my blog archive

Since I recently canceled my MySpace account, I needed to save my blogs. So now, I've been going through them a little bit, and I'm wondering why I don't write the same way anymore. Does one have to be in the throes of angst to write the way I used to write?

Hopefully when I'm not embroiled in school, working, and Primary lessons, I can rediscover those elements of myself. The ironic thing is that since Joe has been in my life, I've written less personal stuff than ever before, but my life is richer than it has ever been. In the meantime, I'm going to start posting some of my favorite old blogs so that I can keep them here as well as in a random file in my email.

Saturday, July 1, 2006

a kind of scrapbook

I have started to collect a kind of moment. In that all-compacting and simplifying nutshell, it's that moment when you learn something you didn't know before, hear something you didn't know before, see something you didn't know before, the key of course being the not knowing before. I'm fascinated by the mystery of the way learning a thing changes the newly-learned in some imperceptible but permanent way. Perhaps some examples could help my stilted explanation.

I love movies, all kinds, even (especially?) obscenely sappy ones. But watching a movie always makes me a touch wistful. As the movie draws to a close, I feel a small shift where my heart makes space in my chest and I realize that in a few moments, I'll know what it feels like to have watched that movie. I'll know the ending, I'll know how the credits roll, signaling my exit gently but stubbornly, and whatever I've just seen has changed my life, even if the only change is that I can never watch that movie for the first time again. That experience is now only in my past, cataloged and archived and usually forgotten but never undone. Even something so insignificant as a movie. Even a movie like Old School.

I take the train to work sometimes, and once I sat across from a young woman who was in the final few pages of a book from the Midvale Library. I don't know why I remember that. The book was A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. And I watched as she finished it. She closed the cover, put it back in her bag. She may have not even given it a second thought, but as I read the same book a few months later, I couldn't help but wonder what she felt as the back cover darkened that last page. I know that as I closed the same pages, I felt a silent anonymous connection with this blond woman from the train because our lives had both been colored by David and Toph and California and ashes and idealism.

Now for the impetus behind this musing: I work with student loans all day. For the most part, it's a job that I would like to see fade away and become nothing more than an archived experience, but every once in a while, I find a breath of life in it. One such moment came the other day as I was assisting a young man with getting his papers in order for a military deferment before he shipped out in the US Army. A few weeks in Wisconsin and then on to the ugliness of war in the Middle East. He was a lovely twentysomething with rich dark skin, an unplaceable accent, and chest hair. And as he walked away with a sincere but hollow-sounding thank you and good luck from my associates and me, I felt on the verge of one of those moments with him, watching a part of it happen. I know from books movies stories that war changes people no matter how prepared you are. I had a glimpse of him on the verge of knowing what that feels like, what war and death and hate and guns and sand feel like when they get inside of you. It was powerful, like I could smell it or see it in a cloud as he turned the corner. A few more weeks like the rest of us. And then, who knows? I guess he will soon enough.

I don't really know why I'm writing this. I don't expect anyone else to find the same magnitude of beauty and melancholy and loss as I do in these moments. But I guess sometimes it's too much to keep to myself. Sometimes I just want to not know so much and slip back to odd and unreal dreams about Sting concerts and having freckles.