Thoughts on 2010.

I was thinking about the year that just passed, thinking that it feels like more than a year has passed. Every year so far has more or less felt this way. I wonder when this will stop? When maturation ends, I'm guessing. Well. As long as I'm young and stupid and there are unexplored parts of existence, each year will offer up new experiences for me to inspect and then to hoard as evidence of having lived at all.

This particular year, new directions and new mentalities. First high, first unsupervised extended stay in foreign country, first apartment, first music festival, first solo trip to a city to visit friends, first blatantly illegal act (speeding not included), first audio piece produced. Unpleasant landmarks, too. First blemish on my academic record, first visit to therapy, first complete failure to live up to extracurricular expectations.

First time being pulled over. First full week of cooking for myself. First attempt to sneak back into house in a drunken state. First fuck buddy.

Fourth failed relationship. Second time getting too close to a friend despite predicting consequences. First tear shed over almost-failed friendship. Umpteenth avowal never to get attached again.

The fallacy of the story-teller: I like to think of life as cyclical. Junior year of high school was transformative; I think my third year at college has and will continue to prove so as well. I think therapy helped in that regard. I think I know myself better than I ever have before. I think I know what I want, or at least how to start knowing.

What I want is not a perfect GPA. Neither is it, I suspect, a perfect life. Nor is it complete self-reliance.

But I'll spare myself the embarrassment of having to shove my meaning into hackneyed words. :) Time to eat dinner, anyway, and to savor the last couple of days of break.

Maybe.

The aesthetics--they're different. I can't write for this professor. Late at night, when I realize that my intuition is just not the same as his, that I don't think remotely the way he does . . . well, what then? I could slay the text to get what I want, but it'd be an act of calculation, not of love.

Law school vs. ???

So. I'm sitting on two internship offers, one at the local public radio station and one at a academic publishing house. I can't reasonably do both, though if this had been last year, I would have overcommitted myself and left future Shining to suffer the consequences. My semester thus far has been work-light and sleep-heavy, and I could probably swing it if I went back to my old sleep patterns and skimped on some readings in my other classes.

But this is my new leaf, and this is my promise to do everything well this semester instead of just doing everything. And I have my writing, and LSAT prep, and going to the gym, and actually having fun on weekends to consider.

On the one hand, I already adore public radio to death, but I'm not sure what working in public radio would be like (and really, is there a future in something so hierarchical and admittedly un-lucrative?). On the other hand, I heard from someone in my creative writing class that HarperCollins starts employees at $20-30k/yr, so would I actually go into publishing either?!

I've been thinking more and more about law school, and I think I'll no doubt end up there. It's so difficult aspiring to anything else when law school is tangible, is professional, is prestigious, is profitable.

My plan right now is to take a few years after undergrad and do something I "love" before going to law school. Somehow this seems like a compromise that falls philosophically flat. I want something like public radio to sweep me off my feet and convince me that money and prestige aren't important, but part of me also wants to realize that nothing is worth being passionate about. Then I could go to law school without any lingering what-ifs.

Maybe for someone who is easily immersed in an expertise and self-confident and consistent, it would be easy to choose ideals. But I'm overzealous and fickle, and my shelf life with any new endeavor is probably about a year or two, maximum. What am I chasing? Is it success? Is it passion? Is it influence? Something else? What, then?

Somehow this relatively unimportant decision has developed great tangential significance. I don't usually do this, but I would really appreciate advice, either via the comment box -- or anyone who reads this probably has my email address.

I think it's here to stay.

The happiness, that is. The "nothing is actually terrible"-ness. The "my life won't end if I don't get this internship"-ness (though I would really, really like this internship).

Maybe it's called maturing. Realizing that angst isn't as appealing as it used to be when my future could conceivably consist of nothing but a job within a void of meaninglessness. Understanding that the biggest crises always end.

Or maybe it's called the end of summer. I always end the summer pretty well, full of new hope and delusions about how stressed I'll be during the school year.

But though I've always had something extremely tangible to look forward to (a boy, a position, a last hurrah before graduating), I don't think I've put my metaphorical eggs in any shaky baskets this time. I think I've actually learned something.

The Archive.

Had dinner at my co-editor's apartment last night. I just let it sink in that I'm going to be running the show for this literary magazine next year. I haven't had this much responsibility in a while -- especially not with something I care about this much. And in high school, it was so easy to be merely nominal about things (-- especially when you're in charge of five other things and have your eyes set on Yale. Ugh okay admitting it yuck).

But I have high hopes for myself and for The Archive next year. I think we're going to make a few structural changes (walking that fine line between setting up useful positions and creating bureaucracy) in addition to working harder on fostering creative writing on campus. Idealistic, but possible?

Junior year is a year during which good things are going to happen. I can just feel it. And no amount of accidental sleeping-in (today) or rookie real-world mistakes (being really scared by the UPS man banging at the door whoops) is going to make me feel ill-prepared to meet the challenges of my near-future life.

And so.

Someone pointed out to me that I only write when I'm pissed, which is . . . true. But in my defense, when happy things are happening, what would you rather do: sit down and write about it? To twist a famous saying, isn't that like dancing about architecture?

To me, words are a heavy medium. They can be made lightweight and fluffy only through an extraordinary amount of effort -- and there's still always the risk of sounding cheesy, inauthentic, strained. I'd rather consume my happiness through music, movies, t.v. shows.

Plus (and maybe this won't make much sense), I think happiness is much more private than sadness. Everyone has insecurities and doubts, and most people wear these on their sleeves. But to really know what makes someone happy is something intimate.

(Also: A small part of me doesn't believe in happiness. It seems like bragging. Stagnancy. Complacency. It seems like not knowing that you should actually be sad. Possibly I'm just infatuated with struggling. My favorite images are those of suffering: Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill, Ophelia submerging herself in water (the same image, except replace Ophelia with Virgina Woolf), Zach Braff and Natalie Portman screaming in the pouring rain in the classic scene from Garden State.)

Nevertheless, this is my attempt at writing down happy thoughts: my mother is hands-down the wisest advice-giver I will ever know. And yesterday my roommate and I laughed until four in the morning about things that forced her to clear her browser history. And I keep getting to know amazing people. And I'm getting stronger, better (hearing the first beats of Daft Punk in my head now), more mature -- I've discovered so much about myself this summer. And I'm looking forward to the next few months of my life.

Unbearably gushy. Going to go wash the taste of cheesy sentiments out of my mouth by listening to some Radical Face.

Zadie Smith is kicking my ass.

-- & other super summer success stories.

. . . Right.

In other news, I am underwhelmed by the amount of productivity that has occurred in my recent past. Do not understand post-structuralism -- so much academic gibberish. Compartmentalization of existence is going well, however. Also I think I have stumbled upon my next near-obsessive, almost-compulsive fix. It (ideally) involves the $15+ four-in-one avocado tool I saw at Williams-Sonoma last weekend. And I am planning something wicked, which is severely not in my best interest. I find my current locale charming, though I am paying through the nose for decent tomatoes at the farmer's market and Jell-O cups that remind me of kindergarten. My brother sends me two-line emails, ends with "please write back!", and takes a week to respond himself.

Courses for this fall currently include: magazine journalism, audio documentary, creative writing. On top of a column gig. Which means I need to cut something unless I want to run out of creative stamina two weeks into the semester.

My friend just sent me the line: "life in the fast lane." Sarcastically, I think, for her. But looking around, I wonder -- maybe not?

Tibet.

My last computer access for quite some time.
I'm leaving for a six-week service project in rural Sichuan in five hours.
I find myself at the cusp of something thrilling and daunting. I don't know if I can handle it. I have such crises of faith.

I took a walk with a good friend today and we talked about the momentum of life. I find my life to be like a book to which I constantly forget the opening chapters. But once I spend time remembering the beginning, I've already lost track of what's actually happening. So much to wrap a mind around.

The point is that we learn something from everything, so I need to think about everything.

Reflection, reflection, reflection. Then, when I get back here, I will right some wrongs, make a few important decisions, be a better person. Good, solid plan.

Friendship fatigue.

I grow tired of the people I know here -- so much that I find myself in the same building as they are but strategically avoiding them. Or even in the same room with headphones staunchly secured in my ears. I like not knowing what to expect from people, and I know exactly what to expect from these people.

I'm listening to an installment of This American Life about getting over the people in your life: relationships, mostly, but also just the idea of dynamics changing, the re-navigation of an emotional map. Recalibrating distance.

It's not just people here, though -- it's everyone I think I know well. I had a fight with my closest friend from high school yesterday, about something trivial, and after the fact I realized that I'd actually picked the fight so I could tell myself he no longer knew me anymore the way he used to in twelfth grade.

The perversity of this strikes me as surprising, especially given my otherwise incorrigible romanticism. After reading thirteen Shakespeare plays this semester, I now realize that I will never like comedy as long as it mocks true love or anyone who believes in true love. But the emotional involvement necessary for romantic love far exceeds that which is expected in friendship, and I can't even muster the patience for friendship.

Paradox, paradox -- I'm sure some consistency underlies this inner conflict, but I'm not sure I need to figure it out. Instead, I'll look forward to the summer: new cultures, then something like peace and quiet in Durham.

Shakespeare.

Note never to take a huge English lecture again.
Have definitely learned lesson: class structure so much more important than class content. More important than professor as well.

Will sleep when dead.

Here comes a feeling you thought you'd forgotten.

In Twelfth Night, the social order comes undone--women fall in love with women, gender becomes malleable, nobles marry servants, servants imagine that they could become nobility. To parallel the end-of-Christmas festival after which it was named and at which it was performed, Shakespeare's play effects a mood of licensed disorder--and things get more than a little crazy.

Life mimics art. Not that our last day of classes (affectionately called LDOC by all those who care) is the same as Twelfth Night, but in a way it performed the same function: loosened everyone up, broke social customs, made everyone rethink friend circles and habits. People I knew in completely different ways found their way to my room and met each other and mingled, we played a stream of trashed up music, tried our best to stay in a comfortable stupor (difficult to maintain for more than five hours straight), etc. Rarely are so many people so willing to get completely messed up, and rarely do we all find ourselves so devoted to having a good time. In the end, I came out with new and unforeseen conceptions of everyone, of social relationships, of how life could be if only academic stress didn't interfere with the living of it.

And the effects have not worn off. Reading period has been a time drain: last night in the library until sun-up with hardly any work done (talking, instead, to good and new friends--rehashing the year in perspective), today four hours at dinner off-campus and bantering forever.

Now to study? But how could I? LDOC is still in the air and with it a sense of non-urgency. At the end of this journey, I feel very much the way I did at Oxford last summer--looking back on a period of my life with a vague sense of having grown in as-of-yet still inexplicable ways. But that time I was only able to construct the narrative months afterward (at the expense of having by that point already made a few missteps), and I hope I'll be a quicker study this time around.

Life & Times & LDOC.

"Do not throw these away. Though they are different, they are lovers."

Sums up one incredible, attention-deficient, too-substantive, and surprising end of the year.

Celebrate celebrate celebrate! (Much, much more later. Late-night Glee with roommate now.)