I'll Take It

"Heaven knows (at moments of anxiety magic thinking knows no let or hindrance; they are reading everything I write on this yellow pad)--I'll take it, I'll take it." --Life Work, Donald Hall

The way I have been feeling lately defies description, but I think that it must be closely related to my coworkers' assessment: "You're tougher than you look. We thought you'd be long gone by now."

The rhythm of my life is this: I do my job, and I recover from doing my job. The lows are low and the highs are high. One such high came this past Thursday when a cast of seven actors from the youth program put on the play we'd been working on developing together since late October. Seeing the pride they took in the finished product, however imperfect, was an incredible experience. I was also moved when four of my actors turned up on time and enthusiastic despite being sent away from the Center in disgrace the night before. There was subtext: they didn't want to let me down, and I was so touched that I almost cried.

I bought t-shirts on sale and used fabric paint to decorate them with the name of the play. When I handed them out to the cast there were a lot of questions. "You spent your own money on these?" "Can we keep these?" "I'm hanging this on my wall!"

Twenty minutes before the play started, one of the girls in it asked me, "What are we doing next?" She's ready for a project, and she's ready now. I laughed, and asked for the weekend to recover.

***

Last week was also a good week for coworker bonding. On Monday night I went out to dinner at Golden Corral with the two teachers I'm closest with. There had been a staff retreat and we were all getting out simultaneously at five (unheard of). So we all hopped in my car and drove to Bollingbrook, where I had the interesting experience of sitting at a table next to a family with a toddler with my name. "[My name], chew your food!" "[My name], calm down!" "[My name], stop fidgeting!" It was hilarious, if not particularly good for digestion.

***

This weekend I drove home to see our neighbors, who were visiting from Iowa. (They live in Iowa, but they're still our neighbors.) I stuck around to watch the Oscars with Dad. (Mom was gallivanting around Europe being the academic BAMF she so clearly is.) This morning I called in sick (partially true and entirely deserved), and made my leisurely way back to Chicago, arriving just before rush hour.

And now for my thoughts on home. I started this entry ready to get it all down, but now I don't quite know what I intended to say. It's hardly a new phenomenon, a 23-year-old struggling with the idea that the place that has been "home" for so long possibly no longer is. Going home this weekend was bittersweet because it felt so right and then I had to leave again. At the same time, forcing myself to contemplate the hard fact that I will probably never live in that town again for any length of time, that my bedroom is now basically my own super-comfy storage unit, and that things change, inevitably and neutrally, was not as difficult as I thought it would be. Sure, I'm tearing up a little right now, writing about it, but that's how I work. When I think in the abstract about how wonderful my parents are and what they mean to me, it's just a fact of life. But when I sat down to write my senior thesis acknowledgements I started bawling in an embarrassingly public Princeton location.

But I didn't start writing this to upset myself, or my readers. The point is that adulthood sneaks up on you when you least expect it. I don't wear particularly adult clothes to work--it's a question of cleanliness and mobility; they resemble my high school outfits more than anything else--but this job has changed and will continue to change me in ways that only become apparent when I react to events differently from how my own predictions and experience would lead me to expect. I am much more resilient, I explained last Wednesday to a relative stranger, than I thought I would ever be, and that is, and will always be, a relief.

I'm not getting the bends, detaching myself from home. I may occasionally freak out about the future, but it's nothing, nothing, compared to the Summer of Angst, 2010. My parents tell me that I can always come home, or that I can still take a year off and write, and I know that what they're saying is true. What I'm coming to realize, though, is that I've reached the point in my life where I'm the one who has to make the smart decisions, the strategic decisions. I can't move home again whenever the lows are low. The thing to do is so come up with a new idea of what "home" is, and then to feel safe and looked-after wherever that is. It can be mobile--in fact, it probably should be--but for my own sanity it needs to stop being the comfy chair in the patch of sun with the smell of cookies in my living room. My parent's living room. Whatever.

I have felt at home in a lot of different places, all over the world. None of then have been home, but that still bodes well for me, I think.

A Visit to the Circumlocution Office

Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Dickens!

I read you because I read Joan Aiken--she told me to read you, in fact--and it was one of the best things I've done. Thank you for Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend in particular, and for these:

Great Expectations

"They took up several obviously wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances."

"'I am ashamed to say it,' I returned, 'and yet it's no worse to say it than to think it. You call me a lucky fellow. Of course, I am. I was a blacksmith's boy but yesterday; I am -- what shall I say I am -- to-day?'"

"For an hour or more, I remained too stunned to think; and it was not until I began to think, that I began fully to know how wrecked I was, and how the ship in which I had sailed was gone to pieces."

Our Mutual Friend

"'My daughter, there are times of moral danger when the hardest virtuous resolution to form is flight, and when the most heroic bravery is flight.'"

"'This reminds me, Godmother, to ask you a serious question. You are as wise as wise can be (having been brought up by the fairies), and you can tell me this: Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?'"

 

"'No man knows till the time comes, what depths are within him. To some men it never comes; let them rest and be thankful! To me, you brought it; on me, you forced it; and the bottom of this raging sea,' striking himself upon the breast, 'has been heaved up ever since.'"

"'No one is useless in this world,' retorted the Secretary, 'who lightens the burden of it for any one else.'"

"'Then idiots talk,' said Eugene, leaning back, folding his arms, smoking with his eyes shut, and speaking slightly through his nose, 'of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy.'"

"No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot."

 

Thereof One Must Be Silent

Sometimes I really, really can't talk about it. There's stuff that happens at work that's just ripe for blog posting, but to do so would be personally and professionally unethical.

In times like these, I remind myself to take secret notes and to remember that later I can heavily disguise everything for publication. That's the only way to come to an understanding of events, sometimes. Especially this week, which has proved a continuation of the last in more ways than one. If my dad's mantra is "Energy, optimism, enthusiasm," then mine is "Everywhere I look there's inspiration." A good mantra should be a buoy, as well as the truth.