A breeze in the distance is calling your name.
YEAR-IN-REVIEW
The 2013 Highlight Reel, Italics Edition
January: T has a very, very busy day, resolves to relearn how to play the piano, and is lent, by a classmate, the very book he is now reading.
February: T contemplates writing a screenplay. Sidenote: A lot of link salad that month.
March: Spurred by a recent trip to New Haven, T takes stock of his time in Sweden and dreams about ex-girlfriends and centaurs. And I read a few books that month too. :)
April: T meets Dr. Cornel West, goes to watch some fights, and makes it onto the Columbia Journal of Race and Law.
May: T remembers an old friend from days past, daydreams about not being a lawyer, has an exam-related panic-mare, and finishes his first year of law school but can't tell his good friend about it. T also spends time with a girl in a park, and makes it safely to Palestine.
June: T visits Hebron and has a balcony moment in Ramallah
July: T begins "reading" his first audiobook, and has feelings about the Zimmerman verdict.
August: T finds himself in the midst of a job hunt.
September: T is ambushed by a bevy of extraordinary Nigerian women, visits a client in prison and embiggens his heart.
October: T boxes on the anniversary of the demise of someone precious, loses a girl, and sells a novelette to Asimov's.
November: T angrily begins a novel, has a writerly moment with said novel, visits a friend for a good time in Fort Greene, and experiences a scopic and fulfilling day, then, on a bus while sitting next to a cute painter, breaks the tape on 50k words.
December: In the midst of all that's happened over the past few months, T wonders about the efficacy of writing things down.
In keeping with that last entry, the decreasing frequency with which I post here can be attributed in part to my wondering about what it means to write these things down and what it means to write these things down here.
Since August 10, 2005, this has been a sort of memoir-in-progress, a detailed account of a journey towards some indefinable goal or point in the distance, an asymptotic reaching towards the notion of my very best self. I've grown and this here is the story of it.
A lot of life happened in October. And November. And December. Around Thanksgiving, my mother, after having reached a goal she'd been questing for ever since the fall of 2010 when tragedy struck, ended her second job. It was a momentous occasion. It'd been a custodial gig that she and Dad, when he was alive, had been doing ever since I was in grade school. Occasionally, it was extra Christmas spending money. Occasionally, it went towards paying tuition of any number of us. Occasionally, it held us over when it came to bills and the such. Mom had been wearing the same pair of sneakers the entire time and I was able to witness her finally throwing those shoes away. A page had been turned in the life of this family.
October saw me end a relationship, only to have one ended for me twice, sending me into a tailspin it took a month to get out of. And now sees me on the precipice of yet another amorous endeavor, having finally dismissed the idea that I should wait until I am "healed enough" to do this kind of thing, having given in to the idea that the only way I'm to properly learn how to do this sort of thing is to do it.
The absence of Palestine posts can be attributed to my new efforts to official-ize my narrative non-fiction aspirations. This year, I read much more longform non-fiction than I remember ever reading before and my love for the form has concretized in a sense. My latest essays have been vicious self-interrogations that have allowed me to flex new muscles and do a thing I'm immensely proud to be doing, a thing that is, even as I think on it now, expanding me and my understanding of myself. The Palestine essays, however, which began as letters to a friend, are writings of a different sort. Parts of a travelogue perhaps. With more resemblance to reportage than anything else. Of course, the elephant in the room is that the pieces manage to be about me nonetheless. Sometimes travel writing is less writing about a place and is more writing about one's self in a place.
I expect more essays to go up shortly, but for now am more than content with what I've amassed.
The year seems very much divided into trimesters. The spring seems qualitatively different from the summer, which is its own beast when put up against the fall. In the spring, I ended the third toughest year of my life and had a summer in the West Bank to look forward to. That summer saw me fulfill a long-held dream, cross an item off my bucket list that I thought would be there forever. And the fall felt more shot through with moments of joy than containing the stuff wholesale in its fabric. What I remember most of those months is fatigue and heartbreak and anger and confusion. But the joy, as rarely as it did occur, was and still is a palpable, massive thing. At the end of last year, I'd pledged to do the difficult thing, and I left it up to the powers-that-be to determine what forms that difficult thing would take. I believe I did difficult things this year. And they hurt, but they often healed as well. Scar tissue is stronger than skin. And happiness can be a tangible thing. And duty, though it is often separate from happiness, can, in the fulfillment thereof, contain its own genre of joy.
The 2013 Highlight Reel, Italics Edition
January: T has a very, very busy day, resolves to relearn how to play the piano, and is lent, by a classmate, the very book he is now reading.
February: T contemplates writing a screenplay. Sidenote: A lot of link salad that month.
March: Spurred by a recent trip to New Haven, T takes stock of his time in Sweden and dreams about ex-girlfriends and centaurs. And I read a few books that month too. :)
April: T meets Dr. Cornel West, goes to watch some fights, and makes it onto the Columbia Journal of Race and Law.
May: T remembers an old friend from days past, daydreams about not being a lawyer, has an exam-related panic-mare, and finishes his first year of law school but can't tell his good friend about it. T also spends time with a girl in a park, and makes it safely to Palestine.
June: T visits Hebron and has a balcony moment in Ramallah
July: T begins "reading" his first audiobook, and has feelings about the Zimmerman verdict.
August: T finds himself in the midst of a job hunt.
September: T is ambushed by a bevy of extraordinary Nigerian women, visits a client in prison and embiggens his heart.
October: T boxes on the anniversary of the demise of someone precious, loses a girl, and sells a novelette to Asimov's.
November: T angrily begins a novel, has a writerly moment with said novel, visits a friend for a good time in Fort Greene, and experiences a scopic and fulfilling day, then, on a bus while sitting next to a cute painter, breaks the tape on 50k words.
December: In the midst of all that's happened over the past few months, T wonders about the efficacy of writing things down.
In keeping with that last entry, the decreasing frequency with which I post here can be attributed in part to my wondering about what it means to write these things down and what it means to write these things down here.
Since August 10, 2005, this has been a sort of memoir-in-progress, a detailed account of a journey towards some indefinable goal or point in the distance, an asymptotic reaching towards the notion of my very best self. I've grown and this here is the story of it.
A lot of life happened in October. And November. And December. Around Thanksgiving, my mother, after having reached a goal she'd been questing for ever since the fall of 2010 when tragedy struck, ended her second job. It was a momentous occasion. It'd been a custodial gig that she and Dad, when he was alive, had been doing ever since I was in grade school. Occasionally, it was extra Christmas spending money. Occasionally, it went towards paying tuition of any number of us. Occasionally, it held us over when it came to bills and the such. Mom had been wearing the same pair of sneakers the entire time and I was able to witness her finally throwing those shoes away. A page had been turned in the life of this family.
October saw me end a relationship, only to have one ended for me twice, sending me into a tailspin it took a month to get out of. And now sees me on the precipice of yet another amorous endeavor, having finally dismissed the idea that I should wait until I am "healed enough" to do this kind of thing, having given in to the idea that the only way I'm to properly learn how to do this sort of thing is to do it.
The absence of Palestine posts can be attributed to my new efforts to official-ize my narrative non-fiction aspirations. This year, I read much more longform non-fiction than I remember ever reading before and my love for the form has concretized in a sense. My latest essays have been vicious self-interrogations that have allowed me to flex new muscles and do a thing I'm immensely proud to be doing, a thing that is, even as I think on it now, expanding me and my understanding of myself. The Palestine essays, however, which began as letters to a friend, are writings of a different sort. Parts of a travelogue perhaps. With more resemblance to reportage than anything else. Of course, the elephant in the room is that the pieces manage to be about me nonetheless. Sometimes travel writing is less writing about a place and is more writing about one's self in a place.
I expect more essays to go up shortly, but for now am more than content with what I've amassed.
The year seems very much divided into trimesters. The spring seems qualitatively different from the summer, which is its own beast when put up against the fall. In the spring, I ended the third toughest year of my life and had a summer in the West Bank to look forward to. That summer saw me fulfill a long-held dream, cross an item off my bucket list that I thought would be there forever. And the fall felt more shot through with moments of joy than containing the stuff wholesale in its fabric. What I remember most of those months is fatigue and heartbreak and anger and confusion. But the joy, as rarely as it did occur, was and still is a palpable, massive thing. At the end of last year, I'd pledged to do the difficult thing, and I left it up to the powers-that-be to determine what forms that difficult thing would take. I believe I did difficult things this year. And they hurt, but they often healed as well. Scar tissue is stronger than skin. And happiness can be a tangible thing. And duty, though it is often separate from happiness, can, in the fulfillment thereof, contain its own genre of joy.