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.

The Woman Who Knew Too Much

If I had to sum up January in an overused phrase, it would definitely be "Ignorance is bliss." The day-to-day has been a lot calmer minus one key student, and the resulting absence of frantic attention grabbing maneuvers has given me more time to learn about the Center, the community, and the lives of the students in the evening program.

It's been a lot to take in, my conversations with my coworkers about the guy who got shot in the foot, the kids who step out to get high and then try to come back in, and the various warnings that one dude was given before he was thrown out for good. I don't work very much with the older guys--theater is understandably not their thing--so I am significantly out of the loop when it comes to their stories. The sudden influx of information last week coupled with a walkover re-routing (too many Latin Kings live on one of the streets we used to take, a middle school contingent of whom once started to throw ice at one of my coworkers) threatened to coalesce into a full-fledged Friday night freakout when I got stuck behind one car that refused to exit the alley I use to leave the Center parking lot. After a bit I glanced in my rear-view mirror to find another car idling behind me.

I honked politely and was released, my heart hammering.

Have I ever felt personally singled out and threatened? Absolutely not. Have I found myself in combustible situations? Absolutely. My biggest fear is probably being swept up in something over which I have no control.

It doesn't help that I've been continuing my way through the fourth season of The Wire. This re-watching is taking longer than all the others, for reasons I have already talked a little bit about here. There's no doubt in my mind that it's my favorite of five excellent seasons, that it's a masterpiece, and that it's brutally uncompromising in painting a picture of, to use a technical term, the crap-shoot that is inner city education. Only one of the four students featured in this season is granted an almost-sure-thing future, and it's the one you were least worried about to begin with. Great.

I've had weeks on this job that were emotionally difficult. I've had weeks on this job that were physically difficult. Last week was the first week that has been psychologically difficult and I think it's no coincidence that it was the week that, in all other respects, was the easiest on record. With time and breath to think, I found myself coming up against the undeniable fact that I'm not cut out for this kind of work in the long term. I can do anything for a year, but a year is all they're getting.

If I stay in Chicago (which is looking more and more likely), I'll definitely come and volunteer. These are the best coworkers I have ever had, even (especially) the one who leaned over to me during a staffing with the family support specialist (who had just finished filling us in on the fourth of four kids with significant emotional problems) and asked me under his breath, "Are you straight with this?"

My coworker must have seen something in my face, just like that guy who made me a pain au chocolat very much not on the menu after I cycled for miles to his bakery on a false promise, and just like my high school theater teacher who took one look at me curled up on the floor during tech rehearsal and told me to go home with my walking pneumonia. When people call you out like that, when they see that unless they hand you dough with chocolate on the inside you're going to pass out, it's just one in a series of great ways of saying, "I see you." Indeed: "I'm watching you, just like you're watching everyone else. And you thought you were the only one."

In college, I told Roommate J that I could read people, herself included, like books. She called me out on that once, too, and after that we would both occasionally refer to me as a hefty tome, in the right hands just as easily read as everyone else. It's a complicated emotion, but I think that, ultimately, it's comforting to know that, even if ignorance is bliss, there are people who refuse to remain ignorant about what my feelings are and that if, one day, everything falls so far short of okay that I need to talk it out, there will be people to listen.

"Do you think you have to be crazy to create something powerful?"

Not even remotely.

A Brief Introduction to Winter Driving, and an Even Briefer Rant

I was let out of work an hour and a half early today and I arrived back at my apartment ten minutes after I would have if I had left at the regular time.

"Chicago officials detoured all CTA buses off Lake Shore Drive this afternoon for winter weather. But as of 6:30 p.m., buses that operate north of Roosevelt Road were back to normal routes, while buses south of Roosevelt remained rerouted until traffic conditions improve, the CTA said."

 My drive back home from work usually takes me forty minutes. Today it took me two hours and ten minutes. One hour and fifty of those minutes were south of an on (mostly on) Roosevelt Road. Never has any paragraph of any news story struck me as more accurate.

Life isn't fair and commuter-heavy areas should probably be cleared first, but Roosevelt Road is a major artery and it seems a little, dare I say, stupid that it was no better plowed than the incredibly minor, one-way street I live on.

Thank goodness for podcasts, and the fact that it's Friday.

I've Always Preferred Odd-Numbered Years...

...but I'm going to work hard to make 2012 an exception. Notably, I finally wrote a long treatise on the disappointment of easily defined sexuality in the Tinker, Tailor film over on the academic blog. (I would link it but it has my real name attached.) If that's not enough to tempt you, there's a picture of Benedict Cumberbatch looking cute.

In other Benedict Cumberbatch news, I am very much looking forward to the second episode of the second series of Sherlock next weekend. AS YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE OR YOUR REASON KEEP AWAY FROM THE MOOR!

In response to an e-mail from Roommate J, I made a new set of New Year's Resolutions. They look a lot like last year's resolutions, which I either pulled off with satisfying results or would like another shot at.

1) Write every day.
2) Keep the sense of humor.
3) Attain some semblance of swag.
4) Go on another date.
5) Don't get shot.


And if I fail at one, I want it to be number four. The others are far too important to me.