of the gray Portland canopy, I remembered it's August. I won't be home (if it's even home) for 4 months. It hits me hard when I have to unpack what I've tried for so long to compartmentalize.
It's the same everywhere, all the time. I only miss where I'm not, who I'm without. What a drag and how silly!
The next vignette was about local time: all the cities are states and time passes at different rates depending on the city. Travelers pass between time zones and adjust to the new rate, but if they went back home after a month, years would have gone by, or minutes. I wonder if that's the real time, our time.
If I explore facebook, I can find all sorts of times, with classmates now Captains and businessmen and children, with children. We're seeing behind the curtain. All your time is local. You feel like everyone is getting old so fast, losing and gaining and dying and dying while you try to live. We're supposed to go back home and feel better or worse about our situation because of how our time rate differs.
I think college is a vacuum, a time suck. Once I leave, I'll speed on through the rest of my life, which was actually an earlier vignette...
Your Own Pace
I was wandering back to my friend Alec's cavern loft, overall having a good day, and talked to myself about workouts. I was planning on running early this morning, and answered to my audience that I would replicate some of the old workouts that I used to love in high school. No, currently love. I'd run some laps Fort Greene Park, which Alec lives next to, and increase the speed every now and then, a regular fartlek workout. No, no, I admitted to my audience, I'm not as fast as I used to be, but that was laright because I could go at my own pace.
It struck me for the first time how revolutionary that mentality is. I could run slower, but that was okay, because I was giving it my all. Everyone on my old cross country team could run at their own rate, challenging themselves in increments and it was all valued. That back-of-the-pack girl Khang liked or that sweaty guy Hania liked, they all could run and not worry about interpersonal comparisons. We trained on the notion of personal records (PRs), self-mythology. You ran your heart out and you knew it, and you were recognized for your effort.
As a stark opposite, one of our rivals, Central Catholic high school (about as bland of a name as you can get, barring something named after an aluminum company...) was an athletic juggernaut with the ability to send only the minimum number of runners to races, while the more elite competitors ran with the gods, or Galen Rupp or whoever. Their coach(es) strategically placed runners exactly where they were needed for the team to win each race, usually with great success. I only saw a handful of red (Central's colors) in each race, because the whole team was not necessary, just the tops. They were the anointed ones.
We ran our hearts out, all of us, and were still trounced by the hierarchical, the efficient Central Catholic Rams, most of the time. It was a given that we would place second or third, but where was the Central team? Where was the spirit of togetherness, of intersubjective support? It was absent, and I'll go as far to say the Central team didn't exist. They may have looked like they ran together, all huddled in obligatory prayer before each race, but when it came to the field, they all ran alone, burdened like Atlases.
Maybe our top runners felt this way, but most of them were all smiles after the race because someone out there with a green, damp jersey gave it there all, and that mattered as much if not more than the PR. And I swear this wasn't just me. This isn't hagiographical delusion. We were radical, we were together.
And I'm trying to get back into running now. Reintegrate those old habits, snot rockets and wearing tennis shoes like they made my outfit, running on empty stomachs, running through pain. I haven't reintroduced my bandanas, but they're still around, in a drawer somewhere in East Portland. I'll run tomorrow, groggy in the cold March morning, but I won't run alone, and even if I did, I'll PR for sure, and I'll come back to Alec's cavern, sweaty, but grinning, because I heard the team fanfare on the way back from the park.
It's not just a runner's high, it's recreated recreation. I've still got the raider spirit.
It struck me for the first time how revolutionary that mentality is. I could run slower, but that was okay, because I was giving it my all. Everyone on my old cross country team could run at their own rate, challenging themselves in increments and it was all valued. That back-of-the-pack girl Khang liked or that sweaty guy Hania liked, they all could run and not worry about interpersonal comparisons. We trained on the notion of personal records (PRs), self-mythology. You ran your heart out and you knew it, and you were recognized for your effort.
As a stark opposite, one of our rivals, Central Catholic high school (about as bland of a name as you can get, barring something named after an aluminum company...) was an athletic juggernaut with the ability to send only the minimum number of runners to races, while the more elite competitors ran with the gods, or Galen Rupp or whoever. Their coach(es) strategically placed runners exactly where they were needed for the team to win each race, usually with great success. I only saw a handful of red (Central's colors) in each race, because the whole team was not necessary, just the tops. They were the anointed ones.
We ran our hearts out, all of us, and were still trounced by the hierarchical, the efficient Central Catholic Rams, most of the time. It was a given that we would place second or third, but where was the Central team? Where was the spirit of togetherness, of intersubjective support? It was absent, and I'll go as far to say the Central team didn't exist. They may have looked like they ran together, all huddled in obligatory prayer before each race, but when it came to the field, they all ran alone, burdened like Atlases.
Maybe our top runners felt this way, but most of them were all smiles after the race because someone out there with a green, damp jersey gave it there all, and that mattered as much if not more than the PR. And I swear this wasn't just me. This isn't hagiographical delusion. We were radical, we were together.
And I'm trying to get back into running now. Reintegrate those old habits, snot rockets and wearing tennis shoes like they made my outfit, running on empty stomachs, running through pain. I haven't reintroduced my bandanas, but they're still around, in a drawer somewhere in East Portland. I'll run tomorrow, groggy in the cold March morning, but I won't run alone, and even if I did, I'll PR for sure, and I'll come back to Alec's cavern, sweaty, but grinning, because I heard the team fanfare on the way back from the park.
It's not just a runner's high, it's recreated recreation. I've still got the raider spirit.
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