insanity.

well. i haven't posted in a little while now, so i thought i should write something. of course, there's nothing really compelling to share...just an impending birthday which amounts to nothing more than another ordinary day which i can choose to ignore or spend anxiously contemplating the urgency of an hour-glass with only 2/3 of its sand still up top.

i am really not enjoying school at all this semester. not at all. i am wanting more than anything to be done with Rochester...or the University of, at the very least. sometimes i panick thinking about what lies ahead of me - the rest of life. sometimes i wonder if i am being foolish to wish this time away. if it's like anything else in my life, this season will rank among the many on which i look back with thirsty if-onlies and lamenting ought-to-haves. somehow, knowing that doesn't empower me in any wise way to appreciate what i have before me. i've always been one to do my real living in an anxious hypothetical all the while absent from the moment at hand. it's such a restless way to live. anticip....-ation. never satisfied. i spend so much time trying to outwit fate like some slippery sniper. i scheme a sly defensive at every turn lest in my vulnerability life should somehow be snapped out from under me. ironically - life lies beyond the walls i've built. even in my dreams, i'm inhibited - impotent to approach the guy who's caught my eye, or kiss him when there's opportunity. there's always a second guess. a fearful footnote. i wish i could just. let. go.

i don't know when or where, but somehow i learned to take life way too seriously.

but how do you learn to take life less seriously? how do you learn that? what if there's no one or no thing to break your fall? what about those you've promised to catch should they fall? you can't just say, "Oh. Sorry. I was busy playing hopscotch."

anyhow - i haven't figured it out. there has to be a balance. there has to be a way to take calculate less, to let go of the obsessive probabalistic forcasting and let the chips fall where they will. it can't really matter what charm you're clutching in your sweaty fist, can it? it can't all depend on how prepared you are for every alternative, right? what's wrong with surprise? it seems i've made a profession of weeding out the unexpected by expecting everything. it's like cleaning house and putting on some coffee with the expectation that company may arrive at any moment unannounced. And at the same time, walking around in your boxer shorts so as not to wrinkle fresh clothes should no one show up.

i think the answer lies in restricting friendship to those who you wouldn't mind seeing you in boxers and who don't mind cold coffee, dirty dishes, and dusty furniture.

and, well, that's pretty much what i've done all along!

: )

legacy at the speed of sound

yeah. i know like most things in life i've got it twisted up in a way which defeats the purpose. and i know the things i have to say aren't the kind of things you post in a place like this, but i don't mind so much. i'm just sorting things out. and when i go through my things, i look at every scrap of paper, every receipt. and i save nearly everything. most people would say i make a mess when i clean. if you know me beyond whatever can be imagined using only the entries in a blog - you know that this is me. i often fall into fits of metaphor and verbal catastrophe. i often skip through mental ghettos making little sense. but i do it passionately. how much more so when i'm speaking to myself! i guess i just like stitching quilts of seemingly random thoughts. little squares of fabric cut from the same bolt stitched back into the whole. i also like how words sound together. sometimes many words together. sometimes just one or two. it's like food. sometimes a statement requires the complex architecture of curry. other thoughts are as simple as celery. both have a time and place. this? my blog? yeah - it's more like indian food. probably not even good indian food. but my mind is definitely not celery these days.

anyway, how words sound together is sometimes - certainly sometimes if not most times - more important to me than the meaning forced upon them...though a pairing violates the prescription of every grammar, a novel lexical marriage is somehow procreative. "be fruitful and multiply," the command went. i've got the fruit part down. and this? this is my multiplication.

new ways of seeing, new visions - realities are born from forbidden semantic trysts. a view can be just as interesting, maybe even more so, when seen through dirty windows framed in chipping paint. it's inductive. it takes work, effort to see. you have to want to see. transparency can actually blind you from what you might otherwise see if you were actually trying. passivity can whitewash the world's tiger-maple. so with words, sometimes it's critical to make your point in a crowded scene, one obscurred by the soot and dust of so many years of neglect. and sometimes the dictionary is of little use. the meaning isn't often superficial. consider this practise.

so. this evening is a friday evening and i'm spending it with Dalwhinnie Scotch and Jeff Buckley - two good friends. the only two good friends who aren't busy with something else tonite.

and i'm realising that sometime over fifteen years ago in scotland, my scotch was made. strange. i've never been to scotland, but here i am drinking it. a great-great-great something to me - my mother's mother's father's father's father came from over there. the sometime Earl of Lennox just outside Glasgow. maybe he was buried in a wooden box. maybe became the soil, the grass, the field. maybe he's in my scotch now. what an odd, ironic circle that would be.

and then there's the late mister buckley. when i listen to him sing or look at a picture of him, i know what the word beautiful means and when to use it - again, the dictionary was of little use there. he's dead. dead at 30. i'm almost 30. his beauty is like a pressed flower found in an old family bible. it's a new and different beauty to the one who finds it than was appreciated by the one who placed it there. it's never the same when the life leaves. and if the one who placed it there goes back amid the pages to see the treasured beauty, it's not there. the matter which once formed the flower is there and still holds its general shape and rumors of the original color, but the original beauty is gone. the beholder's eye either sees through the pressed bloom as a sacramental reference to a memory and resurrects the original beauty in the mind or it closes the book in disappointment. i didn't put the blossom in between the pages. i bought the book and found what someone else thought was beautiful. and it is, still. but i wonder what it was that first rested on the page before the book was closed. i can only imagine.

so i'm listening to a dead man's voice. that's a relatively new thing. we can't listen to abraham lincoln recite the gettysburg address. we can't listen to jesus preach the sermon on the mount. we just open the pages of a book we inherited and view dried flowers in bewilderment, imagining the unplucked beauty. i wonder, will someone listen to my voice after i'm dead? it's hard to wrap my mind around. you can be gone from here - dust from dust - and echos of you persist - bouncing off canyons you yourself never saw - echos above the age of consent. you have no mouth to keep shut and the waveforms of your last cellphone conversation pogostick about the universe. you - disembodied - absent - like someone that got off a train. when it's your time, it's your time, they say. but what is it like to turn around, to look back as the train plows onward...with your voice...your image...your ideas and words? the letter you wrote sitting in a jail cell in birmingham? it's a mitotic parting of the self with itself...the whole into halves...or maybe just a half and a half not. whether you believe in life after death is inconsequential. part of you lives on with or without your consent.

what would i leave? what would go on when i step off?

maybe this.

and what would i take with me? what can we take with us?

Jeff sings a song called "Satisfied Mind"

How many times have you heard someone say,
"If I had money, I would do things my way."
But little they know, that it's so hard to find
one rich man in ten, with a satisfied mind.

Money can't buy back all your youth when you're old,
a friend when you're lonely, or peace to your soul.
The wealthiest person, is a pauper at times
compared to the man with a satisfied mind.

When my life is over and my time has run out,
my friends and my loved ones, I will leave there's no doubt.
But one thing's for certain, when it comes my time,
I'll leave this old world with a satisfied mind.
But one thing's for certain, when it comes my time,
I'll leave this old world with a satisfied mind mind mind, mind mind,
satisfied mind.

thoughts on solitude and fateful circumstance.

if i were blind, would you be more attractive to me? if you were blind, would you want to see my face with your hands? would you bother to ask or would you tire of what you could hear of me? would you shut me up and urge a new, sensuous communication of stealth ballerina fingertips and goosebumps?

if both of us were blind, would we go to presbyterian churches just to hear the organ? would it thrill us like sitting in first car of a roller coaster does now? would we dare sit in the first car of a roller coaster...if we were blind?

if i were deaf would i recognize hands like i do voices?

i wonder what waking up feels like when you're deaf-blind.

i wonder, if i were somehow paralysed, how magical things like walking or brushing my teeth would seem. i'd find myself jealous of dogs and spiders.

surely there are things i've never felt which others have. and surely there are things i'll never feel which others can. am i blind? deaf? i must be. to something. but what? i suppose my wondering about what it is to be blind and deaf betrays a blindness to blank and black and deafness to utter silence. i am blind to blindness, deaf to deafness.

think of how much less obsessed we'd be with our weight, our bodies, our highlights, or the whiteness of our teeth...how many burdensome preoccupations could we just let go of if we never, ever, ever again looked into a mirror or saw a snapped shot of our candid, unmade selves.

i suppose this happens to people whose cars collide tragically or those who survive an aneurism, those who find themselves born suddenly into new circumstances which redefine life and themselves.

it would be a kind of threshold where you step reluctantly into a new life. where even the reluctance is retrospective as you wake having entered before deciding to knock.

you'd let go of pride and surrender your independence to those who care for you - some familiar some completely strange. there must be a time when you still have to choose it. either let go of your old life, and embrace the new, or cling to a memory of old one with the citing inalienable rights which are now alien and then i suppose you swim up a psychological stream trying to retain what you knew yourself to be. and you either acquiesce and discover your authentic self stripped of its stoicism and security, or you grope miserably for the mask again.

people who've lived in the midst of war must know this. you'd never see me climbing a tree to collect robins' eggs for breakfast or boiling shoe leather and tree bark...at least not while i had options. but there comes a time when your options narrow - when the choices fall like leaves until only a few or maybe only one hangs before you. does it at that new moment seem beautiful against a bare tree? does bitter then melt into sweet?

if so, can we not now choose for ourselves what is sweet and what is bitter? can we blind ourselves to the well clothed tree and focus on a single leaf as though it were the only leaf, - the leaf which circumstance demands we pluck as ours - and own it?

could we celebrate that lone leaf as though it were the precious last and we with Fortune's favor have found it before the wind?

or

must everything we see and experience be framed with a periphery of seductive possibilities - none of which can promise anything - all of which bat their lashes and pose to flatter their best side.

must we starve in arrogant deliberation under the assumption that there is grass on the other side?

always almost.

running restlessly toward rest and never more than halfway to happy.

i wanna live till i die...

i know that like everything else in life - time marches on and one worry passes its baton to the next. i very easily buy into the illusion that i am in control and if i just do this or that thing - everything will work and if i somehow drop the ball - the whole act will go sour.

i want so very much to "get ahead" to "do what's expected of me and do the 'right' thing" to "make every minute count" to "get the most out of every opportunity" to "make whoever wants to be, proud of me" and sometimes, i think all my striving - the effort that so often ends in a quizzical moment of quick-change disappointment is....

well, it's like when you go to an all-you-can-eat buffet and you try to inflate the value of your dollar by piling the food higher than your appetite can acommodate - and then - instead of eating and feeling satisfied - you eat and feel sick.

sort of defeats the purpose.

sometimes i think that's my approach to life though...i want to get the most out of every second and in the end - the quality of my life is reduced to that of an all-you-can-eat buffet: food in drag. cheap, made-up, and seductive when dimly lit. calories piled high only to be purged in the body's natural revolt. how many calories is my statistics class?

it's a hard lesson, but i need to learn to pick my "restaurants" for quality not quantity. i need to search out the places that use fresh, organic ingredients delivered in healthy, modest portions. i need to invite only friends to sit with me. we need to take our time and really appreciate the flavors present to each bite. i definitely need to balance what's on the plate in front of me with the room i have to put it in. no more toting metaphorical styrofoam boxes packed with economy-minded leftovers for a "later" that never comes. the only later that most of those wishful leftovers ever see is that moment of frustration when the fridge is cleared in one epic sweep and every forgotten moldy thing surrenders its space to the new gallon of milk and carton of eggs that won't fit otherwise.

sigh. is it possible to learn these lessons and put the wisdom into practice and better the will-be memories you have yet to make? or are these the things that you are left to reflect on while staring at the wallpaper you never would have chosen for yourself in the room in the nursing home where you live until you die.

Back to Beit Sefer (school)...

i'm a little nervous about this year, especially since it's my last at Rochester. it's going to be a tough one. i have my work cut out for me. i went back and forth on whether or not to relist my degree as a BA with a double concentration. the BS degree is a full 9 additional courses and will require i seriously hustle to fit everything in by May. but i've decided to stick to my original goal rather than lower my expectations. i think of it as running some kind of track relay - and how you get really tired preceding the last lap and you begin to contemplate just slowing down. you reassess whether winning matters and you have to make a choice. you either commit to the optimism you had before you started and ignore the phlegm that choking you, the calves that burn, and wheeze that tallies each breath OR you revise your goal and try to rationalize disqualification. experience has taught me that even though i fatigue easily and don't really have a winner's physiology, when i set a goal, i usually attain it unless i get in my own way. so, i'm sure i'll revisit this decision again and again throughout the year, but i'm going to do my best to finish a dual degree program: a BA in linguistics and a BS in BCS. there really isn't any advantage to doing it. it won't really make a difference in grad school or employment. the only difference it will make is whether i look back on this undertaking and feel i really achieved what i set out to or came satisfactorily close. understandably, i tend to set ridiculously high goals for myself, but that's what's been so exciting - looking at seemingly impossible things - israel being the most recent - and robbing them of their impossibility.

at this point, very little seems to be cooperating - i won't get into it, but it's not merely uphill right now. what was a steep hike has graduated to full-on rockclimbing.

wish me luck - and understand if you don't hear much from me or if when you do i'm a miserable bastard. i still love you.

the inauguration of a new world

i thought i'd ramble for a bit while i sit here alone on a friday night listening to the sound of a bell on a collar on a cat that is trying her best to free herself of it. other than the tinny sound of the bell and the muffled yelps of what must be one of those obnoxious little dogs - it's quiet here. it's the kind of quiet which prompts one to silence it with noise - iTunes, television, even the hum of the air-conditioner though tonite is more september than august and there's no need to cool the place. it's nice. churchlike. church with a yelping dog and a bell, but there is a peace about this messy apartment which seduces one to contemplate.

some of you are close enough to me - physically - to have suffered through the verbal solutions of my recent evaluation of faith in light of science and faith in light of historical fact. it has not been easy to welcome once again - dichotomy. my life until a few years back was spent trying to reconcile an unrelinquishable, determined faith with the persistent sexuality of my experience - constantly mediating the two extremes. to say until suggests i've finished with all that. that's not true. i've merely reached a point where both parties within my conflicted singular soul are two exhausted to compete with each other - furnishing me in the meantime with seeming peace. i've learned a few things which, when invoked, shame each into a managable silence.

but to resume my initial point, "recent evaluation" stretches back a year or two when i returned to school but the actual crisis has been within the past several months. i call it a crisis because for me it is very much a crisis. it's something like a slow growing cancer, perhaps a pregnancy - nothing that will kill you in two months, but something which must be addressed before it crosses the threshold of severity. it's something which your friends and family know about - maybe - and which surfaces for one reason or another in conversation but graduates from news to smalltalk in a matter of months. there it remains largely dormant beneath a fascade of normalcy which smoothes over any alterations and makes the toll appear more mild, more gradual than radical and threatening. inside - even when i'm too busy to entertain it - i feel the difference. much like with cancer, i do not feel well. my dis-ease is more the chemo than the cancer though - the cancer grows slowly and usurps it's priority with deceptive courtesy - the chemo is what makes me violently ill. and just as with cancer, the illness that comes with chemo is a good kind of sick. it's a sickness that reminds you you're fighting and ultimately restores health. that's kind of what i'm feeling. very sick inside - privately sick. i know i have to ask these questions. i know i have to commit to looking for their answers even if there are in fact no answers. i must search long enough until i've committed to the questions themselves as answers and discover whatever sleeping questions that might awaken. i am very sure that this too shall pass as it always has, and i know the process will refine me in ways which will surrender their logic when the time is right.

however obscure and elusive things are now, today's opacity is more transparent than yesterday's clear.

i know i haven't said much here to make what i'm talking about understandable to you, reader. i guess that's not really my point. i don't really want to try to do that. it'd disappoint both of us. because it's my growth, literally as well as the figure mentioned above, i don't think i will ever be able to make it remotely appreciable to you. should i seem to succeed in such an explanation - i will have failed to have apprehended it myself. it is like a circle though. i can tell you that much. like a gold band. it is going back to where i was before and seeing it differently. it is going back to that same place and bringing with me new things to put there - like renting an apartment from an earlier season in one's life, and furnishing it with the comforts and collections that have accumulated since that time. the walls are the same. the doors and windows and the light that shines through them - all familiar. but the surfaces which the light strikes and how the eyes perceive all of it? it's the inauguration of a new world quilted from oddly matched remnants - not wholly unfamiliar, but like the blending of two veteran flavors into a novel third, permits the distinction of constituents. nonetheless, it is only rightly called something new - something different. a marriage.

my life is marrying my life. this is the seam - the line between patches. the leap from paisley to plaid, and the needle penetrates with each needful stitch to join the two. who can see the hole i feel mending. who can see the whole?

Sorry, little ones...

didn't mean to disappoint with a slight hiatus from the Third Book of Samuel. Writing Torah is tough work, and this young prophet has lost his vision. Unfortunately.

I am starting to miss Israel. I really liked it there. It's weird, but...well, I'm weird. I felt at home in whackyland. Since coming home, I've pretty much been a nervous wreck. Of course, I ran out of medication (Wellbutrin) in Israel, and while it was fine for a time, it's less fine now. A friend of mine had some on hand from before when she was taking it, and made a generous contribution to my sanity or the general appearance of such. Thanks. So basically, my trip down to Atlanta was more of a drug-run. I did manage to squeeze in some pontifical parental linguistic enlightenment for the benefit of young deaf children. Not that this will mean anything to most of you, but I seriously was impressed with how far I've come as an instructor in my ability to explain complicated things simply and get inside the heads of my students to help them sort out confusion.

Anyway - after a rather long, intimate reunion with the Atlanta airport as my flight crew was stranded in Alabama and I was grounded due to T-storms, I did finally make it back home at 2AM.

Looking at my mail makes me lightheaded and short of breath. I seriously feel like that Verizon commercial where there's this mass of people following the person on the phone as their "network." Only, I don't have a phone (as most of you know), and these tag-alongs are not my network, rather a cloud of CO2 producing obligations with account numbers and (800) numbers which convene and conspire to dilute my enthusiasm for life and inspire more firey stunts from high places. (not that I've ever done a firey stunt from a high place)

I am looking forward to school starting. I really am. Someone remind me of this sometime in the second week of December.

Life feels like it's falling apart. Life feels like it's coming together. Love feels distant. Love feels imminent. Freedom seems like a useless abstraction - like someone's pointing up into the sky and shouting at me "There!" I look. I trace the vector carefully from the fingertip outward - but what should be a line, direct - point to point, is more like a cone. Only the starting point is precise and identifiable. "There! becomes an expansive base of possibilities and beyond from any of these I could look back and say, "Yes, there it is. That's the line. I see it now." But only looking back. Looking ahead, I know only direction - there is no visible destination. What's more is that each step "toward" is made with the assumption that I'd want to go there if I knew where I was going. What if, what if, I get there and it's nothing more than a place to sit and missing the starting-line? What then? When I was young, I felt like an adult and would have jumped through any hoop to win a place as peer among the adults. As I "become" an adult, the battle reverses. If there was only some way to convince the young that I too am youthful yet. If there was only some way to remember that the old, convalescent on the bench outside the sliding doors of the nursing home is no different. We experience - whatever that means. Experience is not simply showing up, but being present, and reflecting on what happens afterwards. We claim that our experience amounts to wisdom, and maybe it does. Often we dishonestly count for Wisdom what is better appraised as bitter retrospective counsel forced on the next generation. The authority of our tenure insists they walk a different route than we did lest they stumble on the same stones. Or, we contradict with demands to trudge dutifully down the roads we ourselves paved lest they enjoy what we could not or shame us with the discovery of a shorter route. No matter what we call the quality which sprouts in response to years of calculated misery and chance vitality, it cannot fairly describe the elusive inner qualities we mean to invoke when we speak of our age. I'm getting older. As I age, I appreciate youth. Youth unappreciated - the youth of the young - is not the youth we long for. We long for youth which can enjoy its youthfulness. Growing old one apprehends his youth, remembers the salient simplicity of sandwhiches cut into squares, the magic of holidays, and the awe inspiring commonplace. One must grow old to grow young. Not all do. Of those that do, not many do so gracefully.