Thursday, August 8, 2013

Onward

It's coming to that time of year again. I love listening to crickets chirping in the cool night, nights cool enough for blankets. Fall is always such a nostalgic time for me, bittersweet yet exciting from enough years of school beginnings to evoke a conditioned response: things ending, plants dying, CLASSES!!
Only this year is different. There aren't any classes, or any beginnings, to look forward to. I really should've done more job searching/life figuring out/anything really earlier this summer. But no matter, it's too late to agonize over it so all I can do is send out my applications now and recognize that all things pass. We make our way through all moments.

I'm looking forward to going out west. Hopefully Scott won't be road-tripped out because I intend to properly do the whole thing: Glacier, maybe Banff, Olympic National Park if I can finagle it. Mountains! Forests! Oceans! Part of me has been longing to see mountains for so damn long. I remember flying to San Francisco and looking down over the Rockies, thrusting out of the ground like the bones of the Earth. Ribs for our world. Even diminished by airplane distance they were formidable, texture in an otherwise textureless view. From a plane textures get lost but patterns get highlighted--that's why flying over farmland is so interesting. I love looking at the patchwork quilt of farms in Wisconsin separated by strips of forest. Every now and then there are circles in the fabric from weird circular irrigation sprayers.

Anyway, that'll be my view flying back, which is something I have been avoiding imagining. I'm generally pretty good at holding my emotions back in public but I'm worried I won't do so well this time.

Looking forward into the future terrifies me. The idea of not knowing makes me uncomfortable. But if you think about it, there are so many things we can't know. I was talking to a friend about the future, specifically about how far down the future we should cast our minds. I think that while planning for big things is very important after a certain point it becomes counterproductive to think about what point B will look like or how we'll get there. That one quote by that one guy with Maria in his name (Rainier Maria Rilke and the poem is this) keeps coming to mind lately. It's a lovely sentiment and one that I'm slowly, slowly trying to meld with a voice in my head (that sounds a lot like my mother) saying "you must find an appropriate goal and act accordingly to achieve that goal in your life BE IN SCHOOL." Who knows? I've been told that I'm idealistic and rigid in applying those ideals. Maybe that's true because it seems to me that if you choose one school of thought you can't subscribe to another one--if you are a Wanderer Liver Into Answers (ha, liver) then you can't be a Planner Straight To Grad Schooler. But maybe life is a patchwork of schools of thought and I just don't know how to sew them all together yet.

A lot of my friends are going away, going abroad. I've been pretty happy not having a facebook these months but I miss staying in touch over that. It's easier particularly because a lot of my friends don't use gmail or gchat anymore. There's something to be sad for short but more frequent communications of the sort that facebook enables. But I don't want facebook to be giving me video ads or selling my newsfeed rights to companies. I know that google and a plethora of other online entities already do that but I can't opt out of google, realistically. I don't know. We'll see.

I'm really looking forward to Scott coming home. But tomorrow, Devil's Lake with a geophysicist!! That'll be fucking awesome.

3 comments:

  1. The Maria guy poem reminds me of this comic that I read (but should read again because it was on my iPod on the train and it was rather scan-y): http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park
    I think the healthiest is to be in the middle - a good mix of Livering and Planning but maybe not all straight and open to detours.

    It's okay because FB is pretty much an amalgamation of all my other social media. You can stalk me on Twitter and Instagram (http://instagram.com/rachel_s_wang) and you wouldn't miss much. :)

    Do you know how I can subscribe to your blog like get an email when you update or something? I can't find anything.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Also you don't have dates on your blog.

      Delete
  2. hey! i've been on the road driving from madison to oregon since august 28 so i haven't had a chance to go on email until today to see your blog comment. this road trip is something i'll have to make a blog post about in the future, so it will all be up there then. i think you're really right about how the healthiest is to be in the middle--that philosophy tends to hold true for many other things in life. the hard part is figuring out how to apply that.

    i saw some of your instagram pictures, the tonkatsu ramen looks super delicious and also that girl looks a lot like marina. haha. i hope you're having a wonderful time still. also, i tried to leave a comment on the picture of your students' note to you ("you are very cute!") but instagram requires facebook to do that magical shit. what i wanted to say was, THIS IS SO CUTE.

    i don't know how to put dates on my blog or give you anything that allows easy email following. in short...blog: still don't know how to operate :|

    ReplyDelete