(no subject)
First: I am aware of the hilarity inherent within this user picture. Rather than take the time to change anything, I find it much more useful as a reminder of days past.
Second: I haven't had much to say in recent months. Even now, part of this feels forced, as if all salience has been erased from my life and the only reason I write is in mimicry of the thoughts that once flowed more easily from my fingertips. I do not, however, think this to be true.
Third: A lot has changed in recent months, most notably in location, and with that in disposition and perspective. Living in the city has been like turning the page in an illustrated fairytale to a world I couldn’t have even dream of. I once eschewed urbanity in favor of things more natural - agro-crag peaks, kool-aid lakes, frosty open air. To me they seemed more real. Where man could never construct them, neither could anything built by people reconstruct the feelings produced by them. I relished being above people, both physically on top of ridges and, perhaps, morally, through the lifestyle I had adopted. (I love not man the less, but Nature more.) In all honesty, the city terrified me - the rush, the competition, the thousands upon thousands of people and cars and stores and buildings. In it, I could never stand out. But I have found a joy in that, in blending in, in allowing its absorption of myself as simply another pedestrian on the sidewalk, a bicyclist wedged between traffic and parked cars, John Q. Citizen living his life and nothing more. Cambridge allows a brief escape from all the pressures I feel within the classroom or at home or on the track - to succeed, to land internships, to push myself perhaps more than I am willing or should be pushed. It lets me exist unconditionally, equal in stature and significance regardless of mental or physical output. And the food! Falafel and ice cream and tea and coffee and restaurant upon restaurant upon restaurant. I find myself longing after the fifty-dollar dinners I'd once deemed as unnecessary, extravagant, or foolish. It scares me that I feel slight tinges of envy, watching the well dressed people and their exorbitant multi-course meals and in their old Harvard colonials. This hunger for something more, however, I believe to be more gastronomical than positional.
Fourth: I grew five inches.
Fifth: Psych.
Sixth: I worked the Obama campaign and found it to be remarkably unfulfilling (not actually a word, though I struggle to find a more effective alternative.) I have struggled for a long time with politics. Perhaps the decision to volunteer time for something in which I don't actually believe in heavily is where I made the first mistake. The entire crowd mentality, is it not mind numbing? Hundreds or thousands of people, chanting, screaming, crying - and for what? A celebrity, an ideological entity not much different from you or I except in their frequency within the media. It looks and feels like brainwashing, just another attempt at an imagined community - go Falcons, go Sox, go America. Even the decision to support one candidate, particularly far in advance, means closing off your mind for what others have to say. An attack on your candidate becomes an attack on your decision. Your defense or support then becomes more a personal matter than an ideological stance; as if you have to defend why you choose, rather than positions you or others believe in.
"You begin by saving the world one person at a time, all else is grandiose romanticism or politics."
Seventh: It is so warm out it makes me want to cry. Regardless of the sensational feel of the New Hampshire air, I’m more caught up in the desire to savor it (and the knowledge that I cannot) than in actually enjoying it. I will say I attempted it in my hours spent outside, and even the grit between my toes as I slipped off my sandals was enough of a spring vestige to make me smile. Even after living my entire life here any variation of stereotypical weather patterns (none) confuses me, but I find them entirely welcome.
Eighth: D2=Magnificent
Ninth: I am not quite satisfied in New Hampshire, or Boston, or even New England. Restless legs of course, are common, but I feel my desire more insatiable than others, resulting (I hope) in a life of impoverishing peripateticism, which, though pecuniarily depleting, provides some of the mental actualization I’ve craved for so long.
Tenth: I am increasingly concerned that any literary aspirations of mine will result in nothing more than the desperate romanticism of my soporifically average life broadcast to nothing more than a teenage database of vain pseudo-stalkers. I’m not even sure I have an imagination anymore.