The Big Cucumber

I had a post idea in November(?) about finding a big, neglected cucumber in my refrigerator, taking a moment to think about how I would cut it up and eat it for a snack. Instead, I rushed it to my mouth and chomped on it like a rabbit eats a carrot. I was going to write a couple of small paragraphs about how life was like a big, neglected cucumber, sometimes, and you just have to go ahead and take a bite out of it. Sometimes life deals you a shitty hand, and you just play on and I'm not very good with long metaphors. 

But I forgot to write that down. I was pretty busy. I was told yesterday that I was vibing people, acting really self-involved and cold. I don't remember that, but I remember a stressful November and December where I felt like I was going to fail a class for the first time. Grad school is hard! (I imagine all programs are hard!)

I'm on the other side now, though, somewhere in 2014. I lost count. 2013 was a year of diversion and 2014 is a year of waiting and then exclaiming! 2013 was a year of going to Turkey and going to Philly and going to Seattle at regular intervals. It was a year of escaping tragedy, escaping boredom, escaping tear gas and escaping myself. Both my grandmas, my real ones, not the many remarriage ones (thanks Grandpa!) died this year and I had a weird time coping.  Like in 2012, I didn't cry for months in 2013. Once I get coverage, I should probably talk to a therapist about that, but I'd rather be reactive than proactive when it comes to therapy. For whatever reason.

2014 is bigger, though. I'm going to graduate from my program, and leave The New School fully. I will sign a lease for the first time. Hania is going to be moving to New York in June, so we'll live in the same place at the same time for the first time in years. 2014 is the year of full time employment instead of cobbled part time employment (I'm looking at you, 2011!) Hopefully this year will be a lot of open doors. 

Or at least closed doors. I'm going to burn so many bridges when I leave this place! 

~~

I've been watching a lot of Homeland and getting pretty emotional while talking to Hania about high school. I had a big wave of nostalgia wash over me in thinking about listening to the radio for the first time, and what a wonder it was to hear Nirvana and David Bowie outside of soundtracks. I want to look at the world the same way I did when I was just discovering things, but I was probably too cynical and ignorant, hopeful and naïve to understand what was happening. I want to time turner the hell out of high school, just to see it over again with these eyes, but those terrible jeans and running shoes and bandanas and carabiners made me who I am today, including the nostalgia. I have to live with them in order to look back this way. 

I've also been getting into "Welcome to Night Vale," this funny, affecting, dark podcast in the vein of "News from Lake Woebegone" and The X-Files. I'm about 30 episodes in and loving it, but a couple of passages really spoke to me. One has to do with Carlos, the skeptical and beautiful scientist, but the one that really made me stumble in awe (it was icy!) requires less context and reminded me of what it is to be alive:

"Thinking back, ladies, looking back, gentlemen, thinking and looking back on my European tour, I feel…a heavy sadness descend upon me.

Of course, it is partly nostalgia — looking back at that younger me, bustling around Europe, having adventures and overcoming obstacles that, at the time, seemed so overwhelming — but now seem like just the building blocks of a harmless story.

But here is the truth of nostalgia. We don’t feel it for who we were, but who we weren’t. We feel it for all the possibilities that were open to us, but that we didn’t take.

Time is like wax, dripping from a candle flame. In the moment, it is molten and falling, with the capability to transform into any shape. Then the moment passes, and the wax hits the table top and solidifies into the shape it will always be. It becomes the past — a solid single record of what happened, still holding in its wild curves and contours the potential of every shape it could have held.

It is impossible — no matter how blessed you are by luck, or the government, or some remote, invisible deity gently steering your life with hands made of moonlight and wind — it is impossible not to feel a little sad, looking at that bit of wax, that bit of the past. It is impossible not to think of all the wild forms that wax now will never take.

The village, glimpsed from a train window — beautiful and impossible and impossibly beautiful on a mountaintop, then you wondered what it would be if you stepped off the moving train and walked up the trail to its quiet streets and lived there for the rest of your life. The beautiful face of that young man from Luftnarp, with his gaping mouth and ashy skin, last seen already half-turned away as you boarded the bus, already turning towards a future without you in it, where this thing between you that seemed so possible now already, and forever, never was.

All variety of lost opportunity spied from the windows of public transportation, really.

It can be overwhelming, this splattered, inert wax recording every turn not taken.  

"What’s the point?" you ask.

"Why bother?" you say.

"Oh, Cecil," you cry. "Oh, Cecil.”

But then you remember — I remember — that we are, even now, in another bit of molten wax. We are in a moment that is still falling, still volatile — and we will never be anywhere else. We will always be in that most dangerous, most exciting, most possible time of all: the now. Where we never can know what shape the next moment will take."

I found the transcript for the episode "A Memory of Europe" here. I highly recommend both Night Vale and Homeland, but also Guacamole Hummus from Trader Joe's (if available). Together, those three have prepared me for my last semester in school (as far as I've planned). 

There will be more frequent posts this year. I'm going to Vegas in March to intern my dad's mom with all my family. I'll write something about that, later. 

That's all I have. Have a good night, though.