domestication

On my continuing journey towards something dimly resembling adulthood, I have begun searching for a home to buy.

The rent v. buy question is a tricky one.  When I first got married, the future was fluid, and the answer was easy:  rent, rent, rent.  That turns out to have been a good decision, since my rent hasn't gone up in over seven years, and anyway I had no money when I got married.  Now I've got some paper, and I'm ready to feel like I don't have any again.  I could keep renting, but in my area the cost to rent is rather exorbitant for the kind of larger place I'd be looking for.  The kind of place where you can comfortably raise a family.

So I'm looking at mortgages.  I'm looking at down payments.  I'm looking at school districts.  This is an exquisite form of personal torture for someone who regards himself as fundamentally Bohemian in outlook.  Like a certain Mr. Draper, the opportunity to just pack up and ship out at a moment's notice has always held great appeal, even if I've never actually made use of it.  I like to categorize my possessions, and one of those categories is 'must-haves,' things I would be sure to take with me when I need to escape from my life.  There are precious few of those.  I would not be found.

But I'm not ready to run yet, and instead I'm about to nail myself to the floor.  I can handle that.  It's for my daughter's good, and creating her endows me with certain inalienable obligations as far as making her experience of living however slightly less miserable I can.

The wife and I went house-hunting a few weeks ago.  We visited an open house near where we live currently, and it was a beautiful place!  It felt clean, and open, and beautiful, and spacious, and livable.  I looked around, and could imagine a pretty fun life there.  It was expensive, but within the realm of affordability.  It was doable in every way.

I was ready to pull the trigger, but (as always) the wife was a little more cautious.  We talked about it, and decided we needed to look at more than one house before making a decision.  That seems reasonable.  That seems safe.  That seems wise.  That flies completely in the face of how I like to approach life, and I've been very successful at it so far.

Places have never been extremely important to me.  In my eyes, a place is merely a forum to interact with people, which is what really matters in life.  I can be comfortable living somewhere, or uncomfortable living somewhere.  I don't care at all, as long as I've got the right people around me.

The wife feels differently.  Places have always been extremely important to her.  The feel of a place needs to be just right, she claims, or she simply cannot be happy.  All my appeals to the idea that we would be happy just from being together fell on deaf ears.  Above all, we must find the right kind of place.  Well-lit.  Boreally orientated.  Properly ventilated.  Aloof neighbors.  Thick floorboards.  Situated on an ancient burial ground.  You get the picture.

A home of my own is more than a place to live and meet people, I admit.  But it opens up an entire world of new responsibilities, opportunities, and fantastical engagements, should I choose to pursue them.  An entire arcane laboratory, all to my own design, if I should so choose.  The wonderment would be never-ending.  The dead might live again.

These are some of the ways I could cope with the idea of buying a house.  I'm terrified by my regular middle-class lifestyle, terrified of collapsing into a perfect family unit of perfectly average composition, forming a singularity of suburban bliss.  It would be happy, but there seems to be so little room to carve out something new for yourself on that all-too-traveled road.  Tell me, where can I find the novelty in always doing what I'm supposed to do?  Where can I find the challenge when I hew so close to the middle road?

I don't want a house that I can go back to and be content.  I want a house that will constantly push me back out into the world, and force me to keep on growing.

tacit fondness

I started writing a blog post last year.  It was pretty long, about twice as long as my average post.  The subject was primarily a message I had found in my 11th-grade yearbook.  It was a message that I had written to myself.

When I found that message, I was really impressed with myself.  Although my yearbook was also full of other people telling me off for pulling a stupid stunt like writing my own message, I didn't see it that way.  Not only was it a clever move, but the message itself was a poignant meditation on friendship and sincerity.

I liked it so much, I knew I had to write a post about it.  Maybe I just wanted to show off how emotionally intelligent I was, even at 17 years old.  So I wrote this extensive post, but there was only one problem -- I didn't actually have the yearbook with me when I wrote it, and I wanted to include the message as a direct quote.  So the draft sat in my computer, waiting for the day I might remember to pull out the yearbook and finish it.

That day came last week.  I opened the yearbook, navigated to the last page, and realized with some dismay that, on rereading, I didn't think the message was nearly as meaningful as when I'd first found it.  Maybe I was just primed to appreciate that sort of the thing at the time.  Whatever the reason, I realized I'd never be able to put up that post.  It reflected my feelings at one point, I guess, but no longer, and it would be disingenuous to pretend like it still meant the same thing to me.

(Just so we're on the same page, no, I am not going to show you the quote now, or likely ever.)

I still think it's a cute message, and far from a bad one.  But it's not something I'd feel particularly proud to share.  There was a time when I saw all of my words as golden, everything worth sharing, holding it all up as a key to unlock the mystery of myself.  But that isn't really true.  Some things are deep and insightful clues to my psyche.  Some things are just cute jokes.  I'm finally learning to differentiate the two.

hands down

As you can see, I am pretty comfortable with expressing myself through the medium of words.  Nearly any format (play, poem, texting, blog post, novel) will do, and I'll happily prattle away until the cows repatriate themselves.  But there are other media than these, my friends, and in those, I can struggle.

Music is my next-most-comfortable realm to live in, and I've got a good sense for it, though my technical fundamentals are lacking.  I'm working on that -- I've been studying music theory -- but it takes time, sometimes conflicts with my natural instincts (which is right and good, instincts aren't everything).  When music clicks for me, it really clicks, and through great effort, that clicking will happen more regularly in the future.

The problems really start to arise when it comes to visual media.  I'm just not a very visual person.  I didn't even have any sort of emotional reaction to a piece of graphic art until I was around 27 years old.   This was the piece:

By the German street artist El Bocho.

This piece is enormous, roughly twice the height of a person.  It's hidden behind a series of blocking walls, so there's no way to see it coming -- you just turn a corner and BAM, your entire field of view is filled with this face.  I stood, absolutely transfixed by it, for several minutes, and then couldn't really bring myself to leave it for another ten or fifteen.  It was a transformative moment for me.  It's still burned into my mind.  It always will be.  I don't know its name, and I don't care.

After that, visual art started to make a little more sense.  I visited some modern art museums, and really pushed myself to see what was going on in the artist's head.  I visited some historical art museums, and found myself appreciating the development of artistic style and technique throughout history, and then even throughout individual artist's lives.  It seemed so much simpler, so much less inscrutable than I'd once believed.

I decided to take an art class, and signed up for an online one that seemed like it would offer a really good overview.  I got myself a nice drawing pad and some good pencils, and was off to a pleasant start, but then I was given a miserable task.

My third or fourth assignment was to draw an object without looking at the paper.  I didn't understand the point of it, and the teacher didn't care to explain.  I tried anyway, but it was grueling, and I deeply resented receiving a terrible grade when I hadn't had any notion of the value of the assignment.  The teacher gave a flippant response when I complained that I didn't understand why he'd asked us to do that, and I quit the class.

I regret it.  I have many ideas that would be far better suited for expressing visually than in words, and I believe I could develop the skills necessary, even if I'm not naturally suited for it.  I just wasn't ready to blindly follow a teacher's advice at that point, although I recognize now that I should have just swallowed my pride and stuck with it, even if he wasn't the tenderest shepherd of my fragile feelings.

Sometimes, the more talented you are, the harder it is to learn something new!  The smallest setback is a huge blow to someone conditioned to success.  But it's vital to keep in mind that, if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.  It might be time to pay the old sketchpad another visit.

fanfare for the common mind

At work today, we were introduced to some new employees, and they were asked to tell us a "fun fact" about themselves.  One woman's fun fact was this:  "I am born on Christmas."

I was amazed by her choice of the present tense.  Myself, I would always refer to the date of my birth in the past tense ("I was born in January.")  But this woman's birthday is an ongoing, perhaps still-anticipated event.  She is born on Christmas.  This year, and again next year, and every year thereafter, she will be born on Christmas.  I was only born once.  I feel a pauper in comparison.

Icebreakers are a problematic institution at best.  The people with less to share feel worse, and the people who already feel great about themselves feel better.  I despair of these sorts of feedback loops where the rich get richer.  I have looked in their hearts and I know that pretty much everyone is excellent, but some of us are far, far better at showcasing our excellence than others.

I take great pains to talk to everyone around me as much as possible, because I love talking to people, and so many have such interesting things to say.  But I have a combination of intellectual energy, natural curiosity, and free time that is hard to match, so I have more to say on more diverse subjects than nearly anybody I talk to.  That's not a slight against them -- it's a matter of circumstance, and nothing more -- but it does mean that I wind up spending a great deal of time telling others what I'm up to, and it's nobody's fault that I both talk a lot and have a lot to share.

So, I have developed something of a reputation as a polymath, which of course I do not mind, except that it's starting to feel a little...gratuitous?  I'll be talking to a coworker, and I'll mention whatever my latest set of interests is, and they will respond normally and enthusiastically, but then (and this is a recent development) there will be a sort of...of course you do that tossed in as punctuation.  "It's great you've taken up ukulele!  I'd expect nothing less from a genius like you."

As someone who seems compulsively driven to seek recognition of his genius from others, this ought to make me very happy.  But it's become such a recurrent refrain that it's almost starting to feel pat and unearned.  Something said so frequently becomes so much less special.  I love you.

What a thing to be concerned about -- my coworkers have too high an opinion of me!  But of course they do, and you believe that the people you respect think too highly of you, too.  We're all frauds, here.  But I know the secret, that there's no such thing as intelligence.  And once you've figured that one out, you can't help but feel ashamed when you're adored for it.

muses in the mist

Malfred had always been unlucky.  His bad luck began the day he was born and his mother named him Malfred.  In her as-yet-undiagnosed schizophrenic ranting, she assured the incredulous nurses that it was an old family name.  Yes, they replied, and perhaps it should stay that way, but she could not be swayed.

Possibly due to his unfortunate name, and more possibly due to the pernicious influence of mental illness on every aspect of life, Malfred learned to temper his expectations from an early age.  He became a sort of virtuoso of bad news, riding the crest of each wave of disaster with an expertise usually found in people who drive extremely fancy but tasteful automobiles.

His even reaction to catastrophe, while laudable, did little to endear him to his classmates.  Throughout his childhood, Malfred was perplexed to observe the growth of social bonds all around him, which nevertheless always seemed to fail to grow in his direction.  He was well known as a harbinger of destruction, and though he always emerged more-or-less unscathed, those in his proximity rarely considered themselves the better off, and he had no friends.

This sorry state of affairs lasted roughly until the end of the most awkward stages of puberty in Malfred's cohort, when two events occurred, roughly simultaneously, that, as far as Malfred was concerned, Put Him On The Map.

The first of these was the sudden, complete, and final mental breakdown ("episode") of Malfred's mother, who discovered one of Malfred's pubic hairs on the bathroom floor and, before she knew it, had made the mental leap to scaling Mt. Everest in her holy quest to spare her son from the ravages of adulthood by, basically, interring him in a monastery at the top.  That there was no monastery, no mountain, and possibly no pubic hair did not dissuade her, and the fire department had to be called to pry her off of the chimney.

With a kindly uncle's guidance, Malfred successfully had himself emancipated, and had his mother indefinitely committed to an institution which would be far better suited to deal with her unique perspective on reality than her sixteen-year-old son could.

The very afternoon of her fatefully imagined climb, just two hours before Malfred returned home to discover the liberating scene, he had met the first love of his life.  Her name was Tuva, and she knew how to look at him in a way that completely disarmed him.  She disregarded the aura of misfortune he carried, as overwhelmed by the power of youthful hormones as he, and they began a relationship.

There are two more stories like this in Malfred's life, similar enough to elide.  They happened years later, and apart, and affected him in much the same way.  He never forgot those girls, even after he had been so long separated from them, ages past when the cruel happenstances of his life had driven them far from his side, so that only a wisp of their light and laughter remained.

Malfred was a lonely man, but an imaginative one.  All that was prologue.

social mediation

Perhaps you've heard of the research detailing how Facebook can cause depression.

Now, I'm not trying to be tech-alarmist here.  Any form of social interaction can result in depression.  Facebook just enables us to have thousands of minor interactions per day at a faster rate than was ever feasibly possible before.  I don't just mean active interactions -- I'm including just glancing at someone's status update.

The gist of the research is that people with low self-esteem, when forced to constantly compare themselves to others, suffer undue levels of social stress.  This stress, unchecked, can eventually develop into anxiety and depression.  This occurs primarily because people tend to share more of the good things in their lives on Facebook and other social networking platforms, so users are generally bombarded with how great their friends' and acquaintances lives are (seem to be).  Whereas users are all too aware of the problems in their own lives, even in spite of the cheerful facades they maintain on social media, and wind up assuming everybody else is doing better than they are.

That isn't a problem for people like me, who have high self-esteem, and know that how great we are is a fact for the record, irrespective of what's going on in ours and others' lives.  We just post all the good stuff about our lives, deal with the bad stuff quietly, and make everyone else miserable thereby!

But there is a flip side to this dastardly equation.  All those happy people you see out there?  They're all suffering somehow.  Everybody on your friends list, at some point, feels as if their lives are spinning out of control.  Everyone is looking for a way to keep it together for one more day.

Remember that, the next time you talk to somebody who seems to be doing great.  We're all under a tremendous amount of stress.  We all carry in our hearts a bevy of regrets, shames, anxieties, and creeping uncertainties.  Most of us, I hope, have found our own ways to cope with these, but they're still present.  Remember that, and let it be the source of a little more kindness in your day.

words on fire

In the poetry class I took in those days of yore three-and-a-half years ago, (back when I still believed in a variety of things that have since proven to be one of the following:  true, incredibly true, indescribably true, and absolutely, horribly false.  Yes, I was right about almost everything.  That's my way.), the very same poetry class that provided the impetus that introduced me to the catalyst that got this blog up and running, I was given a very valuable, possibly invaluable, piece of advice by my professor, whose words ever rang clearly and positively with the unmistakable timbre of truth.

I had floated to her the idea of gifting my wife a poem for our 4th wedding anniversary, an idea I found to be utterly romantic, a true present of one's self, my soul wrapped up in some ink and paper.  My professor, in her wisdom, drew me up short.  Shaking her head, she told me it would be a terrible idea to make such a gift, at least to a non-poet.  She was bound not to get it (at least, not in the fancy-poem way I'd intended), and then I was bound to be awfully upset, and the whole thing would be a shambles.

It was a good point.  When you're getting someone a gift, get them something they can appreciate, not something that's special to you.  That professor had a lot of great advice when it came to poems, and I'm not done relating it to you, you lucky dog.

The next piece of tender guidance she offered was this:  do not rely on your emotions to fuel your poetry.  She had no problem with emotions being present in poems as such, but she was wary of their serving as the sole inspiration for the works.  Believe it or not, it is very possible to run out of emotions this way!  It can lead to very fertile works, but few of them, and that's not what makes a good poet.  Poets must add inspiration to the world, not subtract it.

This is a lesson I am still trying to learn.  Poetry is a noble and admirable endeavor, and I don't want to cheapen it by getting my feelings all over it.  But it's so tempting to relate a story that moved me in such florid language as to obscure, a little bit, the honest pain that waits inside.  That creates, in the poem, a little escape for me, a little safe spot where I can go to express my pain without activating all the world's mechanisms that spring into motion the instant a privileged person like me says "OUCH, MY SOUL".

I wrote those raw poems.  I shared them with my class.  By and large, it freaked them out.  Their most common response was to say "are you okay?"  I tried to tell them that yes, for their purposes I am fine, and please judge the poem on its own merits and don't treat me like I'm taking the bandage off of a third degree burn.  That's what I'm doing, spiritually, but I want feedback, not sympathy.  I want to be corrected, not consoled.

You were probably hoping to read a poem, but I'm not quite ready to share a full one yet.   Instead, let me offer you the first two stanzas of the poem I shared part of two years ago, "A Surfeit of Wishes".

Oh, did I write this.

Over and over again, I wrote it-

I wrote it with tears on the floor,

With the look in my eyes across a table,

With my jaw working soundlessly.

I wrote and unwrote with the fury of one

Driven by the endless roaring gulph inside,

Who sought just a moment’s rest from fire.

Having cast the words into the flames, I realized late

That smoke, too, sends a message.