Tears 4 Fears

I'll be in Seaside in ten days. Until then, I'm alive and awake and well.

Thanks to Daniel Lopatin's EccoJams tape from last year, I've encountered all kinds of old jams that would've otherwise flown under my radar. "Woman in Chains" by Tears for Fears and "Too Little, Too Late" by JoJo are in almost constant rotation on my iPod. I also rediscovered "Laughing" by David Crosby recently, via Zech's expertly curated and truly funny radio show.

When work-related stress had me momentarily zoned out and preoccupied, a brief conversation with my mom opened my eyes. I usually spend too much time talking to my parents without really saying anything. I'm trying to be more honest to them and to myself lately, and in the process, get to know us all better. It was really a splendid moment that replenished what might have been a dampened evening.

I also refreshed myself by cleaning out the cat litter at my parents' house. If everything went according to plan, they'll each think the other did it, making everybody happier (of course, my secret hope is they discover I did this without any prompting and love me even more for it). I did it on a whim, remembering one of my favorite passages from the queer masterpiece The Well of Loneliness:

"She took what she gave and she gave what she took, yes, but sometimes she gave just a little bit more -- and that little bit more is the whole art of teaching, the whole art of living."

Isn't that a swell thought?

Time passes. That it's already midterms hasn't really resounded with me. That I'm feeling this ecstatic has.

Take care and carry on!

Emergency Room

When I woke up from my nightmare at 6 a.m. this morning, I knew the day wouldn't be normal.

I skipped my first class, having screwed up my alarm from the night before and failing to do the readings. I got BK breakfast with a post-radio Zech. From then on, everything proceeded to go smoothly. I carved out some time to watch cartoons. I wistfully thought to myself about memories triggered by the orange light cast on neighborhood houses by the faint strip of red just over the treeline. I ate bad food.

When I was setting my alarm for tomorrow morning, I got a call from my understandably frazzled editor-in-chief. Turns out we had entirely neglected one of the pages assigned to us. I only ran one stoplight to get back to the newsroom. From there I operated in high gear and we (infinite thanks to Michael, Aliya, Bailey, Celia, Missy and Dave) churned out the page two minutes before the fines would start rolling in.

I emerged groggy and certain the essay I was supposed to write tonight wasn't getting written. I guess it could've been, seeing how much I'm writing here. Then again, this is pouring out of me like tears, which wouldn't make for a very good paper.

Ready to go to bed, I checked the Internet one last time. Turns out, guitarist for one of my all-time favorite bands died in his sleep last night. Women's Christopher Reimer is no longer making music. When the band broke up two years ago, it left a huge rift in my psyche. Seriously: I wrote it into my novel. This news hit me harder than it should have, because I'm weary and emotional.

Even so, I'm listening to Public Strain before I fall asleep. I hope I have a nice dream.

Though tonight was wrenching stuff, I still cherish the little moments I got to myself and the exhilarating ambivalence of finishing a newspaper page in 90 minutes. We're alive in this stuff.

While I'm aliveI'll feel alive- Yoni Wolf

Mirror Falls (Redemptive Abjection)

I've been feeling so much lately.

I can't seem to help it. It's overwhelming, almost comical at times -- walking from the IDS to my apartment I actually stopped in my tracks and watched three rabbits crouched beside one another in the moonlight. They scattered when I started walking again.

This kind of emotionality can be absorbing, but it never strikes me as a waste of time. I've spent so much time repressing, wandering without wondering, that it feels vital now, even replenishing, to take care of my emotional self. You wouldn't be wrong to think this screams of triviality or privilege, but you wouldn't be right either.

To paraphrase one of my friends: Whatever feels most important in your life at any given time is the most important thing in your life. For the past five semesters, I've done a good job convincing myself that school or innocuous resentments were critical. I've been selfish, neurotic, and careless. I am still these things (they are me when I least want to be them, and in rejecting them, I reject me).

But these things aren't nearly as important as selfishly spending time on my/yourself.

Let me be selfish: Another one of my dear friends has said where most people filter their thoughts before saying what they want to say, I myself just say whatever first comes to my mind.

I do.

Because of this, it's been hard to trust myself as a friend, brother, son. I rarely know where "I" is coming from. But I can't help but bring whatever this is and whatever I'm feeling to you. I'm almost always seeing you to see me. It helps me feel better.

For everything I've felt, there have been few times when I've gotten it out. Lately I've been doing better. I've confronted contradictions within myself I'd been too afraid or too ashamed to admit. I've unlocked memories I'd spent years missing. I've made myself wide awake.

This isn't self-improvement (I still make more mistakes than I know) and it's not self-enlightenment (I'm safer in the dark most of the time).

I have much to regret. I have much to look forward to. I have much to be silent about. I also have much to be vocal about. I have stories with which to alarm you, disappoint you, impress you. If we want to wake up, we should be telling stories to ourselves and each other all the time. Remembering. Representing.

Some of you know most of my stories and most of you know some of my secrets. I wish all of you knew more. I've shared my poetry and I've shared my sensitivity, much of it through this very blog. It's not a terribly new thing to do, or particularly courageous. But maybe it will help when so many of us seem to be plunging ourselves into difficult situations without remembering what can matter to us.

So I'm writing this now -- sentimentally and transparently -- to tell you to hang on. There are so many of you I care about, but only find time to see when my eyes are closed. This can't make up for all the times I'm missing you, but it's for you anyway.

I want all of us to make eye contact between classes. I want us to think about how and what we're thinking. I want us to try to learn about each other. It's how we'll survive. When it's all too easy to get caught up in homework and partying and our endless commitments, we forget how easy it is not to get caught up in it. 

Our business is seductive clutter in the way of our reflections. When the mirror falls out of our view because of undue work, we have to remind ourselves what we should be looking for. We might not even like what we see, but that's no excuse not to see it.

We need not plateau or stagnate. We need not get comfortable or get bored. We need not forget what we can feel.

While it's easy for me to say we should all wake up and see what a wonderful life we're living, it's also easy for me to say this isn't an easy life to live. If we're feeling everything, and feeling each other feel everything, we've got a lot of work to do. All this on top of the thankless work we're already supposed to be doing. It's everything time.

I doubt we'll find ourselves in the coming years, but we might find something of ourselves in each other or in what we do and make and say and think. Maybe we'll find something or someone to care about.

For that'd be worth feeling so much.

In many ways

So, the next post will probably restore #METASWAG to working order. For now, I don't feel too much like formatting. It might have to do with how much formatting I do every day at the IDS (which I've come to cherish more than I thought I could).

This past week has been quite a ride -- blurry, bumpy, buoyant. 

I've felt alive just walking round. I've seen orange skies. I've spent lots of money. I've thought a lot about little things and a little about big things. I've lost my glasses.

Cheers to nice dinners and nice phone calls.