Friday, August 16, 2013

Lacking Least (or, Why There Are No Cardinals in Colorado)



About an hour outside of Boston, my bus from New York pulled off the pike for a rest stop.  I got out to stretch and resolutely not go into the gas station and buy any snacks (hell, I still had a sodium hangover from the Cheetos we’d eaten the night before).
            
As soon as I hit the air, I knew I was in Massachusetts.  I could smell it
            
The less sentimental among us would point out that what I was smelling was humidity and the green that comes with late spring on the East Coast.  Not surprisingly, I have very little time for less sentimental people.
            
Because to me, it smelled like Massachusetts.  And it smelled like home.
            
I was watching Garden State recently, which has taken on all sorts of new significance now that I’m actually out there exploring my own personal infinite abyss, and something struck me about Zach Braff’s ruminations about the idea of home.  It’s slipperier than you think when you’re a kid, like most of the essential, simple, and fundamental things you have to learn how to make sense of (love, grief, family, disappointment, insurance), and I found an odd period in my mid-twenties when I came to realize that my parents’ house was no longer properly home.  Instead, after some growing pains, my studio in Boston had become home, which I now gauge to be the place in which you miss the fewest things, people, or other places.  It’s the place where you lack the least.
            
I spent the first part of spring break this spring in Illinois with my best friend; in spite of Boston’s being home, I still consider myself to be “from” Illinois.  (Negotiating the language of origin, location, and allegiance is a bitch in this decade of my life.)  As a result, I’d had to go back to Boulder to hysterically research and write the papers I’d been putting off for weeks.
            
On Easter Sunday, I talked with the various members of my family on the phone, most of whom were in Brookline with my aunt. 
            
And that afternoon, I found myself very, very lacking.  In fact, the lack was pretty much incapacitating. 
            
I lacked that perfect, springtime Boston humidity, where it’s always a little too warm inside until you get fans going and even then you feel faintly sticky.  I lacked the obscene amount of food, some of which would be forcibly shoved into Tupperware for my lunch the following week.  I lacked the white wine buzz that inevitably comes from a quorum of my family members gathering in one place, and I lacked wheedling a sober family member (usually my dad) to borrow a car and drive me back to my apartment, where I’d mosey the last few steps from the curb into my building for a relaxing afternoon of silence after the familial white noise of people who generally talk too loud (myself included).  I lacked the friends to call for a leftovers potluck and a post-family vent.
            
I lacked my family, my friends, and my home, and I cried like a child for hours.
            
So much for my research.
            
If you had asked me five years ago what would be the top reasons I would move to a particular place, I’d instantaneously answer “job.”  A little further down the list might be “guy,” although I wouldn’t admit it, even to myself, without extreme embarrassment. I had thought of these things as being the constant, and the location was just window dressing.  The dream job anywhere is still the dream job, right?
           
That, however, was a hypothetical five years ago.  This currently is my life.  And so help me God, I want desperately to live it in Boston.
            
I, along with most of the people who know me, had thought that I would move west to Boulder and never look back.  Of all the places I would be ecstatically happy, Boulder seemed a likely candidate: fresh powder to ski on, creeks to swim in, and open spaces to bike across, gasping the thin air and trying not to pass out.  In theory, the foothills would be alive with the sound of my happiness.
            
In reality, not so much.
            
That afternoon, standing within earshot of the Pike and waiting to get back on the bus, I realized something for which I have been grateful ever since: I know what I’m willing to do to go home, because I know that the dream job will probably mean precisely jack shit if I don’t have my people there to toast it with. 
            
Boston, and my people in it, are my priority.  And in the ongoing existential crises of my twenties, a loud and ringing priority is a miraculous thing.  It is also a miraculous thing, as a lifelong type-A, to finally understand that being happy, that not lacking, is in most cases a much, much better way to be than mercenarily successful. 
            
Later that week in Boston, perched on one of my aunt’s stools in the kitchen, I heard a cardinal’s chirp from the trees outside, and it made my heart ache.  I’ve always considered them personal good luck charms, little signs of good from the universe.  I also realized in that moment that I hadn’t heard or seen a cardinal since moving West.  Technically, the northern cardinal inhabits a southeastern swath of Colorado, but I’m not so big on technicalities, especially when I feel like somebody’s trying to tell me something.
            
That something runs along the lines of head east.

            
And so, another nine months, and I will be headed back to cardinal country.

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

We've Got a Pulse!



It has been a week or two of novel sensations.

The other day, I finished what I needed to do for the morning and then realized I had nothing to do for the rest of the day.  It was genuine leisure, and I was honestly floored by the nearly narcotic sensation that washed over me.  I wasn’t even borrowing personal time from myself, which I would have to pay back the following day with significant interest: I just didn’t have anything left that needed doing.

It was the best contact high I’ve had in years.

I will, for the sake of clarity, state something for the record: graduate school has eaten my life.

Here I am living in one of the most beautiful cities and landscapes in the US, and I feel like I haven’t been able to enjoy any of it.  It wasn’t just the work, which took a drastically different form from my nine to five of the last four years: I have a very small cohort, very few of whose members I like.  Everyone in my year is fresh out of college, and periodically over the last few months, I have wanted to put my hand over my eyes and say to them, “Children, please go to your separate corners—Mommy hasn’t had her cocktail yet.”  I miss Boston.  I miss feeling like a person, which (as I have learned) is not necessarily compatible with being a graduate student. 
 
I had to find a panic place in my new apartment.  In my apartment in Boston, there had been a space between the kitchen cabinets and the wall immediately inside the doorway, and I would curl up there to weep and wail.  Similarly, here in Boulder, the space between my kitchen drawers and my dishwasher is exactly the right distance in which to sit, with my feet against the drawer pulls, and try to keep the sadness and panic at bay, usually without good results.  I had never realized it until someone pointed it out, but not only was I unhappy in my program, but I felt as though somehow I was failing additionally at not being ecstatically happy in Boulder—isn’t that what people do here?

It has been, to put it briefly, a very rough several months. 

That is, until the end of this last semester. 

With my final papers turned in and last exams given, taken, and graded, I found myself able to sleep again; to not feel guilty or budgeted in my free time, of which there has been a significant increase.  My occupation this summer is researching and volunteering at a barn, and I can essentially fall off the face of the earth as far as my program is concerned. 

The bliss is monumental, and I am finally starting to feel like myself again.

At the invitation of a friend who was participating in the event, I attended a very Boulder-esque lecture series tonight, at which people have five minutes to discuss, with automatically advanced slides, anything they want.  The topics ranged from small town nerdhood to saving the trees through a poetic adaptation of Dr. Seuss.  And one talk was on the joys of being awkward.

I knew I liked this person as soon as he started talking, speaking up for the bad rap that “awkward” has gained.  He was intensely charismatic and very funny, and by the end of his five minutes, I was completely smitten.  I looked for him afterwards, with little success, until I bumped into him completely by accident at the after party. 

Standing there in my blue dress with my blue pixie cut, I believe I said the following to this complete stranger:

“Oh my gosh—you’re brilliant!  I would like to hug you.  Would that be okay?”

He assented gracefully to being hugged, and we chatted for a while about this start-up.  Being up close to him was even worse: he was the perfect height, scruffy, and had a wonderful smile.  He offered me his email so I could get more information about some of his company’s upcoming events.  Having been hysterically (and thankfully, silently) trying to figure out how to get his contact info, I settled for email rather than phone. 

When I got home a little while later, I found myself prowling around my apartment with what turned out to be a really goofy smile on my face. 

It was a miracle: I not only had the joy of leisure, but somehow I had also found a real live crush. This is what being human feels like.  I had nearly forgotten.

I know myself well enough to know that this euphoria probably won’t last.  I will need to get down to business and start my research eventually, and the odds are that my sudden and intense crush will mirror awkwardly onto what was probably just networking for him (the awkwardness, at least, will have the sting of irony). 

But this week of free time, this electronic charge of a crush: I have missed these feelings.  They feel oddly hopeful; they remind me of the person I usually am, under non-graduate circumstances, and I’m surprised how much I missed that person.  She is not nearly as self-loathing as the person I’ve warped into over the last several months.  I also remind myself that potentially one of the best parts of these feelings is that they're fleeting: crushes crush and leisure turns to boredom.  But right now, here in this perfect set of days, I am sleeping, I am crushing, I am sparkling, and I am thinking about lines from a song that seem to sum it up perfectly:

Hello my old heart, how have you been?  Are you there still there inside my chest?

I’ve been so worried, you’ve been so still, barely beating at all…

Because nothing lasts forever, some things aren’t meant to be,

But you’ll never find the answers, until you set your old heart free.