Sometime Again

Looking around at various “aboriginal” cultures, I’ve noticed something: very few place much emphasis on goodbye, and some don’t even have a word for it. I remember reading in Glory Road (Heinlein), about a tribe the character visits up in Alaska, above the Arctic circle, and that the closest they came to goodbye was “sometime again.” In Hawaiian, hello and goodbye is the same word, “Aloha”.

There’s something to that, I think, something really worthwhile. Our culture is so afraid of letting go, of saying goodbye, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s because the concept of goodbye is artificial, something that has grown out of a culture of possession. We say goodbye because we’re giving up the possession of someone’s time or presence. “Goodbye” is separation, it is permanence, it is loss. It completely misses the point that all things are connected, and that nothing, not even death if we’re to believe in an afterlife, is truly gone. It is simply somewhere else, and all things will reconnect in time.

The saying goes that if you stand in one place, the world will pass before you. I think it’s true, in one fashion or another. With the 7 billion people living on this planet parade in front of you? No, and that’s not to mention the animals and plants and assorted life that exists out there, either. It is a matter of interconnectedness, the holism of life, and that ultimately everything will come back around.

I don’t know why exactly I decided to write about all this. I’ve been thinking about it, thinking about the process of saying goodbye to my life as it was, and realizing that my life is still there, it’s just different. Where I go and what I do is still up to me, now more than ever. So why say goodbye? Regardless of whether it is the same, or even similar, that which matters will come back around. Instead of goodbye, “Sometime Again.”

Anniversary Day

Diving into the morass that I want to talk about, let me start by wishing my brother-in-law a happy birthday, and my cousins Ethan and Cortney a happy anniversary. I hope you all have a wonderful day with much love and happy times, only to be surpassed in the years to come.

It’s also my anniversary. Today marks two years since Mickey and I got married, on a rainy day in May at Squam. The pictures are still in the gallery, you’re welcome to look at them if you’d like. This year, however, it is sunny and hot here in Seattle, and Mickey and I are not even going to see each other today. Mickey has a busy day planned, picking up her friend Florence this afternoon, hanging out, going to the movies, and then driving down to Portland for the weekend. I won’t see her until Monday at the earliest, it seems. Instead, I’m spending time with Uri, and we’re currently over in Bellevue at Caffe Coccinella, my “regular” coffee shop out here.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I’ve been thinking about what I want, what I need, and what I can and cannot have. I’ve been thinking about loneliness and the nature of solitude, and where I should go next. What are my goals, my dreams, my ideals; who am I, who do I want to be, who have I been in the past?

The short answer is that I don’t know.

What I want is to be loved, admired, respected. I want to get these ideas and feelings I have out into the air where they can be seen by others, and feel that connection that I keep on looking for. To whatever extent, I need this acceptance, this validation to feel good about myself. I need physical companionship in one fashion or another, which is why solitude (an inherently meditative and introspective experience) turns into loneliness (an inherently distracting and dependent experience). I’ve had that physical companionship, and I’ve been betrayed by it, rejected by it. I don’t really know if or when it will be alright again, though I hope sooner than later. Of course, I bring it upon myself, I suppose. My nature and personality is flexible and giving, which is very easily devolved into a form of co-dependence that I don’t really need or want.

So, back to the questions. Where should I go next. I’ve heard opinions ranging from “Player” to “Priest.” Neither extreme is really a solution that I’m entirely comfortable with nor desire. Opinions on where to physically go have also ranged, from staying in New England to moving back to Seattle, to going somewhere entirely new. I’ve thought about wandering off for a while and traveling to places I have not yet been before, as well as some old favorites. I’ve thought of going on a cruise, pampering myself a bit and seeing the world, I’ve thought of kayaking through the Keys, I’ve thought of backpacking through Europe, and studying Shinto in Japan. All of which have an appeal, and none of which are things I’m able to do right now, whether for financial reasons or timing reasons, or simple, pure fear of stepping back into the world without the safety net of family and friends. I am wounded, I will not argue otherwise, and I’m not sure if I’m ready to come limping out of my cave yet.

Pardon the angst-laden symbolism.

Well, what about my goals, my dreams, my ideals. My goal is to create. My dream is to do nothing, to simply exist and live and enjoy life, and create if and as I wish, when I wish. My ideal is to Never Hurry, Festina Lente (Make Haste Slowly). It’s the central philosophy of my life, the basis for how I wish to live, even if circumstances cause me to not. I have come to the conclusion that this is not something I should compromise on, and I must find someone who lives this life as well.

As for who I am: I am a talented person who is paralyzed by fear of both failure and success. It takes a lot for me to say, and not for the reasons you might think. Who I want to be is someone who is fulfilling his potential and savoring every second of life because of that. Who I have been is a bitter person, caught up on the frustrations of being alone, being depressed, and angry at himself for not being able to connect with others.

All of which brings me no closer to an answer, which is kind of the point. I simply don’t know where to go next. I have realized that I have what my brother and friend Mike call “One-itis”, namely getting enamored with someone and deciding that THEY are “the one,” instead of simply appreciating and enjoying their company for whatever it’s worth. I am a hopeless romantic, and to quote Shakespeare, I “loved not wisely, but too well.” This has always been a problem for me, and it’s time I put a stop to it. There is nothing wrong with dating someone, or even sleeping with someone that I don’t necessarily want to spend the rest of my life with, and giving my heart so freely toward that end has done nothing but hurt me in the long run. I do not wish to become a player, but a middle ground might be nice.

Quick Thoughts

Artichokes are tragic. We eat their hearts.

There is a tree just up the road from my parents house that has fallen over from its own weight and the waterlogged ground. It’s laid out down the hill, the root ball sticking into the air. It’s still alive, and the leaves are out on it.

On Being Positive

First off: Mickey gets to go see an advance screening of the Firefly movie, “Serenity” I’m damn envious, and you should be too; the trailer looks tight. Just wanted to toss that out before moving on to the main topic.

I’m in a pretty positive place right now. Given the circumstances, people are pretty surprised at how well I’m handling everything. They say that inside every dark cloud, there is a silver lining. That may be true, but that still ultimately implies that the cloud is dark. That still requires a judgement on whether an act is good or bad, instead of simply accepting the act as it is. We cannot know whether something will harm us or help us later in life, whether it will enrich our experience or hinder it, and to declare otherwise is unfair to ourselves, those around us, and the situation itself. Even in hindsight, we can only declare the impact it has had up to that point, and no farther.

That’s not to say we don’t have regrets, or wish something hadn’t happened, or miss who we were and how we lived before an event (tragic or joyous, it doesn’t matter, that once again is a judgement of an event’s worth). But this is a part of life, and need not color our outlook on life as a whole. Put simply: there is no point in being bitter or hateful, and being so is inherently selfish.

So why should I be bitter or hateful? Why shouldn’t I try to put the best spin I can on a situation that did not go as I wished? It’s not the end of the world, it’s not even the end of my life. It’s just the end of the way it was. Change is not a bad thing. It’s just different, and it’s the only way we can truly grow, evolve, and discover who we really are.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I still wish it hadn’t happened.

On New England

Because life is currently rather circular, I’m currently sitting in the Hopkins Center on Dartmouth campus. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat here, or near here, but suffice it to say that it was a mainstay of my high school and early college years. I’ve blogged probably 70 entries (out of 240ish) sitting on the wireless connection of this campus, and spent countless hours talking to my friends over a cup of coffee or tea, in particular chai.

Something is marginally different now, however. This is no longer where I live. I live three thousand miles away, and only come here once every six months. Time is relative, however, so the amount of time away is largely irrelevant. The difference is far more subtle: walking through town here, people generally don’t smile. If people know each other, they might smile briefly, they’ll say hello, and on some occasions stop to talk further. But by and large, everyone is solemn faced, if not grim. Now, Seattle has its fair share of depressed and grim people, but there is a generally acceptable mood in the population. We are not the most free-speaking area of the country, but even with that in mind, we’re lightyears ahead of New England Stoicism. It’s not that New England is dead, and in fact there is quite a bit of activity and growth occuring. But the general atmosphere is simply grim. I can’t think of any other word that would better describe it. It’s like they are industrious and unhappy about it, but don’t realize that they are unhappy about it.

There is the beginnings of an economic boom occuring the area, with several major stores moving into the area, and apparently there is even talk of a mall going in. Additionally and simultaneously, the counter-culture (people living alternative lifestyles, often artists or musicians) is also beginning to explode in the area, complete with a non-profit low-power radio station (WXND), and even a soon-to-open comic book institute. If after October I didn’t come back for several years, I honestly don’t think I would recognize much of anything but the basic layout of the roads (and maybe not even that, purportedly, they’re finally going to make modifications to Route 12A, to help clean up the traffic problem with the plazas).

Every time I come back to the Upper Valley, I realize more and more how done I am with the area. I enjoy seeing my friends and family, but as I become more acquainted with good coffee shops and places to hang out and good restaurants, I find myself less and less missing the area. That’s not to say I don’t miss Vermont, or Squam, or my friends, or my family. Far from it. It’s more that I’m trying to explain that the allure of the UV is really fading. Of course, if I won the lottery tomorrow, I’d probably buy some land up in the Northeast Kingdom and build a house up there. Not as a primary residence, but as a place to hole up and enjoy the world a bit more than cities really afford. I think it would make living in a city the rest of the time a lot more palatable to me, which I think Mickey would definitely appreciate.

I will give New England credit for one thing: history. In most other parts of the country, entire regions have been overtaken with housing developments and suburbs, cul de sacs, and factory fresh houses. New England has some of that, but you also get to see older architecture, and older town layouts where roads went somewhere and the housing was designed for a non-car centric style of life. It engendered a sense of community that has largely been killed through suburban planning in the rest of the country. It’s affected this area as well, but not as much, or at least more slowly. That is absolutely a good thing, and hopefully with the beginning realization of the need for communal interaction, it won’t lose any more (and maybe even improve).

Pavlovian Response to Crash

When I was 15 and Uri was 17, we spent two weeks in June at Squam, essentially on our own. It was the week of and the week immediately following the Laconia Biker Week, which we largely ignored. The weather was idyllic, and we cooked two or three meals a day on the new griddle that Jain had picked up for Squam that spring. We had very little money, and we cut corners and ate a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches and the like, and frankly I’ve never had any taste so good as those. For pretty close to the entirety of those two weeks, Crash by Dave Matthews Band was playing on the stereo. We only had the tape of it, which meant that halfway through the album, one of us had to get up and flip it over in the stereo.

Which we did, even at night, as more often than not, we simply crashed on the couches in the living room, the ceiling fan spinning and the evening breeze rolling through the open porch doors. We spent hours just reading and whiling away the time, and at sunset, the sun would reflect off the lake and onto the ceiling, creating this golden shimmer. And through all of it, Crash would play, with the exceptions of when we went out for groceries, or to the movies (we watched Fifth Element in an empty theatre the week after Biker Week), or to go laze about in the lake that had already warmed up enough to merit lazing about in. It was a really fantastic time, and I envy the simplicity of it.

I don’t listen to Crash much anymore, but every once in a while, a song or two ends up in my playlist, and that’s where the title of this post comes in. It’s pavlovian. My mood, my physical sensation calls back to those weeks at Squam, with the cold floor in the kitchen walking barefoot and enjoying the feeling of it, just the atmosphere around me suddenly shifts to Squam. I can’t help but think of it, it’s automatic. I’ve been conditioned.

And that’s alright.

One Packet to Go

I’ve been in school for most of my life. Pre-school, then Kindergarten, then first through twelfth, a few months off, then a semester, a few months off again, then my current stint at Vermont College. For various reasons, many of which tied to depression, college has taken me a bit more than the stereotypical four years. I started in October of 2000, and God willing, I’ll finally be graduating in October 2005. That’s fully 7 months away and an entire semester, but even so, I’m a little startled by its approach. I’m left taking stock in the work I’ve done, in the topics I’ve studied, and wonder if I’ve actually learned enough to go DO something with it. And if I haven’t, why the hell did I spend so much money for a piece of paper that doesn’t mean anything?

I’m trying not to think about it too much, no point psyching myself out when I’m in the home stretch. It’s definitely in the back of my mind, though.

My current semester has been about writing, though mostly I’ve been doing a lot of reading, as usual. I’ve got a few stories right now that I like, and I’m going to see how far I can take them in this coming month, at which point my last packet will be due. Then I head back east for my residency, and begin my Culminating Semester. The format is a little different than previous semesters, and the final body of work will be bound and placed in the university’s library. This makes me nervous. No matter how good people say my work is, no matter whether others find it acceptable, a part of me is afraid that when the work is actually weighed and measured, I’ll be found like how I feel: a fake. The work is my own, don’t get me wrong, and the amount of fluffing I do is the occasional digression; I don’t even mess with the margins or font size (the favorite length extender of students everywhere). But I don’t feel like the work I did contributes to a greater understanding for the reader or myself. So regardless of whether the essay or annotation succeeds academically, I feel it was a failure.

I’m hoping to change that with my final study. At least a little bit. I plan to focus on game design, which is a daunting enough topic that the only way I’ll complete it is if I take the bull by the horns and aggressively pursue it for the entire semester. But if I do that, then I’ll really have something to be proud of coming out of my degree. I’m down to the wire (I can’t afford another semester, if I screw my culminating one up, my education fund is about depleted), so perhaps it would make sense for me to do a lighter study for my final semester. I’m not going to, though. I want my degree to be something I’m proud of.

Discombobulated

I’m posting because I can. And because I’m avoiding schoolwork. I wrote some more of the God story today, I’m up to about 4 pages, and like it so far. I’d hardly call it anything special, but that doesn’t make it bad. I’m not sure where I’m going to take it, but I like writing the character, so that’s alright. He does a lot of internal narration, which is a style I’ve always enjoyed, and hopefully doesn’t get in the way too much. It’s hard figuring out how much is “too much” when it comes to exposition: just because I find the setup of the situation worth explaining, it doesn’t mean the mythical “reader” is going to feel the same way. Locke, the main character, is currently flirting with a librarian and setting up a date for the weekend, which I’m not sure if he’s going to keep or not. I’m thinking he will, at the moment, but I may be wrong. Mickey wants me to work in the Goddess Advil somewhere, and I’ve got an idea on how I’m going to do that, which should be fun.

In other news, Jack Thompson is a sleazeball. I’m also not sure how I feel about CBS pitting a lawyer against two gamer geeks (Tim Buckley and Scott Ramsoomair). The whole crackdown on games is just plain disgusting. The complete disregard for the first amendment deeply disturbs me, and the legislators who are trying to restrict those rights should be ashamed of themselves.

On a personal note and the cause of this post’s title, I’ve been on Prozac for a few weeks now, and have noticed a positive difference in my mood (fewer swings in mood and less severe when they happen). I still feel extremely disconnected and disorganized, however, and still feel like I have a long road ahead of me. It doesn’t help that they’ve been wreaking havoc with my stomach… unless I eat something with the pills (and something coating/soothing at that), I have an upset stomach/queasy feeling for the rest of the day. I’m due to go back to the doctor for the follow up in another week or so, so I’ll be sure to bring that up with him then. If not, having to eat some yogurt in the morning really isn’t the end of the world, y’know?

Writing Fun

I’ve been focusing on writing this past semester, which has largely involved a lot of reading and my typical avoidance techniques for the actual writing. That said, I’ve started three separate stories, all of which have the potential for a worthwhile story (in my humble opinion). The first is a dystopian future world with nanotechnology that I’m now thinking about rewriting (I’m only a few thousand words in, so now would definitely be the time). The second is a silly little story about a Reality Assessor investigating the strange occurences occuring in a small town somewhere in the midwest. The third is an idea that’s been percolating in my brain for ages, and I’ve actually started to write it down. I’m really happy with that one. It basically hinges on the concept that a few thousand years ago, the existing pantheons of gods got together and decided to come up with a long term solution for survival, since their existence hinges upon belief, and what with all the plagues and wars and the fickle nature of humanity, no one really had what could be called “job security”. So they formed a union, or something similar to it at least, pooling the resources and beliefs of various different pantheons into one superstructure… which is how “GOD”, and the sudden predominance of monotheistic religion was formed.

The GOD story has been quite fun to write so far, and reminds me somewhat of a hybrid between American Gods and Lord of Light (both excellent books in their own right). I may post excerpts later. Maybe.

Speaking of Lord of Light (at least in passing), I just finished reading it for the first time. It is written by Roger Zelazny, and is considered by many to be his best work (justifiably). Given the nature of this semester, I took the opportunity to put it on my bibliography, and am very glad I did. Much like the excerpts previously mentioned, I may post my annotation about it later.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve switched to WordPress. There are still template tweaks to be made (making sure navigation is everywhere I want it, etc), but overall I’m really happy with the new design and system. I’ve placed a personal moratorium on even thinking about new systems again for at least a month, to give this one a chance to shake down. Besides, WordPress 1.5 has all the features I want, as far as I can tell. So why switch again? Also, I upgraded Gallery to 1.5RC1, from 1.4.1. The template changed a little in the process, but otherwise the changes should be largely invisible to the viewer (possibly a bit faster). This gives me a chance to add the “random image” block they have to this page, which’d be cool. That said, I may hold off on that until Gallery 2 hits final, and then upgrade to that first.