Guest House July 16, 2010

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all.
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-Rumi.  Translation by Coleman Barks.
From A Year With Rumi. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2006.

For me, what Rumi is writing about here is what I refer to as “staying with it”—letting myself feel whatever emotions I’m feeling fully, however negative they might be, and staying present with them rather than trying to avoid them or turn them into something more easily bearable.  That doesn’t mean that I completely surrender myself to them, because I do maintain my perspective, but I try to separate the two: on the more immediate level I can let myself fully experience whatever negative emotions are there, while on the higher level (with better perspective) I’m aware of what I’m allowing myself to experience and why it’s happening and whether or not I should act on it.  And I know that it will pass, because everything does, the good along with the bad.  Sometimes transience works in my favor, and sometimes it doesn’t.  Although nothing lasts forever, everything does have its rightful time and place, and it’s all I can do to strive to live whatever is here with me at any given moment.

…In which people continue to suck. June 29, 2010

One of my more troubling characteristics right now is my inability to sustain anger.  I can remain pissed off at someone for about 24 hours maximum for doing something that hurts me, unless it’s obviously intentionally cruel, in which case they’re just a jerkface buttbrain.*  After the initial anger dissipates I am ready to make up, regardless of whether anything has been resolved and my concerns have been addressed and I have even expressed the extent to which I’m hurt.  This is not because I am a benevolent forgiving person; this is because I’m a spineless sap.  I hate conflict, I hate fighting, I hate being mad at people and people being mad at me, and I just want to get past it so that we can start being friends and having fun again.  I miss them.  Everything reminds me of them and all of the good memories I have with them and all of the things I like about them and I just can’t bring myself to do anything that might prolong the conflict—the missing wears me down until I’m ready to just swallow all of my concerns for the sake of appeasing the other person.  But then I’m not happy in the long run because these things just fester, so that’s not healthy either.  In a way, I think I might prefer to be silently unhappy myself than to have someone else unhappy with me.  It’s far from ideal, but at least it’s easier to deal with.  (The past four days have been ridiculously hard to get through.  I suppose I’m building strength of character?  Maybe?)  (…I doubt it.)

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*As you can see, I keep my insults classy.

Saying Goodbye August 8, 2009

As a kind of closing post for the JVC chapter of my life, I thought I’d give you a few excerpts from my journal that I might have posted earlier in the year but just never did. Enjoy!

Friday, September 5, 2008

I believe I am learning that life requires courage—not just the lives of heroes and soldiers and world leaders, but everyone’s life, including my own. Life demands courage in everyday things. It isn’t the courage of martyrdom; it exists on a much smaller scale: it’s the courage to pick up the phone and make a call you’ve been dreading, or start a conversation with a stranger, or stand up for your principles when they’re not popular, or start a new job or move to a new place or try a new recipe or admit that you’re wrong. Life requires courage from me, and I want to live courageously. Sometimes this means that I have to force myself to do daunting things that I don’t particularly want to do. I have to face the fact that a lot of things worth doing in life aren’t necessarily going to be things I am absolutely thrilled about—I’m going to be anxious and apprehensive going into them. Making decisions and getting things started demands a good deal of courage, and then there comes a point where I realize that I CAN do it, I’ve left my fears far behind me, and it is very much worth it.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

I wish I had a quest—a quest like Frodo Baggins or Luke Skywalker or Harry Potter. I want a quest for something besides self-improvement, its success measured in something beyond my own happiness. I want to destroy the ring and take down the evil Darth Vader or Lord Voldemort to save the world, and I want to bring my friends with me—my Samwise Gamgee, my Han and Leia and R2-D2 and C-3PO, my Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley. I don’t want to have to be happy about what I’m doing; I want it to be okay to be scared and miserable but press on anyway because I have to, because it must be done and I’m the one who has to do it. I want something to live for, that is real and concrete and unquestionably worthwhile, beyond my own personal happiness.

Friday, December 19, 2008

Tonight I felt the urge for motion, the desire to lose myself in a sea of other people and just feel a part of this seething humanity for a while. Courtney and Lorraine are my only roommates left right now, and neither of them wanted to go out—so I ended up going out by myself and wandering up and down Valencia. I didn’t work up the nerve to go into any bars or coffee shops, but I did stop to peruse a cute independent bookstore called Dog-Eared Books. There were hand-written notes on many of the shelves explaining the organizing system and pointing customers toward specific authors. Out on the street I was stopped by a man and a woman who had been robbed and just needed $7 for the bus to Santa Rosa. “No one will help us!” he said, distressed. “Everyone thinks we’re bums!” I dug through my purse to find my wallet with my gloves on and pulled out a five-dollar bill; they thanked me and walked off to find the last two dollars. Did I believe their story? Yes. …Well, maybe. Why hadn’t I given them seven? I had it on me, and it wouldn’t have meant starvation by any means. I don’t know why I only gave them five. Maybe if I’d given them more it would have meant that I owed everyone else who asked me the same amount of money. Maybe I’m just a stingy bastard. Who knows, really?

I am twenty-two years old and my life is directionless and I have no friends my age in San Francisco aside from my roommates, and I am just beginning to begin to understand the world and my place in it. My experience is so small, when held up against all that has been lived. I want to live it all—I want to fill the skin of each person I see and feel what it is to live their lives, and take a look at my word through different eyes. I want to be shocked and disturbed and saddened and touched and inspired, and I want to know. I want to put all of that knowledge together so that we can begin to make some sense out of this crazy life-thing.

I am twenty-two years old and I am sitting Indian-style in the middle of the living room floor with pieces and scraps of experience spread out all around me like Tinker Toys, trying to figure out how to assemble them into this solid, cohesive thing called a life. I’m at a loss for where to start, and I seem to have misplaced the instructions.

Thursday, December 25, 2008

The real reason I started crying during A Muppet Christmas Carol [true story, by the way, and to my knowledge this is the only movie I have ever actually cried while watching] is the scene where the Ghost of Christmas Future is showing Scrooge the following Christmas at the Cratchit house, after Tiny Tim has died. They show his empty place at the table and his crutch by the fireplace and his whole family trying not to cry so they can hold each other together and it’s just so fucking sad… Losing a child, or any family member, has to be just about the most painful thing in the world. But then Scrooge realizes that he can change things, that he has a second chance at life! And Tiny Tim lives! And Scrooge is a new man, and everyone is whole and full of love once again.

It’s a wonderful story—which brings to mind It’s a Wonderful Life, another classic Christmas tale. I haven’t actually watched it in years, so I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but basically George Bailey loses a lot of money and it looks like he will have to close his business, so he gets really depressed and wishes he’d never been born. Then—poof!—it comes true, and then everything gets even more horribly depressing as we see how bleak his town would be without him. But in the end he is able to unwish his wish; he is reunited with his family and now thoroughly appreciates the life he has.

Why do we love these stories so much? Because they bring us so close to the edge of death and total collapse, and then they pull us back from the precipice of the abyss to where we were before, only we appreciate it so much more because we have been so changed by having faced terrible things and been snatched back from them at the last minute. Redemption narratives. As Teresa’s friend Eron said, life is made up of redemption narratives. Maybe that’s why these stories are so timeless: in dealing with the interplay between life and death, they reflect something essential about the human condition.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

I’ve been skeptical of hope for a long time, since it’s kind of like a drug: gets you high for a while but there’s always the inevitable letdown, as very few things in life can meet the expectations of an idealist. Hope isn’t a lasting source of happiness because I’m just setting myself up for disappointment; therefore I haven’t seen a whole lot of value to it.

But then I started to think about it differently, based partly on points that other people made when I talked to them.

Maybe hope doesn’t bring lasting happiness, but what does, really? That’s just not the way life works. Happiness never lasts, but sadness doesn’t either. Everything is a cycle. …So why not just live accepting that? (I asked myself.) …Acknowledging that sadness and happiness come and go no matter what, and you can’t have one without the other?

So maybe the object of hope is not what determines whether or not hope is worthwhile. (To a certain degree, I mean. This doesn’t extend to being completely delusional. Not because it fits with my theory; just because I can’t buy the value of hope that totally obscures some crucial aspect of reality. Example [spoiler warning for Cider House Rules]: whatever hope the orphans gained from Homer’s coverup of Fuzzy’s death in Cider House Rules.) Even if the thing hoped for never comes to be, maybe that hope is worthwhile regardless. I am at my happiest when I have hope: I love more easily and live more fearlessly and tap into forgotten stores of enthusiasm and motivation. Maybe hope really is good in itself–maybe it’s okay to throw myself into it wholeheartedly without focusing solely on the eventual outcome.

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So it’s 1:00 a.m. on Saturday, and I’m leaving for the airport in about eight hours. No matter how long I have to prepare myself for endings, I am never, ever ready. I’ve known that August 7 is my last day of work for over a year, and yet it still managed to creep up on me… and I basically knew for my whole life that I was planning to graduate from college in June 2008, but that one caught me by surprise as well. One friend I mentioned this to suggested that it’s because I don’t detach—I stay fully present and try to make the most of where I am right up to the bitter end. I think that might be giving me too much credit (the explanation I had in mind was more along the lines of “denial”), but if that’s part of the reason endings catch me off-guard, I’ll take it.

What bothers me the most about leaving are the remaining things I still want to do here but haven’t had a chance to, and the people I haven’t said goodbye to. I never made it to Alcatraz, for instance, and I never went to Yosemite or swam in the ocean (albeit for a good reason—it is FREEZING!). These are all things I’d been meaning to do, but time just crept up on me. On the bright side, unfinished business is all the more reason to come back someday. Goodbyes, though, are strange. I no longer try to drag them out as long as humanly possible—a change which other people seem to appreciate—and instead, I seem to be becoming a quick goodbye person. Part of me knows that leaving is the hardest part, and once I’m gone things will be okay, so I kind of just want to get the leaving over with. (Sometimes I think I miss people more before they leave than when they’re actually gone.) But that doesn’t mean that saying goodbye is less important for me. Even if it takes five seconds, I feel immeasurably better having said goodbye to someone than not.

So for now, I will miss you, San Francisco, and I will miss you, Jesuit Volunteer Corps. I will miss every inch of this apartment, the freak show that is 16th and Mission, and everything that drove me nuts this year. I have eight more hours to sit here with my goodbyes, and then I’m going to try to make my peace with this.

Ending July 30, 2009

Disorientation was the weekend before last.  There were trees and grass and caterpillars and dragonflies and crickets and cicadas and mosquitoes and heat and sunshine, and for one weekend it felt like real summer.  I slept in a field under the stars both nights, and I went swimming and soaked in the sunlight and didn’t shower for three days.  It was wonderful.

As we were taking the 101 South back from Sonoma, we drove through a tunnel in a hill in Marin and caught sight of the Golden Gate Bridge perfectly framed by the arch at the tunnel’s end, and I was filled with this sudden surge of warmth for San Francisco.  My God, we live in an amazing city.  Until that moment, I don’t think the fact that I’m leaving had really hit me—I’d been looking forward to the being home part of things but hadn’t thought much about the leaving San Francisco part.  There’s a part of me that thinks I’m a total idiot for moving away from a city this great.  And naturally, it’s not just the city I’m going to miss, but JVC as well.  I’ve learned a lot this year from the people and places that have been a part of my life, and it’s going to be strange to be separated from the structure that taught me everything.

I wrote those two paragraphs over a week ago.  They were going to be part of something longer that just never came together…  I can’t sort out my thoughts anymore.  Somehow I hadn’t expected leaving to be such a process.  I just pictured us living like we had all year, right up until the day we all went home.  Silly, right?  The past week and a half has been a chaos of packing and hurried goodbyes and rushing to tie up loose ends at work and prepare for next year’s JVs.  As exciting as moving can be, transitions are always rough.  I feel like I’ve been dragging a load of worries around with me since Dis-O—and some of that is also the weight of goodbye.  It hurts, leaving people I’ve grown so close to this year; and it hurts leaving people I know I’m not going to get to say goodbye to (like some of my coworkers who were laid off in May).  I know my roommates and I will keep in touch, but I also know that it’s impossible to stay as close as we’ve become while living together.  Saying goodbye is sad, and there’s really no getting around that.  I just have to make friends with the sadness.  Sit with it and take it for what it is.  It’s not a bad thing—sadness at leaving means that what I’ve had here is something worth missing.

My walls and my drawers are empty.  I can see my desk for the first time in months.  Julie’s going home tomorrow—my first roommate to leave—and I’m sitting on the futon listening to the music I stole from her computer and thinking about how much I’m going to miss everyone.  It’s been a great year.  It’s had its ups and downs, like every year does, but looking back, I’m just grateful for the entire experience.

Guess what? It’s June. June 4, 2009

Hello there.  I am giving you a lame update because I have a few minutes to kill before I leave for Seattle for the weekend.  I don’t really have a ton of new and exciting stuff to report, aside from the Seattle thing, which is pretty exciting.  I finished filing my TAP application yesterday and accepted my federal loans (eek), and I’m planning on being back in good ol’ NYS around August 9.  I was originally planning on sticking around here an extra week or so, but I realized that all my roommates were planning on leaving sooner, and what would I do for a week by myself?  Besides, I could use the extra time to get my life organized in New York.  Sara and I need to find an apartment before I get back, and then I’ll need to move all my stuff to Buffalo and buy a car within the 2-3 weeks before classes start.  Maybe find some furniture.  Furniture is good.

So basically we have two months left now.  I know it’ll go by fast—Seattle, then a couple of concerts, then Florida/Mexico with my family, then a couple more concerts, then Disorientation (yes, that is the official name of our final retreat, ridiculous though it sounds), then home.  The past week or so, I’ve been really looking forward to going back.  I miss trees and grass and rain and seasons.  Maybe that sounds stupid, but one thing I’ve realized about myself while living in a big city is that I really, really, really like nature.  And of course I miss having friends around… that’s been one of the hardest things about this year, the not-having-friends-aside-from-my-roommates aspect.  I know that isn’t the case for everyone in JVC.  I’m probably not particularly adept at making friends in new situations.  But I know this is a fairly common thing that people face after college—it’s hard to establish a social life for yourself after you’ve been completely uprooted.  But yeah.  Friends = good.  (Like furniture.  You know.)

Two months left.  That isn’t much time.  This year has gone by so much faster than any year before it—I don’t know if it’s the lack of major paper deadlines, or just that I’m getting old (I found another grey hair last night!).  The weeks slip by like nothing, the days blend into each other, and I’m madly treading water just to keep from drowning in the monotony.  That’s a gross exaggeration, although it seems that way sometimes, to me.  My life is actually pretty good.  I make sure I do at least one interesting/productive thing per day aside from work; I’m living somewhere cool for the year; I have good friends here and good friends at home; my job is enjoyable and worth my time; I’m more or less young and free.  What more do I want from life?  A lot, I think.  But I’m not sure what.  What is the word for that—ennui?  I’m not sure it’s that I want more from my life, so much as that I want to cultivate a greater appreciation for what’s in front of me.  If I don’t know what I want, then being content with what I have does not constitute settling for less than I should—right?  It’s all about the process anyway.

The Fourth Down November 17, 2008

“   I
let the day go by,
    I
always say goodbye,
I watch the stars from my windowsill,
      the whole word is moving
            and I’m standing still—”

(The Weepies)

When I run out of actual work to do at work (which is usually only on Fridays), I’ve developed a habit of opening up a new email and typing whatever’s on my mind, and saving it as a draft. I’m up to twenty-five or so right now. One of them is entirely devoted to memories I miss—the actual subject line is “Memories I Miss (often perversely, but not always) (in other words, this will be an unabashed nostalgia fest).” I’ve written about this before: when I keep myself busy, I don’t have time to miss home; but when I have spare time to think, the missing creeps in. I’m okay with it as long as I keep it in check. Lately I’ve been getting hit by random bouts of longing for Eastwood 4, for the Canisius chapel, and for all the other miscellaneous places where I’ve unexpectedly found myself feeling completely at home and at peace.

I know that I idealize it, though. I know this rationally, when I think about it—things are always better in memory than they were when I lived them. I guess that’s essentially how nostalgia works. I try to remind myself that things weren’t as good as I remember them being, but it isn’t always very effective.

I’ve been trying to remember a time when I wasn’t missing someone. I have to stretch my memory back and back and back… I must have been very young. When I was a little kid, the only people I had to miss were my grandparents, and that was just because they weren’t there, not because I could never see or talk to them again. My first grandparent died when I was 4; my first close friend moved away when I was 12. Losing people starts young.

And then it just keeps going.

The worst part about college graduation was the anticipation of drifting. I knew it would come, because it came after high school, even though it took a couple of years to really set in; and I spent the last month or so of college in utter dread of it. I really, really, really don’t like losing touch with people—I’m not sure whether it’s worse when it comes suddenly or when it happens over time. But it sucks. …And it means that I can never go back, to that time that felt like home, because the place has changed and the people have changed and gone, and I’m not even sure where to look anymore. Is this what adult life is? —Trying to cope with the aftermath of realizing that nothing is stable?

The Momentum of Missing September 22, 2008

I’m starting to miss Buffalo. It started this past week, really—the week before, I was doing something (or several things) every single day after work, and it was insane; but this past week there was nothing going on, so I had more time to think. I like having time to think, but thinking also gets me to missing. It’s okay, really—it’s natural, and it’s not so overwhelming that it’s detracting from enjoying myself in San Francisco. I’m not exactly talking about the people, either: I miss my friends and family no matter what when they’re not around. What’s new is missing Buffalo, and Canisius, and the whole life I had there. Not only am I missing my specific friends, but I’m missing the level of friendship we had. My housemates are great but we’ve only known each other for a month; it takes me longer than a month to establish that level of closeness with someone. I have yet to figure out how to meet people in the city, outside of JVC and work, so the circle of people I know has diminished considerably…

I came across an interesting passage in the book I’m reading, You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers. Will and Hand are swimming at night in Senegal when they meet a French woman who is trying to explain to them her concept of the fourth world:

“The main point is,” she said, trying to contain her frustration, “that we have to cut from hope of continuity. Momentum. We must to see each setting and moment as whole. Different, independent. A staging ground.” […] “My mother urges me to have a chance for the fourth world at all time. You have to forget about momentum and start again, and again, and again, and again.” (141)

I don’t think that what she’s talking about is exactly what I’m talking about, but there’s a connection there somewhere. In a way, what she’s describing is what I’m trying to do: cut from all hope of continuity, to live each moment fully for itself. I’ve noticed that sometimes, when I’m enjoying myself, when things are going exactly how I would want them to, and it should be absolutely perfect, the one thing that keeps it from being perfect is my own knowledge that it has to end, because this world is inherently imperfect and whatever perfection there is can’t be complete, can’t last, and my dread of that moment coming to an end, my overwhelming and futile desire to prolong it, takes away from my enjoyment of the thing itself.

My other thought along those lines is momentum. In the story, she’s urging them to forget about momentum, but Will, at least in the ¾ of the book I’ve read so far, is doing all he can to keep moving, dodging obstacles, dreading sleep, trying to outrun his thoughts. Is this momentum or velocity? My lack of ever having taken physics is catching up with me. Anyway…that’s basically how I work, too. (Maybe it’s how everyone works? It’s possible, but not having polled everyone, I’m not going to be so presumptuous.) Over the summers my life would stagnate; I was working crappy part-time jobs and trying to find ways to entertain myself in the meantime, doing the same things I’d always done with nothing new in my life and nothing to distract me from wallowing in thoughts and memories and the wistful awareness of absence. During school, though, I usually had enough to distract me. I have no desire to completely outrun my thoughts, but I don’t want to dwell in memory to the point of toxicity, either. I think all I need is a decent balance. The thing about balances, though, is that they don’t exist in a perfect form either—most of the time the best I can do is swing back and forth between one extreme and the other.