Mas palabras
"We are pulsating with causality."
--Deborah Hertz, in class on Wednesday.
This week has been a beautiful and frustrating array of courses, learning, job interviews in Inglewood and Torrance and Linda Vista. Leah, Mo and I had an impromptu photo shoot in El Segundo. I'm overworked, and I'm a little sleepy.
This is a weird amalgam entry of things I've scribbled down in notes and side margins in binders and on old wordpads and whatnot over the past seven days.
Right now, it's a Sunday afternoon and I'm marveling at both my own emotional mood swings and the sheer amount of brokenness that exists in this world. Close friends are hurting, dealing with divorce, parent deaths, personal crises, or near fatalities on freeways, and my heart is pulled in forty-seven different directions in pathos. And my own life? I'm hardly a model of personal calm, comfort, or being 'together.' I flaked on a graduation party at the last possible minute because i couldn't hack the 220 mile drive, failed to call someone back that was hoping i would, put on another five pounds, and feel vaguely in turmoil over my recent job offer.
Oh, that's right. Job offer. I was offered a teaching job in Inglewood, and I'm not sure how i feel bout it yet. I could do it well, i think, and the school is great, but i don't know if it's what i want to do or how passionately i'd do it. It's a weird internal conflict at present. What the hell am I doing?
Last week saw me in Los Angeles for twenty hours, interviewing at two schools for high school teaching as well as taking random photographs in El Segundo with dear friends Mo and Leah, all while we contemplated our own borkenness, ate ice cream, clapped in unision, and danced in the afternoon sun.
This week also saw me stressing over papers, quesitoning my self-worth, irritated at my inability to follow through on commitments, and angry at a friend who stood me up for a movie date.
Really, if there's anything I'm cointinuing to learn, ti's that my life is not under my control in any way shape or form. My successes are lovely, but they are as much the result of my own making as my failures. While I may want to take sole credit for the Inglewood job and none for PhD fiascos, i recognize that overall, life is not mine to possess to control to dominate.
I performed a poem for an art show last week, called Upstaged. The theme of the show was "Out of the Chaos," and it examined the ways our lives weren't under our control and our own Brokenness. It was a hard poem to write, but "Shards of Chaos" was an interesting piece, and I was glad to perform it. It was personal and oblique at the same time, about striving to be loved and to be worthwhile and accepted and busy and filled with shit that's meaningless but desperately yearning for it to fill me.
Love, I don't like to see so much pain
So much wasted and this moment keeps slipping away
I get so tired of working so hard for out survival
I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive
I know I'm not alone, in several respects.
I know that everyone is broken. That we all for better or worse, where masks, veneers of slick, smooth confidence that glides over our cracks, chips, dents. That we lie our way into security, or rather we commit to feats of strength or continued endeavors in order to feel better about all that we are or hope to be. There is a type of maudlin reassurance in realizing that you are not the only one behind a mask, even if it does smack a little of schadenfreude. But it is at times a cold comfort to be surrounded by brokenness duct taped by smiles.
I know, as well, that I am not alone in the sheer fact that I am loved by God. In a moment that made me cringe, i dusted off my Bible today. I cringed mainly from the realization that in the nine or so days since it'd been last opened, dust had been able to accrue on the Book, which says something about both my spiritual habits and my infrequent room cleanings. I recognize that I'm lvoed by God, and sixteen years of claiming Christianity as my faith and years of trying to live it have shown me that is true, but it is something I have to re-understand, reinvent, relearn every day. I'm loved by a God that cares even as i fuck up big time, even as I grow weary in my brokenness, even as I desire to change and absolutely fail to do so.
I long to fix myself, to fix others, to make everythign make sense in these waning weeks of gradutae life at UCSD, of sure certainty in San Diego, and of life as usual.
All my instincts, they return
And the grand facade, so soon will burn
Without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside
I long to be free, to recognize my weaknesses, keep going, and not try to slog through the pain of life and try to heal myself. Sigh, I long to be more than this. I long to be the follower of Christ I hoped to be by now. I long to be less broken. I long for my veneered mask of smiling, laughing, completely at ease, worryfree T.J. to match the infinitely more complex face underneath.
I guess I'm going to go pray. But these are the thoughts, that run through my head.
--Deborah Hertz, in class on Wednesday.
This week has been a beautiful and frustrating array of courses, learning, job interviews in Inglewood and Torrance and Linda Vista. Leah, Mo and I had an impromptu photo shoot in El Segundo. I'm overworked, and I'm a little sleepy.
This is a weird amalgam entry of things I've scribbled down in notes and side margins in binders and on old wordpads and whatnot over the past seven days.
Right now, it's a Sunday afternoon and I'm marveling at both my own emotional mood swings and the sheer amount of brokenness that exists in this world. Close friends are hurting, dealing with divorce, parent deaths, personal crises, or near fatalities on freeways, and my heart is pulled in forty-seven different directions in pathos. And my own life? I'm hardly a model of personal calm, comfort, or being 'together.' I flaked on a graduation party at the last possible minute because i couldn't hack the 220 mile drive, failed to call someone back that was hoping i would, put on another five pounds, and feel vaguely in turmoil over my recent job offer.
Oh, that's right. Job offer. I was offered a teaching job in Inglewood, and I'm not sure how i feel bout it yet. I could do it well, i think, and the school is great, but i don't know if it's what i want to do or how passionately i'd do it. It's a weird internal conflict at present. What the hell am I doing?
Last week saw me in Los Angeles for twenty hours, interviewing at two schools for high school teaching as well as taking random photographs in El Segundo with dear friends Mo and Leah, all while we contemplated our own borkenness, ate ice cream, clapped in unision, and danced in the afternoon sun.
This week also saw me stressing over papers, quesitoning my self-worth, irritated at my inability to follow through on commitments, and angry at a friend who stood me up for a movie date.
Really, if there's anything I'm cointinuing to learn, ti's that my life is not under my control in any way shape or form. My successes are lovely, but they are as much the result of my own making as my failures. While I may want to take sole credit for the Inglewood job and none for PhD fiascos, i recognize that overall, life is not mine to possess to control to dominate.
I performed a poem for an art show last week, called Upstaged. The theme of the show was "Out of the Chaos," and it examined the ways our lives weren't under our control and our own Brokenness. It was a hard poem to write, but "Shards of Chaos" was an interesting piece, and I was glad to perform it. It was personal and oblique at the same time, about striving to be loved and to be worthwhile and accepted and busy and filled with shit that's meaningless but desperately yearning for it to fill me.
Love, I don't like to see so much pain
So much wasted and this moment keeps slipping away
I get so tired of working so hard for out survival
I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive
I know I'm not alone, in several respects.
I know that everyone is broken. That we all for better or worse, where masks, veneers of slick, smooth confidence that glides over our cracks, chips, dents. That we lie our way into security, or rather we commit to feats of strength or continued endeavors in order to feel better about all that we are or hope to be. There is a type of maudlin reassurance in realizing that you are not the only one behind a mask, even if it does smack a little of schadenfreude. But it is at times a cold comfort to be surrounded by brokenness duct taped by smiles.
I know, as well, that I am not alone in the sheer fact that I am loved by God. In a moment that made me cringe, i dusted off my Bible today. I cringed mainly from the realization that in the nine or so days since it'd been last opened, dust had been able to accrue on the Book, which says something about both my spiritual habits and my infrequent room cleanings. I recognize that I'm lvoed by God, and sixteen years of claiming Christianity as my faith and years of trying to live it have shown me that is true, but it is something I have to re-understand, reinvent, relearn every day. I'm loved by a God that cares even as i fuck up big time, even as I grow weary in my brokenness, even as I desire to change and absolutely fail to do so.
I long to fix myself, to fix others, to make everythign make sense in these waning weeks of gradutae life at UCSD, of sure certainty in San Diego, and of life as usual.
All my instincts, they return
And the grand facade, so soon will burn
Without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside
I long to be free, to recognize my weaknesses, keep going, and not try to slog through the pain of life and try to heal myself. Sigh, I long to be more than this. I long to be the follower of Christ I hoped to be by now. I long to be less broken. I long for my veneered mask of smiling, laughing, completely at ease, worryfree T.J. to match the infinitely more complex face underneath.
I guess I'm going to go pray. But these are the thoughts, that run through my head.