trio: season 2, #2
Over You, Tangling, (Until You) Awake
Over You, Tangling, (Until You) Awake
self-aware
The sad little story i brought into my creative writing class was exactly what was assigned… an exercise in creating a cheap sort of detective story in a limited amount of time. So, i brought it to class and read it, because no one else was loud or willing enough to read theirs. When i finished my professor asked me if i knew what a gumshoe was, and i held up my draft so that she could see that i had headed it “Gumshoe Exercise, Draft 1.”
There was this awful belching silent void after that, and then she asked “does anyone have a comment?” And, the girl who had just read her story opened her mouth and incredulously asked “Was that really 30 minutes of writing?” To which i honestly replied: “No, barely twenty. I didn’t make revisions.”
So, everyone in my Creative Writing class hates me as of day three with the exception of Gina, who just looked mildly bemused. We haven’t heard each other’s fiction for three or four years, and today i discovered that she’s been transformed into this pointedly ironic Douglas Adams of the twenty-something hippy chemistry-student set (while i have become a shamefully self aware Lillian Jackson Braun).
Again, the professor chimed in: “Journaling can keep your writing in good shape. Who keeps a regular journal?”
I shrunk under the glances of my classmates as i raised my hand, one of only a few.
Two years ago today (more or less) i was told by this same Ms. Prof. Kotzin that i was to keep a journal and turn it into her at the end of term. And, i groaned. A journal? How 11th grade English class…
What my professor received at the end of the term was a tiny sapling… a wet behind the ears inkling of this. And, here i am back in her classroom and as everyone fixes me with another exasperated stare i am thinking “Don’t blame me for this; she started it.”
Somehow today rendered my entire life empty, and i cannot explain the process of it at all.
It all started with an argument about how i really don’t like theatre despite the fact that i’m regularly involved in it, and how if it was worth something to me i would take it seriously but in reality it is just a placeholder for my being able to have people watch me based upon my own creative work and not some mere interpretation. Somehow (although in retrospect it isn’t such a leap) the conversation ballooned out into being about how i don’t like anything inside my life at all. Well, that’s what i said, even if i didn’t quite mean it. Of course, that’s a misrepresentation and i corrected it immediately: i love creation. I love to write and to compose and to sing. You’d think acting falls under that umbrella but it doesn’t… it’s just a shadow … a directed interpretation of someone elses work.
Sometimes i say that i hate everything about my life and it feels like i’m just trying to be dramatic to get attention; i know too many of those people. But, really, there are days that my life is really just a shell and all that’s inside are some tiny songs that no one ever really hears and me plugging away at my classwork trying to make a dent. A difference. Whenever i get to this place it comes down to… what is the point? And, i can tell you right now that i don’t believe there is one. Is there any point to existence as we know it? Each of us is the product of the almost-hubris of our parents … so sure of their love or lust that they created a physical product of it. And we, as that product, are trapped here and all we can do is try to keep ourselves happy, or to better the environment for anyone else who might get stuck here without much choice in the matter.
It sounds like a defeatist view, but it isn’t. I have goals, and things i enjoy doing, but when it comes right down to it there is positively no reason for me to exist – except for the effects that i have on other people’s lives. I am not the biggest fan of It’s a Wonderful Life (or, Scrooged, for the more skeptical set) and i am not so full of myself to think the world would be inherently different without me, but i recognize that i have left marks on the people that i have passed by and that i’m here for them as much as they’re here for me. So, it’s not like i’m perched on the edge of a roof … this isn’t a suicidal kind of raging depression, just a contemplative one.
Sometimes when i am in this place the only way out of it is to evaluate … what is it that i have and love and why? Tonight i am a reductionist… i have my narrative voice, and i have a handful of friends who i can honestly talk to without ever watching what i say. And, so, i told Jeff honestly that the only thing i ever enjoy is writing… how i can write 3500 words about something i love and not even notice and then reread it endlessly. The same with writing songs. Jeff is a communications major a year ahead of me, and he has already found what he wants to do with his life and he’s doing it. I think he was trying to tell me that i can’t ever get there while i’m busy torching the bridges i’ve crossed and the one’s i am on.
Jeff ultimately understands my point, but he won’t concede it: I have goals and places to be, but i am 20 and life is already over even if i get to do everything i’ve ever hoped and dreamed for. The world is the container of a finite amount of possibilities both big and small, and i don’t think any chain of events will ever make me truly happy even if you substitute in all of the right jobs and friends and lovers where there are just empty spaces right now. The only true choice that i have is to do something that will make anyone else forget about how pointless their life might be… to make them forget about everything i’ve just said – because i know it’s here and no one seems to care whether i notice it or not. My goal shouldn’t(can’t) be to go back because there isn’t any such thing; i need to move forward. In a way, i am meant to be a distraction.
Not such a bad job, really.
Yesterday was impossibly full… two or three different days all slipped deceptively into the packaging of one. Shopping turned into lunch, which turned into a deep conversation about what made me who i am, which turned into a concert for my mom that ended with a concert that pulled out notes and chords from places i’ve never been before. That was one day… happy deep family day. Then there was my day to myself, with guitar and internet and music and napping and food. And, then, came my day with friends, which typically started out happy and fun and quickly descended into misery. I’m usually introverted enough towards the middle and end of big parties, but this time i had headphones with me so i just turned on the good bits and let everyone at the party do their miserable little social dance to the sounds between my ears. Eventually i got tired of waiting for the people i wanted to be with (the story of my life) and i went out on the front step and turned it up all the way until finally i set off for the apartment.
So many blogging things happened in there… things i’ll have to say eventually for me to make more sense. Somehow i explained to my mother exactly why i like to be thin and why i like the girls who i like and why i have to be successful at something and she understood it all with this wane little smile and tears welling in her eyes. I can’t imagine what it must have been like seeing me from the outside… i wanted to thank her for everything and so when she asked me to play “under my skin” i shut my eyes and opened up and poured things into it that she had never even heard before, and afterwards she sortof just stared at me and i was just sweating and breathing and smiling because somehow i opened the song up again just when i thought i had used it all up.
It’s hard to quantify 20 years in any kind of way, but somewhere in between my nearly mathematical proof that i’ve never had a male role model before Peter Mulvey and my gut-wrenching concert i think i was having a happy birthday. The only happy one out of the three.
Yesterday was walking walking walking, starting out in my apartment skittering from floor to floor and then off to the office and around the campus and then with Gina delving far into center city where i somehow managed to spend under $20 on a shopping trip for once in my life and then back to university city to walk in circles upon circles that eventually left me sweating and smiling heading back up the stairs of my apartment.
It seems like Gina and i can have one endlessly strung out conversation that will last us from the beginning of whenever we see each other all the way until when she finally has to get back to her apartment to continue with her own life rather than with our all-too-briefly shared one, and yesterday was no exception. I don’t know how we wind up talking about sushi and the existence of an afterlife and cool brands of wah-pedals and bars on South Street that got busted for selling coke all at once with hardly a pause for breath, but we definitely do.
Two intrinsically linked things came out of our infinite conversation that keep echoing in my head, and those things are coping and karma. Gina and i have known each other for eight years now, and in the history of our friendship we can find many examples of events that in retrospect look totally different to us than they felt at the time. Both of us were entirely emotionally unhealthy heading into our last year of high school, though neither one of us would have admitted it to the other (or anyone else) (or ourselves) at the time. Gina had a great new boyfriend and was sure to be a lead in the play, my guitar playing skills had picked up and i was accepted into all of the AP classes i wanted … things all seemed good. Of course, looks deceive, and i was depressed about life and college and even though i was past being obsessed with my weight on a day to day basis i was entirely too thin and Gina was my best friend at the time but she had to deal with her own set of problems that i won’t even begin to enumerate here. And now we get to reflect on the situation and reveal what was going on inside at the time.
Mentioning such meager problems in my life makes me feel like a lightweight, especially considering that i came through it all not significantly worse for the wear. What keeps me wondering about the way the world operates is that at the time i would have told you that i was happy and doing well but looking back i can see through that to my life being relatively empty and hollow at the time. I don’t know how i kept from being miserable and sick and exhausted and defeated. Maybe i was all of that and i didn’t even realize it at the time (and still don’t).
This is where karma comes in. Bad things happen to good people all of the time, and visa versa. Whether or not karma exists as an actual repayment for your actions in life it is present in that your choices will alter you and your psyche for the rest of your life. Comparatively, my choices were easy and my hurdles were not high and i didn’t even think about balking at them at the time, and i think the fact that i didn’t flinch has left me as the relatively healthy person i am now – three years after the fact. What makes me really wonder about life, though, really wonder, is the people who were not ever allowed to make an easy choice and who have always been presented with hurdle after hurdle to leap. I know too many people in my life who have had to face too many challenges, and almost too many of them to believe have somehow walked through all of their fire and brimstone and still manage to smile every day; that isn’t to say that they don’t have problems and issues, but that they aren’t consumed by them all the time.
I am not an especially strong person, and my amassed karma must be equally tiny in relation to the world on the whole. I have never been extremely sick, i have two healthy parents who i have relatively open lines of communication with, i have never been financially in danger of losing my home or my possessions, and i have never been physically or emotionally threatened so much that i was unable to defend myself. But, i know people who have battled health problems for years, who have lost parents to feuds and time, who have lived on incomes stretched to the breaking point, and who have endured assaults on their physical and emotional well being on more than one occasion. What really scares me about life is that sometimes all of this is inflicted on one family… even one person, and that they are left to come through it or to fail somewhere in the middle. I know people who failed and are stuck endlessly in a feedback loop of emotional and physical trauma that they will inflict upon themselves if no one else will do it for them, but what amazes me about life is that for every one of those people i know more than one person who still believes fully in everything life has to offer them rather than inflict upon them after battling a similar set of circumstances. Everyone who has faced against a difficult set of circumstances has problems and regrets, but not every one of those people can wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night, and that power alone is something that stuns me.
What’s my point? Who knows… is there ever one, really? The point, i suppose, is that my tiny mound of shiny karma is but a pebble in the face of what some people have amassed, and that i just hope that they all get to redeem what life owes to them… and that i will get to see them enjoy every second of it; i’d gladly trade in my karma just for that.