I don't want it to be summer. I need it to be summer.
It always seems to come right when you most desperately need it.
I was in the car with two of my friends and they started talking about how the other day one of their mutual friends had been driving and gesticulating while talking to the passenger and had broken the rear view mirror.
And I thought about it. Particularly because something I tend to say a lot is "life's always better with someone riding shotgun." And because driving is one of the things that I love, and something that keeps me sane, in a very weird way.
If you're anything like me and you occasionally think about the journey of life in automotive terms, then you'll understand why the 'rear view mirror' story started me on a spiral of thought.
Life without a rear view mirror is like life without anything in your trunk. You put your keys in the ignition and you drive. No baggage. The absence of hindsight would be a strangely blissful drive, in life terms. Nothing to look at but the open road ahead.
Rear view mirrors make things safer, though. You can keep an eye on what you've passed and can know what's coming before it hits you. They give you greater perspective.
Or at least I can hope so. Sometimes I want to smash it and just keep on driving.
This is being published soon in a campus magazine, which has revived my dream of actually publishing some of my writings some day in a book and has made me so simultaneously humbled, proud, and hopeful that I thought I'd re-post it.
*
airport thoughts
This is a melee. There is so much noise. It’s almost too much humanity to handle without headphones on. The old moccasin man in front of me is doing Sudoku in pen. There are babies gurgling, handhelds clicking, and plastic voices coming over the intercom.
I am angry. I guess that proves that I care.
There are few things I love more than traveling alone. There is a simple independence in it. You casually buy a sandwich and a bottle of water, sit at your leisure, casually keeping an eye on the time. You don’t have to talk to anyone or deal with anyone else’s crap. You’re going somewhere, getting away for a while, just you, yourself. You can probe the corners of your brain in the quiet. They fucked up your sandwich, it’s not what you ordered, but it still tastes just fine.
There are no outlets in this place.
A father is lovingly gazing at his son, a reminder that he is not alone, and, if he’s lucky, he may have a few more generations of remembrance than the rest of us. In our hope to leave our mark we leave our children, and we hope to god they will like us so they’ll tell the world about how great we were, or we thought we were.
I’m going somewhere today. I’m always going somewhere. But where am I really going?
We actually put thought into things like matching our bracelets with our headbands and shoes.
You can see the world in an airport. All types of people. The business executive taps away, the clefts in his forehead growing as you watch. The harangued parents sprint back and forth in some bizarre relay, handing off babies and bottles and clinky colorful toys. Restless leg gal jackhammers the ground in the hopes that she might be able to sink into it and hide for a while. You can read the sadness on some, and you wonder where they’ve been, where they’re coming from…and why they look so god damned exhausted with life. Give me your tired and your sick, your weary and your broken? They’re all here, lost in the limbo that an airport is; a junction between this place and the next, suspended somewhere between numbness, sterilized silver countertops and really ugly carpet.
You, just watching life froth and bubble in front of you, passing you by. Waiting for something to pick you up off the ground and take you somewhere new.
*
A friend posted this the other day and I thought I'd share it's beauty.
*
A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.
He then asked the students, if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.
The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls.
He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.
The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up the other spaces in the jar.
He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous 'yes.'
The professor then produced two cups of coffee from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand.
The students laughed.
'Now,' said the professor, as the laughter subsided, 'I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things - family, children, health, passions.
Things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.
The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, house, and car. The sand is everything else --the small stuff.
If you put the sand into the jar first,' he continued, 'there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you.
So pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out to dinner.
There will always be time to clean the house and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first -- the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.'
One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the coffee represented.
The professor smiled.
'I'm glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of cups of coffee with a friend.'
Today I am in a really good mood for no apparent reason.
I haven't been like this for a while. It's so good to be back. I almost feel like I was asleep for a little bit there, like I was going through life with my eyes half open.
And now it's the kind of thing where you're walking down the street and the smile just spreads its way over your face, its tendrils creeping across until it's firmly stuck on and you can't wipe it off. When you get the champagne bubble feeling in your stomach that's just pure...happy.
I am also re-discovering my loves for good music, good tequila, and good coffee.
I love conversations that spark big epiphanies about yourself, or about things in your life. It's like the jiggling around in the keyhole your brain needs for everything to click into place.
Click.
I realized why I enjoy the company of gay men so much. Not that I didn't know that it was because they are fabulous and fun and so much more in tune with my way of thinking than straight men are. But after yesterday's intense four hour conversation about sexuality and male-female dynamics, and going on a tirade about the sexualization of women, I realized something.
Even when you're with women, there's this competitive undercurrent in everything. It's almost worse than with men (which is why, typically, I don't really get along with women or care for their company. Except for my besties, but they're diamonds in the rough and I'm sure they know that too.)
And I went into a lot of detail with this in said tirade, but with men, sex is always between you. Always. I don't care what you say, you may be the most platonic of friends, blah blah blah but it's biologically, subconsciously...built into your bones and chemistry. It creates a really difficult power dynamic (which, I will admit, goes both ways). In any case, there's really no way to have a bare-bones situation that takes sex out of the equation.
But what I love? Gays don't sexualize me. The awkward sex-charged dynamic is completely out of the picture. We aren't even competing over the same thing, oddly, even though we may both turn our heads when a good looking guy walks past us.
We typically then turn to each other and burst out laughing.
I also had a really big epiphany about myself, and relationships, and the way I handle them. I'm not going to talk about all of it here, because a lot of it is stuff that would just sound weird written down. I'll do my best to summarize.
I have really weird ideas about things. Life, people, sexuality, sex, thought processes, the world around us. And my ideas I have about relationships are pretty weird too. I hate titles, and I hate labels, and I know that sounds so pretentious and is such a typical thing to say but it's true. For me, a relationship is about that commitment without needing the tie.
I hate exclusivity. And that's not because I'm a slut. I'm actually one of the more sexually conservative people I know. I hate exclusivity because it creates a false obligation. The true obligation, or truth of the matter, is that you should be opting not to be with other people because you want to be with that person. There is a natural exclusivity that our false exclusivity corrupts and eats away at.
And you can call me crazy, but really, it works for me and makes sense to me. In my past involvements (I am going to call them that because I have to call them something) I've been able to go to a party, or a dance, or whatever, and dance and talk to other people but not for one second think about being with them like that because I am that committed to the other person, and I don't need false obligation to keep me there. I don't need that string, I don't need to be kept on a leash, and I think it's silly that the thing that inevitably destroys so many relationships, this false obligation, is something that we make mandatory right from the start. That's what being involved with someone is about.
If you are secure in yourself and your relationship, and secure in the fact that if the other person feels the same way they will meet you halfway and be with you and if they don't they won't and oh well, and you don't need that extra string. That is the mark of someone having true confidence, in themselves and their partner, not needing that extra socially constructed reassurance.
Try falling without safety nets. It's scary as hell, but the rush is irreplaceable.
So my idea of commitment is a little unconventional. As are a lot of my other ideas about intimacy and romance. My point is, though, that I have a lot of shit figured out about myself, and I am very comfortable with this area of my life.
I'm tired of the game. I really am. Sure, it's fun to play, but I feel like I'm ahead of it. I'm trying to find someone who's figured it out the same way I have. Not to be with necessarily...just to be at the very least a little comforted that at some point there is hope of finding someone who gets it.
I've come to accept that part of me will always want a relationship out of my life, as I think everybody does. Having that level of knowledge about another human being is beautiful and rare, and everyone wants that. But at the same time, part of me will always want to be single, to work on the relationship I'm building with myself.
Honestly, if you ask me, you will get a different answer every day depending on how I'm feeling. And that's okay. I'm just taking what I can get and trying to make lemonade out of these lemons, adding my sugar and seeing what I can do. I'm dealing with it. Taking it day by day. And I'm focusing more energy on my personal development.
I basically just ranted forever to tell you that I don't even know what I want, or really what I'm doing. But my big epiphany was figuring out where I want to go and how I'm going to keep things shipshape in the meantime.
I hope that all of this made some sort of sense.
---
Frank-
I've been following PostSecret for years and have never seen one of my secrets posted. But something happened a few days ago that was much cooler.
I opened your latest PostSecret book at Barnes & Noble and read that secret on page 5 about the note found on the plane. I was shocked to realize that I had written the note a couple years ago.
I had left the note on the airplane in hopes that I could wake somebody up from the trance we get stuck in everyday and realize what is really important.
I hope he and his new wife are very happy together.
-Minneapolis
---
I still have some faith left in real love. And I don't think I'll ever really let go.
Maybe it makes me stupid, but I'd rather be a fool.
