This Is My Bloody Valentine

This year, I am celebrating Valentine's Day in a fashion most single people only dream of: by traveling alone to a strange new city where nobody knows me. If that doesn't elevate the stereotypical loner Valentine's Day fuck-you to a brand-new transcendental level, I don't know what does. I haven't had a proper Valentine's Day in two years, but I don't suppose there's a lot I can do about that on my own.

I'm flying out to San Francisco at 8AM. This means I have to leave my apartment no later than 6. These early flights always confuse me; sometimes I want to sleep early, but most often I don't sleep at all. Incentive: University of California-San Francisco Biophysics interview. I'm actually quite excited for this: I'd almost forgotten the UCSF Biophysics program is part of an Integrative Program in Quantitative Biology that also covers their bioinformatics and systems biology research, which is a godsend for eclectics who can't make up their minds, such as myself. I also have most of this evening to explore San Francisco on my own, and while I have no idea how to do such a thing, I'm looking forward to sampling the eccentricities for which San Francisco is known.

To be honest, I'm not sure what to expect from the interview itself. They said we have faculty interviews all Friday, but haven't sent anything detailing which faculty members we will be interviewing with, which makes it hard to do background preparation (though I might be too lazy to do it even if I did have the information). They also specified that we should not dress up for our interviews, unlike Vanderbilt, where all the interviewees looked like they got lost on the way to Wall Street. I'll probably still wear some sort of collared shirt, just in case. Finally, they have apparently arranged for us to attend a party at a student's house. This could either turn out really badly or really well...

Today didn't make preparing for travel easy, though. I'm always a little bit nervous the day before I have to travel anywhere, and get a kind of gut-deep nausea that makes me want to not eat and spend all day with my friends, yet when I'm with them, as I was with Jessica today, no amount of conversation can dissolve that lump in my stomach; even though I would like to express it somehow, it seems to refuse to even enter my throat, much less manifest as speech. On top of that, it seems it's always a rainy day when I have to go somewhere. As though the weather conspires, on the precise day that I need to be energized and alert, to make me want to do nothing but stay in bed all day. And get Beach House songs stuck in my head, which causes me to go all blank and melancholy. Not that I don't enjoy that--in fact, I probably enjoy it more than is healthy--but it's inconvenient when I've got timetables biting at my heels.

I was talking to Jessica today about how I was concerned, if I did end up in San Francisco, there would just be too much stuff to do all the time. It's analogous to why I probably can't ever live in New York City for an extended period of time: I wouldn't be able to stand having the city in my face all the time. Baltimore is dispassionate; it often sees fit to leave one hanging in a void, and I have come to take comfort in that void, which is the desolation of Charles Village late on a weeknight, the tranquility of Mount Vernon that enfolds one a few blocks after one leaves the clamor of Sonar or Talking Head on a weekend, the silence that is only infrequently punctured by distant sirens. For one, such as I, who thrives so much on deprivation, it would be the ultimate irony to be deprived of deprivation itself. It is absurd, the extent to which my mind has extended to wrap around this city, like one of those trick bamboo plants that twists and folds upon itself. It seems uprooting and relocating myself is getting harder as I grow older.

No further word from Boston, though there's little doubt in my mind there's a bullet out there, most likely two, possibly airborne as we speak, with my name on it, coming to deliver the deflating coup de grace to my visions of Boston. It would be hard to describe my apprehension each time I came home at the end of the day this week; the routine fifteen-minute walk has turned into a dreadful fifteen-minute ritual of steeling myself for thin envelopes, of which none have arrived this week, thankfully. The very act of returning to my apartment has become a source of stress, and it's making everything a little surreal. Fortunately, I won't have to worry about it for the next three days or so, but there's always the danger of having to come home to them after 1AM Sunday morning, which is when my flight back to Baltimore arrives. I suppose these things must be dealt with, one way or another.

Let's not end this on a dour note. Here is something Williamson gave us to read in class today, one of the best things I've laid eyes on recently and occasion-appropriate to boot:

For C.

After the clash of elevator gates
And the long sinking, she emerges where,
A slight thing in the morning's crosstown glare,
She looks up toward the window where he waits,
Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest
Of the huge traffic bound forever west.

On such grand scale do lovers say good-bye--
Even this other pair whose high romance
Had only the duration of a dance,
And who, now taking leave with stricken eye,
See each in each a whole new life forgone.
For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn,

Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these
Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief
And baggage, yet with something like relief,
It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas
To cancel out their crossing, and unmake
The amorous rough and tumble of their wake.

We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to nothingness;
Still, there's a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,

And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose's scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.

-Richard Wilbur