Category: personal

Today would mark the four-year anniversary of my relationship with Emily (you know, if that whole “break-up” thing hadn’t happened). To mark the occassion, I sent her an e-mail, said thanks for the time we spent together and that I thought she was a wonderful person. I got a similiar note in return. It’s good to be amicable, though I admit sometimes I regret that things didn’t work out better between us. I like the direction of my life right now, and I wouldn’t change it; but there’s always the thought that I just didn’t try hard enough. Enough. Enough though, it’s a vain game to play in one’s head, and ultimately futile. I wish happiness and fulfillment (to everyone) and am ready to move on with everything.

To Emily: Happy Anniversary (or non-anniversary, really);
Wish I could give you a big hug, at least.

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Brendan has some good links involving activites in Fallujah; you know, if you feel a little too optimistic about life right now.

This article is fascinating, as is the associated blog, if you’re interested as I am in the idea of fiction blurring with reality. Who knows if these things are true, and who cares. Life’s more interesting if you believe that these things are happening all around you, all the time. To paraphrase Karla, we’re all living our own autobiographies: we pick the music, the camera angles, and the actors we play with. Some of these stories overlap, and some of them read like spy novels. That’s what makes life interesting. I may not have upscale private detectives tracking my movements across the globe, sent by a Don Corleone father with deep pockets and an arranged marriage waiting in the wings; but I lead a life of private adventure, and I’m happy with it. And despite Nick’s list of reasons not to move to Canada, I think I will. Or at least, I’m going to do my damndest to end up in Montreal by next fall, and to stay there for at least two years. Besides, I like the metric system. Thanks to all you kind strangers for your encouragement in this. It’s past time for me to jump ship for a bit and see where the current carries me.

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So, I nearly joined the Eagles here in Olympia, mostly because the Eagle’s Hall is where we swing dance, and Christine, the main swing organizer in town, is a big Eagles campaigner. I was supposed to be initiated this last Tuesday, actually, ’til I thought about it and realized that I really didn’t know anything about this organization. It’s a community organization dedicated to “people helping people”, but it still seems more to me like a cult, and I can’t help but wonder if the values they choose to uphold are really the values I want to spend $60 a year supporting. Christine was disappointed, because in the end it’s all about saving the ballroom for our dance. I told her I’d gladly donate $30 specifically to save our dance space, but I didn’t feel like selling my soul to a “fraternal order” so early in my life. Am I just crazy, or does a group like this kind of scare anyone else?

Memories of years ago,
turning pages of Lewis Carroll
at two in the morning,
brains hot as we laughed at logic.

How blind we were, then;
how stargazing and mad
as we snuck through the gate and
walked the trails in the black,
shivering and afraid and invigorated;
each snap of wood from the dark
another reason to hold you close.

You were the only one I saw the beavers with,
and the river otter come out to play;
as if they’d come for you.
We gave bread to the ducks
and talked about that first night,
stars by the lakeside and how
I was too nervous to sit down.
I shook like a reed just standing next to you.

We conquered Carroll and perhaps
I only did it because I felt your equal,
if just for a minute or two.
Then you’d dazzle me:
mathematical virtuosity,
referencing a world of depth I felt beyond me;
poetry by the dockside as we listened
to bullfrog bass and waited for stars to fall.
You offered so much and took so little
that I had no choice but to feel diminished,
though the conclusion ignores the premises.

We conquered Carroll for balance
and we mastered logic,
ignored that emotion will in its tenacity
unravel even the most perfect puzzles,
and were thus undone.

Sometimes I’m scared of how not scared of committment I am. Perhaps this is because I know that despite how we would normally feel bound to something, the truth is that we choose every moment to be who we are, do what we’re doing, and to be with who we’re with. There is no moment when you can’t just choose “no” and walk out the door. There’s no crisal point from which you can’t turn back. Our love of a good plot and the human dilemma would like to say differently, but at any point you can run away to a different state or a different country, leave every aspect of your old life behind and become a new person (as new as you’d like to be, anyway).

This has always been something of a lure to me. Growing up, as we become the people we are, we are raised and nurtured and taught and shown how to be and what to be. We are, in short, pushed along certain paths that we’ve little control over. Unless we jump the rails at some point, these early pushes can continue to guide our lives throughout, so that each moment is just a reaction to a previous moment, which is also just a reaction, which leads all the way back to an action taken that wasn’t even of your choosing, but was made for you. Moving to a foreign country signifies to me a rebirth; a jumping of the tracks and a making it on your own. Learn the language, the culture, how to interact with people, but do it all on your own, with no one making choices for you. The image of the loner is so fucking romantic, after all, that it’s hard to get away from. I imagine myself, reborn in Paris, and I know no one. I go to the same cafe every day, and I write and I read, and I study or do whatever it is I am in Paris to do aside from be reborn; and it rains a lot and I’m fucking lonely because I don’t know anybody and everyone is speaking French anyway.

I do speak French, contrary to personal belief. I.E. I do know how to speak French, but I never do. Go figure. The loner is a powerful figure, but it’s easy to forget his flaw: he gets lonely. Even so, sometimes it feels like all the choices I make are based around the idea of comfort, because I’m not willing to completely divest myself of … myself, and become me anew. On the other hand, I know that doing so would not necessarily be anything more than a somewhat masochistic social experiment, or a way to prove something to myself. It’s enticing, even so.

The world’s full enough of strangers,
perhaps there’s no need that I become
a stranger to myself.