comfortable

How did it happen that I have two weeks left to wrap up a year's worth of work, to soak up my beloved apartment, to pack for travel and to prepare for school so that I'm not swamped when I get back in August? No matter how I try, I can't finish all the little things I thought I could do with my "free time." I've put a whole lot of photos in albums, but then I accumulated new ones this year. I've read a few books that make me want to get more. I've amassed much new music that I'd like to put in exactly the right playlists, but the minutes elude me. My email drafts folder grows by the day. I haven't written in my paper journal in ages; this past year, when I did write in it, it was when I was moody, not so much a thoughtful mood, just a moody mood. It's full of the same stuff. I regret that, because this year was so full of new, nuance.

This past Saturday I went to a graduation party for a girl who just graduated from my high school. We played together as kids, but I haven't spoken to her in years. She was salutatorian and is going to UCLA, and wants to major in environmental science. How odd to think of that time, so long ago. Notre Dame is very much the same and different too. We talked about teachers who were still around, Spirit Week, college applications. I sometimes missed high school while I was in college, but I haven't missed it in a long time (especially now that I miss college). As I told her how much she had to look forward to in college, I remembered how nice that summer before college was--so much possibility, so much excitement, so little anxiety, because my scope of the future back then ended with college. I didn't think past that, and it was great. At the same time that I grew nostalgic for that phase, I realized that I didn't want to be back there. I'm incredibly happy to be where I am right now, and I've liked--am grateful for--growing up a little. I love how much fuller life has gotten through experience and story. Like kids going into college, us kids going out have so many choices and opportunities ahead. We're in a scarier place than we were back then and somehow that's becoming less something to lament and more something we've gained privilege to.

The carefreeness of my weekends this past year in a very small way recalls a little of that stress-free summer before college (I doubt anything will ever be as completely thought-free and that's okay), but I've appreciated it differently. This past weekend was a lotta Steph & San Francisco. I saw her classmates perform classical music at the Alumni House and it was a nice excuse to dress up. Her friends are a warm, talented group of people. We went on another inNout & Krispy Kreme run afterwards, and spent quite a bit of time watching the donuts being made on the conveyer belt. I think I felt actual pain when they threw away a deformed donut that we'd been watching from its inception through its development. Such sugar coated goodness, never to be eaten! On Sunday I met up with Steph and Albert (silly kids!) again to go to the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair, which was quite the packed event. We were basically a herd marching slowly down the few blocks of Haight, and it was lively as outdoor affairs usually are. People peered at us from their balconies on the apartments lining the street, and we ate overpriced mediocre Chinese food while sitting on steps. There were bands at both ends of the fair, and various troupes moving from one end to the other. Everything was funky and hippie and colorful. It was a sunny cold day but warm within the cocoon of crowd.

Walking back, we somehow decided that we should build a fire in my fireplace and make s'mores. So we stopped at Steph's apartment so she could change and Albert could rest on her futon, then to Albert's apartment so he could get books and let me borrow his awesome backpack for my Asia trip, then finally to mine. We hesitated for a bit, unsure if the chimney was "open." When we finally went for it our fire went out pretty quickly, but we persevered and soon it was glowing. Christmas in June! The sunlight pours through the windows through the white curtains in my living room, so the room was awash in yellow sun and orange fire and the three of us were mesmerized. Then we skewered our marshmallows on fondue sticks and melted them atop le petit ecoliers. There was also dark chocolate with almonds. All the while my "comfortable" playlist provided a musical backdrop. I packed a little, they read a little; mostly we lolled and lazed around. An old friend, a new one; a city from my past where I've made my home of the present.

These things make me want to write because I want to both bottle it up and keep it in me, and to pass it around and make it tangible and living around me. There's much more I've wanted to write and more I will want to, and more photo albums I'll want to make, and more little things to do and make, but nothing can really capture everything. So you might as well carry it around with you.

hate/love

In one day as I was flying to Cleveland I rediscovered intense hate for one thing and intense love for another. They're not related.

I freaking hate flying and almost everything associated with it. I fly a lot, and I HATE airports. I've had practically every bad experience possible and those I haven't had, I'm sure I will. I've been in two-hour security lines (pre-9/11) that make you miss your flight so that you're stuck in the airport for six hours. I've been sent back home from the airport. I've lost luggage, I've sat in a plane waiting an hour for a storm to pass so that we could move up a hundred feet to the gate (thus missing a connecting flight), I've been given a boarding pass to Austin instead of Boston (and once I cleared that up I had to retrieve my luggage that was also routed to Austin), I've spent 15 hours at the airport/on planes for a 5 hour flight, I've switched planes due to malfunctions. Like everyone else, I've had the crying babies and obnoxious kids and vocally grumpy passengers and seat-kickers and lean-backers-even-while-you're-eating. I hate the recycled air and the loud, fast flush in the bathrooms and the prevalence of incompetence. I feel like such a horrible person when I am easily annoyed at someone for being incompetent, but I can't stand it. I've lost expensive things on airplanes, like my retainer and iPod. And though this is of course my fault, it contributes to my bitterness.

One of the things I hate most is how airports desensitize people. The staff rarely cares about the passengers, because to them everyone is just another cranky customer with the same problems as everyone else. They can no longer see why some hours at an airport versus some hours with someone you haven't seen and won't see for a long time is a reason for some pain. Over time the urge to place blame on them for your woes snuffs their natural empathy. I do know there's nothing they can do, but I do think that if the woman behind the counter was actually sympathetic when she tells me my flight that I paid for months in advance is overbooked and I'm not getting on this plane even as I can see it outside the window, I wouldn't feel so defeated. Instead, I'm just another, and to the woman behind the counter, why risk sympathy when you'll likely just get anger in return? I've tried combatting this with politeness and the kind of empathy I'd like, because I think people do respond, but honestly I'm just not always that patient and it's hard to be nice first if someone else isn't all that nice to you.

My hatred of airports/planes is so pure that it overcomes my natural urge to romanticize such imperfections with their counterparts, like the beautiful views and how you're covering all kinds of distance without feeling any motion and how you have long stretches of time for music and books and the conversations you have with strangers and how I actually liked the food back when they gave it to you and that one time I acidentally went to the international terminal to pick someone up and saw people standing around with signs and flowers and so visibly eager to see loved ones from afar. I like these latter things about flying, but for me they are distinct from the experience of flying. I like them as individual things, and I hate flying as a whole. It's the difference between a good thing with imperfections, which is how I see most things, and a bad thing with some saving graces.

Enough about that.

I didn't bring enough to read during my delays last weekend, but I had a pocketbook Chagall and I was too tired to read much anyway so I just looked at his pictures. I freaking love Chagall. I don't know much about art, so it's not like I have a whole lot to choose from when I say he's my favorite, but for what it's worth, he is. I love how he captures such real emotion with such dreamlike images, and how his vibrant colors make you think that's what life really looks like. I like how people are often upside-down or at odd angles and how he gives them unnatural curves that seem natural. One of the things I love best is how he makes people fit together--how they float, intertwine, connect in some way. One of my favorites is The Birthday, where a woman is leaning forward on one foot, like she's drifting upwards, and a man is floating above her, kissing her. They're back to back, so he has to stretch his head 180 degrees (impossible) so that he can be face to face with her. I also love his windows and the views into other worlds, how these views also happen when there are no windows. I like his art because you could think hard about it if you want to and there are deeper things that I probably don't get, but you don't have to think too hard. It's strange and beautiful and you can just look at it to get that. You can see that it's not exactly simple because it's different and odd and there must be some reason and technique for how he gets you to feel this way--it's not just a pretty scene but something he does to it--but still, it is simple.

my supervisor and my job

I love my supervisor. She's amazingly smart but seems unaware of it. She doesn't use her job or her life as a way of proving how smart she is; she just is. She doesn't really care that she didn't pursue the education and career that her abilities would be associated with; she's happy. She's laid-back and outspoken; she swears freely. As scrupulous as she is with science, she lacks the neurotic and uptight tendencies that usually go along with that. She has reddish blondish brown curls that are typically tied up in a bundle and the fray curls wisp in every direction, and that along with her blue eyes and long face make her a frenetic unconventional beauty. She has an amazing work ethic, not in the sense that she works without breaks or comes in every weekend (she's very good at work/personal boundaries and making her own life hers) but she does everything with the care and accuracy that's required when you're doing something for the first time. Except she does it over and over, all the time, this way.

Her mother was diagnosed with leukemia awhile ago and passed away just a couple weeks after they found out. Being the only sibling in the area and also the only one with in depth knowledge of leukemia, my supervisor had to juggle taking care of her parents, talking to the doctors, researching new treatments, informing everyone in the family of what was going on, and making sure her own child was coping okay. I've been surprised to find out about my supervisor's family's hematological problems considering that's her field, and these problems arose after she'd chosen it. Her son has hemophilia, and then her mom gets leukemia. She was unsurprisingly devoted, practical and capable throughout it all, but not without feeling and sadness. That fragile/strong dichotomy gets me all the time.

We've been tracking the progress of leukemia patients pre and post-bone marrow transplant (which was not an option for my supervisor's mom who was too elderly and sick to survive an operation like that). My supervisor is very invested in these patients, even though she's not a physician and she's not directly taking care of them and in most cases she hasn't met them. She gets genuinely disappointed to see someone relapsing and sincerely wishes to see progress. She so easily makes the connection between paper results and real people. There is a particular woman who she's really pulling for, because she's been through so many different treatments. During the first difficult week when my supervisor's mom had been diagnosed and they knew she'd only have a little time left, my supervisor was tracking this woman's cancer. She always updates me, even though I'm not the one doing that part of the project. She told me the woman was negative for disease, and she looked so happy to be telling me. It wasn't an overt display of joy; it was there in the creases and corners.

I thought how rare it is to be so happy for another person's fortune when your own is dreary. I can't say that I'm always like that; I have jealous tendencies. But it made me very thankful that our work, as steeped in concepts and theories and the grind of experiments as it is, is based on real people.

I like my job. A huge part of that is my supervisor. Other parts of it have to do with jobs in general. I've learned so differently this year. School is linear and structured and designed to educate. I've got a handle on how to follow that; I'm good at routine and learning from books with clearcut purposes and narratives. Tossed into real life, you see that you learn things in scattered pieces, often without a story, and you have to put the effort into seeing how it works or realizing that it doesn't. This applies to the big picture as well as just figuring what the hell you're doing on a daily basis. Also, mistakes. Many of them. And it's hard to think of your job the way you would a curved organic chem test, where 60% correct is not that bad. But it's also what makes it satisfying.

There are frustrating times and wasted hours, but the good, productive moments compensate for the others. I'm not contributing anything that will be very important in anyone's life, not broadly or on an individual interaction basis the way teaching or other relationships are. But I can see different avenues of doing so in the future, and that view helps an enormous amount. I like the intellectual challenge of figuring things out, and explaining what goes on in your body. It's scary not to know, and in trying to just know, I think there's an element of what happens when you teach someone something and they get it and they feel better for it. Also, I don't think scientific inquiries are so different from other kinds. It strives for a more concrete, objective understanding, but at the end of the day, who really knows why it works like that, why things are made to function a certain way? Sure, it works because this causes that and it works well this way and you can see the beauty of a well-ochestrated pathway, but there are always other equally good ways. Why it's this way is a question of all disciplines.

What bothers me about a lot of work in general is that I can easily imagine someone else doing it in my place; I don't find that I bring anything uniquely valuable or that I'm doing it any better than someone else could. I think I did all my past jobs well enough but there was no real reason that it was me doing it; the same goes for my job now. Right now, I feel it's okay for the balance to be tipped in my favor--that because I'm still learning it's okay that I'm getting more out of this experience than I can give it. Because it contributes to a feeling that I've never had, one I'm still developing and don't quite have yet--the feeling that there does exist a path that I am specifically suited to. There is something that I'm not just adequate for, but that I'm meant and exactly fitted for. All the things along the way change your shape or make you see a nook you hadn't noticed so that you end up fitting something only you can fit into.

journals of steph and strangers

Reading Steph's med school blog (in retrospect) has been like discovering another person. Hi Steph! I've been reading snippets here and there, and while the things in each entry represent things I already know of her, there's always something new. Not new in that I didn't already know she hates the fog and hills and loves her classmates and oncology. New in that I hadn't heard it expressed in these specific words, on that particular day. She mentioned in an early entry about how she's not drawn to strangers' blogs, but maybe that's changed a bit because we've been talking recently about how we read strangers' blogs. I love reading blogs, people I know and strangers likewise. I love seeing what people choose to say, because there is a great deal of choice and weeding out. I love the dynamic of connection and separation that happens between bloggers and readers. I love seeing my own feelings articulated by someone else; that is so much of what I love about fiction and here it is in real people's lives.

I like strangers' blogs because the process of getting to know someone has so much novelty and a refreshing quality, and it does weird things to me. I once spent a few days reading a person's entire archives, not because it was particularly interesting but because a lot of the way he talked and things he referenced reminded me of West Point and I just wanted to figure out whether he actually went there (he rarely used any actual names). I eventually discovered that he went to the Naval Academy (close, right?). I had momentarily become obsessed with seeing if I could figure out a basic fact of his life through his more intangible online thoughts, and isn't that such a reverse way to get to know someone? It's like characters, except not. And it's always a treat to find the thoughtful, well-written, funny, bittersweet ones. And to read about people leading lives completely different from yours. I also develop dislike for people through their blogs, which I continue to read. It would suffice it to say that if I have a reaction to your writing, good or bad, I'll keep reading it. People can say so much in narcissistic writing that just can't be said in a two way conversation.

Anyway. Steph, I love your poems and your growing love of San Francisco and your thoughts on medicine and how even your thoughts on the misery of college make me miss it.

I've wanted to switch to blogspot for a long time because of the ease of posting photographs and also because it seems more conducive to regular entries. But I've been reluctant to abandon the history of my livejournal because 1) the history and 2) I don't know if I should really write more regularly. I'd like to, I'd like to write about my reaction to a movie soon after watching it instead of piling it into a larger entry about how lost I am or some recurring theme. In some ways I'm scared it'd replace a personal journal, but honestly I've been too tired to write in my own journal this past year. And there's too much piecing together of real life to try to piece together a livejournal entry, sometimes. Maybe it'd be nice to put the fragments out there, instead of collecting and sorting.

coachella

A delayed flight to LA, a two-hour drive to Indio, the wait for our keys to the condo, a trip to the grocery store, the 90 minute drive or more into Coachella (I think it normally takes 30 minutes but we missed a turn and sometimes there was traffic into the parking lot), the 20 minute walk from the car to the entrance (that was the damn longest part). The heat made the walk pretty miserable, and the first thing I wanted to do upon entering was get water and go to the bathroom. I needed another water bottle after the first show. The porter potties are stifling (though cleaner than I expected) and during the first half hour I honestly wondered whether I'd make it through the first day, much less all three days. But that first hour of the hot dry blindingly bright late afternoon was always the hardest each day, and once you get past it and know you'll be fine, it is glorious.

There are five stages: the huge Coachella Stage with screens and a long expanse of grass in front of it; next to it is the smaller but still large Outdoor Stage that has some bleachers way in the back; perpendicular to these are three tented stages in a row, aptly named the Sahara, Gobi and Mojave. There were SO MANY people. Families with little kids, groups of friends, college kids, couples, teenyboppers, hipsters, hippies...music lovers. Music has that ineffable quality of being intensified and better by sharing, more so than a lot of other beautiful things, because it can be so accessible to so many at once. I remember hearing a song I liked playing across the Yard from someone's dorm room, through their open window to mine, and thinking of connections between strangers. And it's amazing to be able to go from dancing to a semi-raunchy girl band packed in the middle of a crowd, to standing hushed in the front row listening to just a voice and acoustic guitar. And to see how everything contributes to making each show distinct: the time of day and the light and temperature that goes along with that, where you are in the crowd, whether you stand or sit, and so on.

There were so many highlights: the energy and passion of Arcade Fire and how much we moved to their music, Lily Allen's band playing their trumpets in sync, Damien's riffs, Air's atmosphere reaching us in the bleachers, Regina Spektor's distinctive piano and voice and pale skin with red lips, being so close to Jose's lovely quiet music, the Decemberists playing the entire eight minutes of the Mariner's Revenge Song. And all the dancing, to CSS and Rapture and anything with a beat really. I didn't expect to dance that much. I think we ended up seeing twenty artists, maybe fifteen of whom were full sets, which is pretty awesome.

The one singular highlight though was Bjork, headlining on Friday night. I didn't listen to much of her music before that, aside from Vespertine and Dancer in the Dark, which I love, but I wasn't a huge fan of her or anything. But I fell in love. Her voice is so beautiful, I have no words. It soars and it moves in a way that makes you feel each note. We were far back so I couldn't see her well but I could see her petite self move across the stage, and I was amazed at the sound that came out of her, she looked like a fairy or pixie but was so much more powerful than that. And she's so incredibly creative, all these strange sounds come together and you're surprised to find yourself immersed in them and loving them. Argh, I'm having that really frustrating moment of not doing something justice at all. Let's just say that if I had to choose fifty things that defined beauty for me, her music live would be one (fifty sounds like a lot, but it's not if you think about all the things you could name).

By the end of the each day, your lower back aches, there's dirt underneath your fingernails and dust in between your toes and blisters on the soles, your skin is a funky mixture of sweat and grass, your contacts feel like they have a little layer of fuzz atop them, and if you're me, your hair was messy to begin with. You feel like there's all this crap on you that you can't wait to shower off, but you're so happy because you've been filled up through your ears and feet and eyes with all this beautiful stuff.

books

I finished “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen the other night; it almost made me cry which puts it in the emotional vicinity of Atonement, Lolita and King Lear. Except that I can’t compare, in the way that every book is so uniquely itself. The contemporary humor and bluntness and surface pessimism of “The Corrections” are unlike what moves me about the other books. Some feelings it evoked were similar to past ones I’ve had, but this isn’t to say that my response was the same at all. My favorite books have a lot in common; they make me a little (or very) sad, contain clear moments of happiness to cling to, articulate feelings or thoughts I’ve had that I haven’t described, or haven’t described well, or haven’t recognized. I usually finish them quickly. These qualities being general, the books that embody them are pretty different and I have a different relationship with each of them. I thought maybe I should start writing more about them (and writing more in general), to avoid the consuming inwardness that having a “relationship” with your books fosters, to think more about what I want to do with what the books give.

I went into the book without really knowing too much about it, though it’s well-known. The title made me think of journalism and for whatever reason that stopped me from starting it for awhile. “Corrections” turns out to be about many kinds of corrections; there are physical, concrete ones but also of course the personal, emotional ones. It’s a dysfunctional family story about parents and children and siblings and significant others trying to prevent, deny, and compensate for each other’s mistakes and flaws. It’s long and about a lot of things, but really it’s about this one thing—how screwed up we become by trying so hard not to screw up, by trying to correct ourselves into better versions of the flawed people around us.

I liked:

“When the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before?”...In typing this quote, I find that it reminds me a little of how I might think/write about something like that. Things for me are all about how I internalize them. While concrete events or singular experiences have an immediate impact on me, it’s the way they linger, build up, flow back in mind and heart over time that really changes me. We’ll see how that pans out in the future, because I’m sure I’ve only seen a tiny bit of what can change you through a life.

“He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.”...Maybe the character believes in this line, but I don’t think the writer does. I believe in intentions, even as I feel they only go so far and am often disappointed in lack of actions (largely in myself and a small number of others from whom I expect a lot). I think what you want is a huge part of who you are, even if it’s not something you can be or do. Honestly, it’s what I fall back on when I need encouragement. I remember Mr. Floyd, our high school history teacher, asking us what categories he should grade our projects by—and I suggested effort. I remember Anna B. scoffing at this notion, and then Mr. Floyd said, effort would show in the quality of the work, so it doesn’t need quantification. Personally I think the correlation between effort and quality differs among people, and god, it’s hard to always be your best, so whatever, I’m making effort its own category.

So it’s easy to see how everyone’s felt a lost sense of self because they don’t know what they want. But maybe the things that lead you to uncertainty are just as much who you are, and maybe they’re the same things that lead you back. The book made me feel anew these cliches, of a self that stays in tact in the midst of lives falling apart and so much mess.

It scared me a little, as each day I both recognize and avoid more the reality that life will be imperfect—and not just imperfect in the romanticized way I look at flaws, mistakes, mishaps, difficult love, second choices…but imperfect in that gut-wrenchingly painful, that-was-not-for-the-best, damn-this-is-hard way. Yet, it’s easier to look back on pain in retrospect and see what each one meant and how important it was, when so much passing of time and life happens in a book...instead of trudging through it in real life. I think we develop a lot of expectations of how we’re going to feel during certain phases of our lives and through certain events, through stories—books and movies. I worry about being overprepared, because I expect certain emotions and events that I see in these fictional lives and maybe this will keep me from experiencing things I hadn’t foreseen. I worry about being underprepared, because I might think that life can be as neat of a mess as fiction is, and life will prove me wrong and it will hurt. I’m getting so confused writing this, but I also realize now I don’t have to worry about these things.

I wonder how people foresaw their futures before there was such widespread, accessible stories of fictional people, created by real people. Maybe people just absorbed things as they came, without knowing too much beforehand, without too many expectations based on what’s supposed to happen in a life. I like this idea, and believe that it still applies to us, as awash in other people’s stories as we are. Things are new and yours when they happen to you; your story is going to be the one you feel most, and most genuinely, and there will be surprises still, and you’ll be hurt and you’ll be fine.

And okay, since I mentioned it and because I came across a We-Hate-Atonement facebook group today that made me hostile and impulsive—I need to passively-aggressively defend this book. Not against people who have judged the book in its entirety and still don’t like it, but against the people who haven’t given it enough consideration to justify what they say. Not that I know the book, or any book, in its entirety but I do think there are things Atonement-critics overlook. Maybe I’m not as irritated by Briony, the protagonist, because I see a lot of myself in her, but I do see why she would annoy people. What I don’t get is how people focus on the fact that she’s to blame for everything. Yes, the book is about her crime and guilt, but it’s also clear that it’s really about atonement—which is different from forgiveness, which she isn’t asking for, or repentance, which she already obviously feels.

What’s more—people who bash the ending: the twist is not everything, and it’s more complicated than you give it credit. If you consider the implications of her self-representation, the notion of her fiction, then you see that the Briony you dislike is one that she’s created for you, and for herself. It takes a lot of courage to be honest about yourself, more so to (possibly) distort things to make your own flaws all the more apparent. Besides that, the ending isn’t clearcut. Maybe the twist is fictional, too, maybe it’s more self-inflicted punishment. Who really knows? But you just can’t hate on the novel’s premise without first considering how the ending changes not just the final parts but the entire book, without thinking of how it opens up endless perspectives on her character and the plot and atonement. If you give it at least that, you can then hate all you want. I’m mostly accepting of differences of opinion, though I have a lot of natural defensiveness that I’m trying to decrease; I just hold things I love very, irrationally close.

huh

I was reading old entries and almost two years ago I alluded to that King Lear line about "Reason not the need" when I was writing about Walden Pond. That didn't even register when I wrote about it again, awhile ago (and coming to a similar conclusion both times). In fact, realizing that I wrote about it two years ago made me remember that it was Professor Greenblatt, not Parker, who lectured on it and who I was referring to in the more recent entry...but I'd mixed them up since I took Shakespeare with both, and I mistakenly wrote that Professor Parker had talked about that line. My memory being something I value, this was a little disconcerting even as I know it's normal to mix up details even for those with the best memories.

I almost went back and corrected my entry, from Parker to Greenblatt, but I didn't.

I'm glad I wrote the few times that I did over the past years, because these entries feels both close and distant. Sometimes I write a phrase and feel like I must've written the same thing at another time. Then there are things I don't remember at all. Not that I don't remember the events, but the same feelings aren't so close at hand. Not that the feelings in which I was so endrenched are surprising when I re-read them, but some of them feel new rather than lived-in, while others are precursors of current thoughts and thus feel near, but not quite. It's very bittersweet.