Homework assignment little ones!

[tatortot]

In the process of creating some sort of performance piece to work with something my students are doing, I'm trying to expand my thoughts and understanding of this mostly random phrase I came up with over spring break

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[trididos]

Sometimes when I sit while and stare at the trees, I wonder how it would feel to be young again. If I could even feel young, you know, after feeling how I feel today. It's the same feeling I get when I sit down at my desk to write. When I have spent all day thinking about writing, and waiting to get home to write. Then, I sit down and I stare at the paper with the pen in my hand. And I start to write a sentence. But I don't like it. It starts just like all the others started. So I scratch it out. And I don't like it. I can't think of anything to write that doesn't start like something else started. I just stare into the writings of the past, and I wonder what it would feel like to write again. If I can even write again, after not writing for so long. I had that feeling the other day when I wanted to talk to one of my old friends after not wanting to talk to her for a long time. She was part of something else, and I just couldn't get my sentences to come out correctly. They waned and tortured around my brain. I feel like I am the past, on those days. When all that I can think of is in the past. Some of that past lives so much in the present, and so often, that I can't tell if it really happened. Maybe it did. Maybe it didn't. But perhaps if I thumb back through these pictures that I keep boxed up I can remember. And maybe, too, if I flip back through these notebooks, I will see that my life was what I remember it to be. And maybe if I talk to my friend, her voice will take me back to those times I miss so much. And on those days, I suppose I am the past. I am the past 49% of the time.

But I Have days like today. Where all I can do is daydream at my desk. I know I have work to do, it sits all around me. It never ends. It may be complete, but it completes only to begin again. And I have employees running around me asking me questions, asking for permission to do this or that, and asking me to answer questions they know the answer to... so I look like the bad guy, and they seem empathetic. Which is my job. But today, it all swirls around me -- in one ear, and out the other. And I accomplish little of what I set out to accomplish. But tomorrow I will see that I did more than I thought. Because while I dreamed, I cleaned. I threw out all the trash and all the clutter. I moved it all to order. And today I was now. I was what it's like to be here, living and breathing, but still no place else. I am nothing memorable to write about or to see, and I am no one who changes the future. But I made it through the day, to see my progress tomorrow. I am now.

Sometimes I am there, or here. Sometimes I am nowhere, or everywhere. Sometimes I am now. Sometimes I am the Past. Sometimes I try to put them together. I want to be here, and there, and nowhere, and everywhere. But all that I am then, is the past, but now. Together, they might be tomorrow. Or they might be now, or the past. But either way they both seem to be the same day to me, once it's over. But I can tell they're different. They're the only thing about me that is guaranteed to pass into the future. Both the past. Which used to be, and is now, before it goes into the future. Which, too, is now, and yet it's past. So I am stuck.

I might be living. Or I might be ceasing. I don't know. It's neither here, nor there. But I am. When I'm scared and angry and fragile and sad and uncomfortable. All wrapped up at once I am here. At least. I am.