We'll Always Have Baltimore

I've slacked, I'll admit it; gone a week, or nearly so, without looking in this figurative mirror of mine. Last week was unexpectedly labor-intensive, and this week should be pretty busy too; but there's nothing to be done about that, I've midterms coming up, and Mikhail's getting on my case about my paper.

Read an entry on Joe M.'s blog--I think he's a cool, intriguing man, though he doesn't seem to give a damn about me either way--where he wrote about finding himself unexpectedly in "work is ultimately the only thing that matters" mode.

Excerpted directly here, because he describes the feeling so well it's pointless for me to try and paraphrase:

"...my emotions about things are in suspension because they seemingly have to be...I've never had so few prospects both personally and professionally, nor have I ever been so completely unconcerned (actually, more like resigned, but I just used that word...) with that fact. Is this the good or bad part of maturity? Is it maturity at all?"

Joe speculated that the situation was unique to the 21 Writing Seminars graduate students at JHU. Unique to Writing Seminars graduate students...and nomadic senior Biophysics undergraduate types with a secret love for 7th chords and Sad Boy Writing, it would seem. Or maybe just not that unique at all within our age bracket. I remember being in this position my senior year of high school, too, only then I had no concept of resignation, though I'd already read Kierkegaard by that point. I suppose the difference between Joe and me is that, for me, should all else fail, I could always try to focus my energies on grad school applications, and he doesn't even have that. But it's still hard to conceive that the next few months may carry little meaning in and of themselves; I sort of want to be in a band again, playing guitar, but what good would that do when I'll almost certainly be in a different city (note the title of this blog) this time next year?

I've empathy for the whole "what's the goddamn point" mentality; once you accept that there's nothing to do and nothing you can do about it, it gets hard to get out of bed in the morning, and even as you do, as you get up and about and attend to your business, some part of you is always detached and adrift from the parts of you that are being productive, wondering in a bemused way what keeps you running around and functional when there seems to be nothing pulling your strings or winding up your gears, no motivation or incentive whatsoever. It's like Jessica said: it takes blood to wake up in the morning.

And if that goes on for long enough, eventually you come around to realizing that, no, there's no real infrastructure in the world, no guidelines or waypoints to guide you to your personal happiness, there's everything you could ever want to tell you how to do and to receive doing, action, action, action, but as far as feeling like you're living a happy life goes, you're really dropped straight into the ocean treading water with no shores in sight, and if you only followed the paths you didn't have to carve yourself from scratch, you'd never find your way to the place you really wanted to be; no, if you wanted to get to happy, wherever the hell that was, you'd have to draw the map on a blank slate, erase, revise, no rules, but no help, no hints either. You realize it's not easy. Granger called me twice from the OC because in the month that he'd been there he hadn't had opportunities to meet any friends, or possibly a new date, just work from 7:30AM to 11:30PM.

The fact is, nobody really gives a damn if you snap, as long as you don't. Nothing's ever wrong with you until something is. And then they wonder why people do. I'm glad I won't be in the real world for quite a few years yet.

Saturday was busy: took a long walk to the Waverly Farmer's Market in the morning, first time I'd been here in my 3+ years in Baltimore. I have to say, I much preferred the atmosphere there than that in Giant at 9PM on a weeknight, which is just depressing. That afternoon, I went to my labmate Lijuan's wedding in Catonsville. It was very Chinese, and very Christian, and the minister's exhortation was vaguely misogynistic--something about the husband needing to self-sacrifice, and the woman needing to "submit," submit, submit (this word was used many times over) for the sake of love, but that despite that, husband and wife were equal, because the husband and wife were to each other as Christ and his congregation were--what the hell ass? I couldn't tell if I was crazy or actually witnessing the assignment horribly obsolete gender roles. A few times I actually felt like bolting from the church. But then again, Lijuan (and her husband as well, I assume) is the type of person who'd ask around in July for a place her then-fiance could live for a month--and no more--in September, because although he was moving to Baltimore to be with her, she wouldn't let him live with her until they were actually married.

Apparently she came to lab yesterday, too. As in the day after her own wedding. Some people just fucking scare me.

That evening we went to see Sigur Ros' film, Heima, which was screening at the Rotunda, which is possibly the least appropriate venue for anything involving Sigur Ros. The film consisted mostly of Iceland looking beautiful, though it did look really fucking beautiful. Stunning scenes of the band setting up for an acoustic set in the middle of a huge, sprawling steppe with glacial mountain ranges looming over the horizon line. Unbelievable. I want to go there now.

Saturday night I watched Casablanca with Jess and Thom. I usually don't respond particularly strongly to movies, and I'm not exactly a connoisseur of the classics, but that was a great movie. Humphrey Bogart set the bar way too damn high for us nihilistic angsty types. Yeah, sure, we'll always have Paris, but Paris is overrun by Nazis now, or maybe by Nazis we actually mean langoliers, or entropy's rushing tide, whatever. Point is, after being shunted to the backwaters to await the future for years, this is what one deserves, this is what one gets? Way too damn high.

Yesterday was pretty interesting for a Sunday; went down to the Current Space near the Inner Harbor with Diamond and Sarah K. to see Monarch at the Current Canyon arts festival. It was a good show; they had a really shoegazey new song, which was very long, and very beautiful. Hung out in an alleyway where Diamond and I watched a couple of solo acts (acoustic guitar through EHX pedals, circuit-bending accompanied by Jeskola Buzz and such) perform while Sarah checked out handmade clothing. Bizarrely, Cheri--the one from Alabama whom I met at Pitchfork Festival in July--called, and I talked to her for 20 minutes while standing on the sidewalk with Diamond and Sarah, who chatted as they waited for me. I owe Cheri a long email--she's a very intense type with a head full of thoughts, though not all of them agree with me.

Later that night after we went home, Diamond looked at Sarah's Myspace and was disappointed to find she was dating someone. Alas, alack, etc., either way I had a crush on her first.

Speaking of Sarah, I've been borrowing her as a semi-muse for poetry assignments, which probably reflects upon my aforementioned lazy resignation; did that for last week's poem, and will probably do it this week as well. I'm that boring.

Except I have a new theory, stemming from thoughts upon reading one of Jessica's short stories, that you can't really fall in love with a girl until you've seen the back of her neck. I remember being at the TV on the Radio show at Sonar last fall. It was on a Friday night; that Tuesday had been the day Sarah came to Trafalgar's show at 8x10, after which I pulled her aside and told her that I really liked her, after which she told me she was taken...and after that we were cool, and I thought I was done, that I'd done a good job of pre-empting the awkwardness that would've inevitably resulted had I allowed the emotions (remember those?) to bottle up longer. (And I did, more or less.) But anyway, that Friday--almost a year ago--we were at the TV on the Radio show with John and some others...she stood in front of me, and happened to have her hair tied up, and I accidentally let my eyes drift from the band onstage and saw the back of her neck--and all of a sudden it felt like getting hit by a truck, as though I'd never actually liked her until that moment. These things happen, I suppose. Or maybe they don't, and I just remember them happening a year later.

That last paragraph was really a pretty messy narrative. I'm just glad the theory itself is arguably more interesting than me and my little bundles of romanticized nostalgia. (Remember those?)