Felt like I needed to read some poetry.
A Dream for Winter by Arthur Rimbaud, read by LtL
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Pushing elevator buttons angrily does not make the elevators arrive more quickly.
I own 3 times as many hats (6) as I do jackets.
I have come perilously close to crossing the event horizon of Facebook and need to draw back and begin using my blogs more. For a number of reasons, but the primary one is that when I work on posts for LtL, I actually do some writing and thinking and analyzing instead of merely sharing links and “liking” things. I wonder if Facebook makes us less thoughtful even as we share more thoughts?
I wonder if simple joy can be a radical act. Sometimes I think so, sometimes not.
It’s a grey day in Providence. Lightly snowing, cold but not excessively so. I’ve been staying in the apartment I lived in before moving to Pittsburgh. Empty but for a futon sofa, a small folding table, a microwave cart, and an a.c. that I had left behind when I moved. There is still an internet connection.
This morning I walked to Thayer Street and had an egg-and-cheese on a bagel from Bagel Olé and am now sitting at Blue State Coffee. I plan on meeting a friend from high school for lunch at around noon and until then, I’ll probably simply sit here, sip coffee and try to write about why I’m so sad.
Almost exactly two years ago, I was living with my parents after returning from my wanderjahr to New Mexico which was an attempt to detox from my years living in New York City. I had just gotten a temp job in East Providence that was good for 4-6 months and almost immediately started looking for apartments. The one I found, 122 Doyle, was walking distance from Brown University (I was applying there for graduate school), as well as from Whole Foods, a YMCA (which I never joined—despite good intentions), and even downtown Providence. It was also near a number of bus lines and, because the apartment was on the 4th floor, I was guaranteed to get at least some exercise each day. It was a decent 1.5 bedroom apartment, inexpensive, and had a lot going for it. I moved in on December 15th of 2008.
Home is a contentious issue for me. I never really felt profoundly connected to any of the places I’ve lived. I crave it, yet I find it immensely difficult to create a sense of home around me. Caveats here: I love my parents and enjoy spending time with them. Their home just doesn’t feel like my home at this point in my life. Also, while I looked to Joya as home for the years we lived together, New York City hugely disrupted my ability to feel at home. That said, in my adult life, I think the strongest sense of home I have, until recently, managed to create was my time at University of Maryland. Not because of apartments I lived in (though my last place there is still my favorite apartment I’ve ever lived in), but because of the sense of community and friendship that surrounded me. A sense of home, for me, is very much tied to having a strong and caring network of people that I can trust and allow myself to feel vulnerable with.
When that temp job in East Providence ended in August of 2009, I went through a really difficult financial period. Despite my office experience, competence in MS Office and with computers in general, nobody but nobody was hiring temps in the fall of ’09. But for my generous parents and grandparents, I don’t know what I would have done. I was never, ever at risk of losing my apartment because of my family’s support, or even going hungry. Still, it was a very hard period and frustrating and I decided that it would be very helpful if I could find someone to help pay the rent. The .5 room of 122 Doyle is very small, and while the apartment is spacious for one person, it’s not all that big. I responded to a foreign grad student’s housing wanted ad on Craigslist but never heard back from him. I also really, really wasn’t looking forward to living with a stranger.
New York was, in part, difficult because it created a kind of feedback loop. I didn’t want to be in the city and knew I wanted to leave as soon as I could, so I didn’t want to get too attached to people because I’d just had to leave a home in Maryland and was still, in a sense, mourning that loss. I didn’t go out of my way to avoid friendships, and between Joya’s theatre work and my year at CUNY’s the Graduate Center, I did meet and become friendly with a number of good people. It wasn’t like I was spurning all efforts at friendship. Still, I didn’t go out of my way to forge stronger connections or create a community in any real way because I wanted to leave the city. Thus, I felt isolated and lonely and yet feared the loss of another home more than that isolation and loneliness. This did not a good three years make. It also put strains on my relationship that, to this day, I regret. Joya deserved better than I could offer in that time, in that place.
The solution that presented itself was in the form of Joya’s younger sister, Erin, who was then living with their mother in MA and looking to move out. Erin and I had always gotten along and are similar in some very key ways. Not only do we share a love of zombie movies, all things Joss Whedon, Battlestar Galactica, and Milla Jojovich, but we also have similar sensibilities regarding privacy and social interactions. I’d been thinking about asking her to move in for a while after she’d visited a couple of times, but I’d held back because she came with a cat (Piper) and a beagle (Cassie). Piper was not an issue because I love cats and still missed living with Lila, but I was definitely concerned that going from living by myself to living with 2 animals and 1 person would be a bit too much. In the end, however, I decided that we could make it work and asked her if she wanted to move in. She said yes, and moved most of her stuff in at the beginning of December. Just over one year ago.
Moving back to Providence in December of 2008, I sort of expected to find a home ready made. I still had friends at Perishable Theatre and figured that those associations would blossom into a community that I could call my own. Yet, after Brown rejected my application in January of 2009, I knew that I would be applying to other graduate programs for fall of 2010 and thus would, most likely, be moving one again. I think I returned to a similar emotional holding pattern that I had inculcated in NYC because I did not want to leave/lose another sense of home. I would say that for almost all of 2009 Jen M. was easily 80% of my social life, with Vanessa making up the other 15% as both friend and colleague on some theatre projects. The last 5% would have been everyone else that I met (Ryan H. in particular) or reconnected with (Anne P. and Chris N.) Again, I wanted deeper connections, I wanted a richer social life, and I wanted a home, but I held myself back and kept myself emotionally reserved in some important ways precisely because I was going to lose it all when I (most likely) moved in the summer of 2010. So while there were some good times and fun moments that year, I was emotionally unsatisfied, disconnected, and adrift. Yes, I was quite, quite liminal.
Then Erin, Cassie, and Piper moved in.
I don’t think either Erin or I expected much more than a practical arrangement for us both with someone we knew that we could stand to live with. But something else happened and suddenly I found myself with a home, in all senses of the word.
It’s difficult to write about Erin because she is Joya’s younger sister and because, while Erin and I are platonic, there is something more complex than simple friendship between us. For the six months that we lived together, we were a family of sorts in that Joss Whedon, created-family sort of way, or an Armistead Maupin, 28 Barbary Lane sort of way. I adored both Piper and Cassie and was able to be silly and vulnerable with Erin in ways that I am with very few people. I felt utterly safe.
The sun is burning through the clouds. The snow has stopped. Grateful Dead is playing. I’ve moved from on of the big easy chairs to a table so I can plug in my computer. As much as I love my Macbook Pro and plan on using it through at least most of 2011, I’ll be glad to get back to battery life that lasts more than 90-120 minutes.
Erin moved out of 122 Doyle this past weekend, into a 2 bdrm apartment in Riverside that she is sharing with her Dad as his East Coast place—which means that she’ll have it to herself most of the time. Of course, this is the holiday season and she and her Dad have just moved in and Joya is coming into Providence and will be staying with them and I know all of this is all good and it’s just what happens at the holidays and I of course don’t begrudge them all that family time together and I’m staying in a nearly empty apartment because it’s closer to Erin and to several other friends in Providence and allows me to walk to coffee shops, etc., while my folks’ house is too far from anything without a car and thus I’m dependent on their schedule when staying with them (which I will be for the weekend). So there are a number of reasons for me to stay for a few days at 122 Doyle before Erin turns the keys in. But lying on that particular futon, looking up at and out through those particular and rather dirty skylights, it is hard not to feel like I’ve lost something, that I don’t a home anymore, again. At least not in the same way that I’ve had for the past year. Even though I’ve been living in Pittsburgh since August 1, the place at 122 Doyle, Erin, Piper, and Cassie were still my home. And it’s been very, very hard to lose that, I feel adrift. Alone. Liminal.
Sad.
Of course I also feel bad for feeling sad during the holidays and while I’m visiting family and a few friends and while I will be spending at least some time with Erin, Joya, Piper and Cassie. Which makes me frustrated with myself and probably further adds to the sadness. The last couple of days have been particularly hard, but I do think they have helped clarify just how gut-punchingly hard losing a sense of home is for me. And, perhaps more importantly, just how easy it is for me to hold myself in reserve and to hide from people; to forgo the difficulties of establishing deep and true friendships because I’m afraid of losing it all once more; to live a life of quiet, disconnected, desperation.
I probably shouldn’t do that.
So yeah. This holiday season is going to be hard for me. I’m sad and while I will have some good times with family and friends, pretending that sadness is not there would be hiding myself again.
I keep trying to find a good conclusion for my thoughts, and the only conclusion I seem to find is that I don’t really have one. Instead, since I’m going to be meeting Chris for lunch and in honor of our shared love of King Crimson, I’ll simply let this song be a reminder, mostly to myself, of something I need to do considerable work toward achieving.
“Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With”
[Update: Also, writing this and sharing some of my thoughts and feelings has made me feel at least somewhat better.]
Sitting on the bus Thursday morning on my way to teaching Intro to Performance and the movie moment happens: an attractive woman makes eye contact and sits next to me. Her body language indicates that she would be open to talking with me (and let me be clear here, I’m not expecting that she is open to anything more than a friendly conversation and do not read this invitation as anything more than it is). However, there’s a problem. I have, as usual, my earphones in and will need to take them out in order to begin a conversation. Which I do in as subtle a way as possible so as not to appear too eager and you know what, we had a pleasant conversation for a few minutes and how knows, maybe meeting for coffee or a drink will occur if we see each other on the bus again.
But that’s not really the point I wanted to make.
This incident reminded me just how isolated I usually make myself in public with my earphones and music. How many encounters (not necessarily with pretty women) have I not had simply because there was no space for casual observations on the weather or the the elevators at school or the myriad of other small conversation openings that might occur to two humans in the same space?
Now, I generally don’t like the noise of a city or on the bus or traffic, etc., and I love music, and I carry an iPhone that let’s me listen to my favorite Internet radio station in the world Radio Paradise anywhere I like, so it feels entirely natural to plug myself into my music whenever I leave my house.
Yet…
I am going to try an experiment. I am going to go for just 3 consecutive days next week without listening to music while I am out and about. Just three days. I can do that. It will feel odd and perhaps be uncomfortable on the bus or, especially, when waiting a while for the bus at night. However, it will only be for a few days, so I can deal.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Lila is staying with me until I move to Pittsburgh. I am happy to watch her and adore the dickens out of her, but this morning, as I was getting ready for work and grabbed my Etymotic hf2 earphones to untangle them Lila took one playful swipe and cut right through the plastic sheath and through the wires and destroyed a $140 investment in the blink of an eye. I am, to be honest, still upset about this because I have very few nice things in my life. My computer, iPhone, iPod, headphones, Snowball Mic, and my Etymotics are among the only possessions that I truly care about (other than books and music), and that are central to my life. Don’t get me wrong, I have more than most people on this planet, but in comparison to many Americans, I have very little. But what I have means a lot to me. Materialism is, in many ways, an under-valuation of the products and items in out lives rather than an over-valuation. If you invest money and mindfulness into an object, take the time to appreciate it, you are less likely to throw things away, or replace them simply because a newer, shinier thing was released.
So, yes, I feel a bit shallow for being really upset over the loss of my earphones, and realize that this is an entirely 1st world and privileged problem to have, and yes I know that I can get by in the foreseeable future with crappy earphones and that it wouldn’t hurt me to take more walks without being encapsulated by my music and cut off from the world around me, but I’m still sad at the loss and frustrated that I won’t be able to replace them for a while.1
Have you ever had something break that your objective mind said “it’s just a thing,” but your emotional response was genuine sadness?
Few writers make me want to weep as consistently as Carl Sagan: his hope and joy in our species bounded by the sad knowledge that we are continually at risk of not living to our potential, at short-changing ourselves and the planet through greed and pride. His words and his voice touch in me the same hope and joy and sadness every time. Yet, at the heart of it all is the belief that we will succeed, that we will learn, that we will grow.
And that someday, our children’s children’s children’s children might fly among the stars.
via Daring Fireball
I am rapidly approaching my 40th birthday. I could pretend to be fine and zen with that fact and, to be honest, I don’t dwell on it too much. Still, I am a bit . . . shall we say off-put by the notion that I’m entering middle age. I mean, really. That’s not cool. Mortality blah blah time passing yadda yadda. I have no thoughts on the matter that are particularly new or interesting. However, while I have a tendency to disparage my achievements because, like a lot of people I expected a grander life for myself, I figured it might be worthwhile to actually think about what I’ve done in the past decade.
I worked for a year (or near enough) as the Office Manager for Perishable Theatre, an organization that has remained dear to me and that inspired me to write and perform The Legend of Steve and to host and produce the poscast Perishable Theatre Presents for them. I also worked for nearly a year as the Office Manager at Olney Theatre Center, as well as working for American Friends of Magen David Adom, an engineering firm, a hospital, a Dean’s office and the BioMed Faculty Affairs office at Brown University.
I went to graduate school and got myself a Master’s degree in Theatre History and Criticism from the University of MD, as well as attending two other schools for a year each: Virginia Commonwealth University and CUNY’s Graduate Center. I’ve had a review published in PAJ and an article accepted for publication in a book that will, hopefully, see print by the end of the year. I’ve also presented my work at three academic conferences.
I’ve been lucky enough to vacation in Hawaii. Twice.
I discovered a talent for theatrical sound design and designed eight shows. In addition, I directed Little Murders, a stage adaptation of The Yellow Wallpaper, several one-act plays, and several staged readings. In addition, I wrote ten one act plays and 1.5 full length plays. I wrote around seven short stories and started writing a novel (which I will be getting back to working on shortly). I wrote a handful of good songs (and at least twice as many sucky ones).
I’ve developed a taste for good single malt scotch and sushi.
I created and recorded seven episodes of my own podcast Letters to Lost Friends and now find myself audio producing two podcasts: PodCastle and Perishable Theatre Presents.
I started this blog.
I met J and fell in love and moved in with her which was the first time I lived with a girlfriend. I then went through the pain of losing a relationship that lasted four years and that was both four times as long as my longest previous relationship and, in many ways, the most supportive and kindest romantic relationship I’ve yet experienced. I am terrifically happen that we remain close. I learned a tremendous amount about myself because of our time together and cannot thank her enough for putting up with me!
I lived in Maryland, Virginia, New York City (ok, Brooklyn for all those who consider only Manhattan to be NYC), Rhode Island, and flirted briefly with New Mexico.
I quit smoking.
I met and became friends with Vanessa, Josh, Jeff, Wendy, Natalie, Noelle, Sandro, and Erin . . . to name a few of the people who have touched my life. I’ve reestablished contact with Juliet, JeAnne, Chris, Jon, and Brendan. I’ve become closer still to my friend Jen.
I switched to the Mac. And am still loving it!
I’ve taught Intro to Theatre and Intro to Public Speaking and Public Speaking for Business Majors in addition to privately coaching five clients (including a VP for Paramount Studios) on their public speaking abilities.
I guess, upon reflection, I did accomplish some stuff in the past decade. Some of it stuff to be rather proud of.
I expect the next to be even more productive and exciting and challenging. While I may not be thrilled with my body’s age, I am appreciative of my experiences and life so far. It hasn’t been perfect and has had a number of false starts and mis-adventures that didn’t lead anywhere, but it has placed me here and now and at the start of a new path and I have a new determination to make the most of my mind and my capabilities as a writer, scholar, teacher, and thinker.
(And if you happen to want to do something for my upcoming 40th birthday, your company, or a good bottle of scotch, or a nice sushi dinner are all exceedingly welcome ways to help me celebrate.)
I believe in technology. I absolutely adore humanity’s curious nature and the fact that we are able to see stars billions of light years away, detect particles on the furthers edges of existence, understand our biology and neurology in ways that even fifty years ago would have seemed impossible. All of this is a product of our insatiable curiosity. And yes, often this curiosity is guided down dark and dangerous paths, or used to line the pockets of the few at the expense of the many, or produces unexpected consequences for the environment or the very well-being of our continued existence as a species. I understand that, I really do.
I have a friend who believes strongly that we need to radically change our way of life in this country, to the extent that we ought to break ourselves up as a nation and return to smaller forms of governance and older ways of doing things.She and I both want the same thing: a saner, more peaceful and more just future for the planet; a retreat from the ravages of cancerous capitalism; a realization that consumerism and the pursuit of more and more “stuff” has produced a deeply unsatisfied populace, but one that is easily malleable in the hands of the oligarchy and the corporations who have chosen to sell out our future in the name of profits. Our continued issue of contention, however, has been how to achieve such a future.
I see technological innovation and social innovation as absolutely crucial to finding a saner path. I tend to reject calls to return to the past because the past was a) never as rosy as it seems and b) is unable to solve the problems that we have created for ourselves. We understand, perhaps too late, just how interrelated our world ecosphere is and so I don’t see how a retreat from global consciousness into local awareness will help us correct for the excesses of the past century, nor how it might lead to a future that is able to balance local needs with global patterns. As much as I don’t like large cities, I also don’t believe that a retreat from those cities to a mythical agrarian existence would be in any way helpful. Cities offer social freedom and experimentation and are easily the basis for some of the most profound social changes in the past century. Could we really have had the feminist movement without cities? Or the work of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Could gay rights have progressed as far as they have if we didn’t have the urban centers to offer the opportunity for chosen communities or for people to experiment with their sexuality, gender, and identity in ways that are simply impossible for many who live in small towns? I don’t think so. There is a reason that, as long as there have been cities, people have left the country to explore themselves and the greater range of possibilities that they will find in the city. And who are we to say that a young person growing up in a small farming town would be better off there rather than exploring the greater range of opportunity that might be found in a city? Who are we to relegate future generations to the closed minds and closed ranks that often mark out small communities? Additionally, cities are often more ecological in terms of personal impact on the environment, with a greater density of people you are able to concentrate and share resources in ways simple impossible in more spread out communities.
I also truly believe that computers and the internet, for all their pitfalls and problems (some first-world social and others far more devastating in terms of the environment and the workers who build these machines), are truly beneficial technologies for humanity and that they can, in fact, be disruptive in positive ways (even when, at the same time, the internet can offer the appearance of disruption of power while doing nothing truly positive or progressive). I believe that we must move forward, using all our intellectual and scientific resources to understand the social, economic, and environmental problems that we have, to be honest, often created for ourselves. We have to learn to be better than our darker angels and rise above reflexive passivity and self-interest to understand how long-term self-interest in tending the garden of our world with care, diligence, love, and some self-sacrifice is truly our only hope of creating a future for our decedents.
And yet . . .
Lately, I have been wondering if my friend’s instincts might not be correct. Perhaps, as a species, we ought to go into another “dark ages,” and let the great civilizations crash up against the rocks of their own voracious appetites. Perhaps we produce so much apocalyptic literature these days because, deep down, we crave the release of responsibility that such an event would create: if our infrastructures collapse than we are off the hook; no longer plugged into the global, we would be forced to only deal with the local and our ape brains would no longer strain at the complexity of modern life. Might it be possible for enclaves of knowledge to emerge and protect the accumulated knowledge so that, in several hundred or a thousand years, humanity might emerge with a clearer and more mature understanding of how to use that knowledge for good?
Does humanity need a time out? Not in the sports sense, but a go to the corner and stare at the wall and contemplate what you’ve done wrong kind of time out. The kind of time out you give a naughty child.
I don’t know. I do know that as I see the images coming out of the Gulf of Mexico, I feel a deep and powerless anger toward BP and the American people for not having the will to do what we all know is necessary. I feel a desire to smash and burn all the fucking crap that has produced this situation, to tear it all down and let the asteroid hit or the zombies come or the plague arise that will tear us down and humble us to the point where we might, just might realize just how small and fragile our world is. But then I think of the unimaginable suffering that such a lesson would require and I tremble and balk at the blood and pain that would emerge from such an apocalyptic punishment.1
So I hope that such a thing is not necessary, that we can find ways to think smarter about how we live in and interact with the world. I want to believe that the vast amounts of pain and suffering in the world today can actually be reduced through the sweat of our collective brows, through our knowledge, through our ingenuity, through our compassion, through our technology, and through our imagination. I am not talking about miracle cures. Each and every one of use in the relatively wealthy industrialized nations must, absolutely must take responsibility for how we use resources out of all proportion with the rest of the world. We do need to change our personal, local, and national behaviors and we need to do it now.
Before it all falls apart and the center cannot hold.
Recently, xkcd ran this comic:
Steven Novella followed it up with a post on his NeuroLogica Blog, and concludes that:
The take home message for skeptics is that even in a world without ghosts, aliens, and bigfeet we would expect there to be large numbers of anecdotes that sound very impressive, told by people who seem sincere. In a world with these things, we should also expect some objective and verifiable evidence – and that is what is lacking.
The notion of “where there is smoke there is fire” simply does not apply, because human brains and the cultures in which they are embedded are smoke machines. (Link)
Now, I like to consider myself a burgeoning skeptic and overall rational person. I am an atheist and accept that there is nothing about the universe that is supernatural, only operations and systems that we don’t understand yet. There is no Loch Ness monster. I know this. I accept this. But damn it, I really, really wish there was. Same for aliens visiting our world and Bigfoot and ghosts and time travel and any number of cultural fictions that, while powerful, do not have material evidence for their actuality. But most of all, I want to live in a world where the Loch Ness monster exists, even though she doesn’t. (Not sure why she’s a she in my head, but always has been.) I think, probably, because such a world would seem to me somehow richer, more magical, yet tinged with a sense of tragedy–one lonely serpent monster cut off from her kind through eons of time. Whenever I say (and I’ve said this on a number of occasions), “I don’t believe in the Loch Ness monster, but I really wish I did,” I am wishing for a particular story to be true, to be tangible.
The desire for a more magical world seems to me one of the principle reasons why some people cling so hard to stories of monsters and aliens and fairies and conspiracies. Such concepts and stories offer excitement and wonder. Perhaps, for some, they offer a glimpse of the sublime: that overwhelming feeling of joy and wonder and fear and smallness annealed into an emotion that takes you out of yourself and returns you a changed, even if only slightly, person. However, I wonder if using fictional beasts and aliens to create such an emotion is simply being lazy. When looking around at the material world that surrounds us, when really looking, we are always already surrounded by beauty and strangeness and seemingly-alien life forms. Is Loch Ness really more impressive than the giant squid or the Blue Whale? Are aliens really more interesting than the biodiversity contained within a single Redwood tree? Can there be anything more exciting and humbling than a crystalline desert sky at night and truly understanding just how small you are in the universe; than letting yourself know that you are not separate from that vastness but part of the warp and woof of a universe that contains secrets and splendors enough to occupy our species for all of our existence?
I may want to believe in the Loch Ness monster, but that is partly because I don’t seek out, nearly as much as I ought to, those secrets and splendors that do exist. Instead of reading about UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle when I was a kid, how much richer my life would be if I had read about archaeology and oceanography; biology and astronomy? I’m not saying that my interest in certain topics was wrong or that I shouldn’t have read Chariots of the Gods when I was twelve. I merely wonder what kind of path I might have taken if I’d spent more time reading about and learning about the strangeness of our actual world. That said, it becomes important for scientists and skeptics and rationalists to provide equally compelling stories about the world as those told by the flakes and the kooks and those who are merely desperate in their desire for a magic world that excites and astounds without all the tedious mucking about in reality. Thus the importance of people like Jacques Cousteau, Carl Sagan, and Neal deGrasse Tyson. Scientists and story-tellers need to work with and learn from each other so that our science and skepticism can be told about with compelling narrative and our compelling narratives can be told with the richness and wonder of the natural world.
I may never entirely leave behind my wish to live in the same world as the Loch Ness monster. I don’t think that’s a bad thing as long as I understand that it is the story of Loch Ness monster that intrigues me, and that her non-existence does not drain that story of meaning or importance.
Because the Loch Ness monster does not exist.
And I’m ok with that.
If you don’t trust the government, how in the world do you trust the corporations who dominate the “free market,” and whose primary purpose is to take your money away from you to do anything for the betterment of you, your family, your community, or your nation?
I ask this in all sincerity because I’d really like someone to provide a well-reasoned argument that, say, Anthem Blue Cross, is more trustworthy and effective at promoting civic well-being than the government.
Powered by ScribeFire.