Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Hasta Lavista, 2008

I keep seeing news articles today about how relieved everyone is to say adios to 2008. Harsh, unequivocal, "good riddance and don't let the door hit you on your way out" sort of sentiments. Understandable. On the macro-level, this year we've seen extreme violence, national disasters, the crash of the world economy. On the micro-level, it seems like everyone I know - myself included - had to encounter significant, often painful challenges, ranging from loved ones' deaths to health traumas, heartaches to unemployment and financial woes.

Before making any resolutions or talking about 2009 - that post will come tomorrow - I just want to acknowledge 2008. It's been a brutal, trying, testing year. I can't soften that for anyone with any platitudes. But to 2008, in the abstract, I say:

  • You better have been trying to teach us something, somewhere along the way.
  • I hope we learned those lessons. I hope we passed most of the tests. I hope very few repeat-classes will be required.
  • Perspective, huh?
  • So long, farewell, auf weidersen... adieu.
That's all. I'm holding onto a few of those hard-won lessons, but otherwise... I'm letting this year go, and tomorrow, I'm embracing the new one.

This post is in memory of Richard Donahue, Dr. Paul Schoen, Bryce McVety, Dorothy Childress, and several more friends' and neighbors' parents and grandparents whom I never had the pleasure of knowing; entertainers from Heath Ledger, George Carlin, and Paul Newman to the year's-end passages of Eartha Kitt & Harold Pinter; the victims of disasters both natural and incredibly unnatural in Myanmar, India, China, the Middle East, and throughout the world. As a whole, we survived 2008; but in this year, we lost some of our best and brightest. May all of their memories be a blessing as we move forward into the new year and all coming years.

Monday, December 29, 2008

No Place Like It

I've complained about my apartment many a time, including here on this blog. But for nearly two years now, it's been my home base - which means I've officially lived in this little space for more consecutive months than I've lived in any other place since moving out of my parents' house in 1999.* I still might have my complaints... but.

After spending most of the last two weeks traveling, not having slept in my own bed for quite some time, I got home Sunday afternoon, let myself in the door, and felt an oddly comfortable thought cross my mind: Ah, I'm home.

My couches. My books. Holiday and birthday cards from friends and family lining the bookshelves. Photographs of favorite faces. And of course, Sof wagging her tail (probably no more excited to see me than to see the friend who dog-sat for her all week, but oh well).

Sometimes it takes being away to make us appreciate these little comforts of home. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, I suppose. I felt genuinely grateful to putter around my apartment, fixing myself some tea, curling up on the couch, doing some writing in my own little corner of the world. It's not so bad, this address. It feels cozy. I'm lucky to have a place as nice as this, and glad to get to spend some time here.

Still wish my windows could open, though.

*This is true. Since 1999, I have lived:
1999-2000 East Quad dorm
2000-2001 Castle Suite with the boys
2001-2002 Rosenthal Suites as an RA
2002-2003 In a lovely apartment in a haunted-mansion looking house near Watertown, MA
May-July 2003 The infamous CRAPHOLE cottage in Belhaven (Jackson, MS)
July 2003-2004 The cool 1950s "GE House of the Future" in Belhaven
July 2004-July 2005 The Seminole Kids House in Fondren (Jackson)
August 2005-May 2006 The odd Colgate apartment in Oak Park, MI
Summer 2006 Ridgeland, MS
August 2006 Terrifying Apartment Where Someone Got Shot Right Outside My Window, Ypsilanti, MI
September 2006 My parents' place (hell of a commute to grad school)
October 2006-April 2007 The Townhouse, Ann Arbor, MI
April 2007-now: This Place (well, this building; I lived in a one-bedroom for April-June 2007, and moved into a two bedroom in July 2007. This Place still wins for longest residency)

Monday, December 22, 2008

The Good Kind of Tired

It's been a heckuva month, and it's caught up to me. I'm feeling it, and evidently I'm showing it. People are actually telling me "You look really tired." That's not generally synonymous with "you look great."

Sometimes, when life is exhausting, it's for unhappy reasons. Losing sleep over health issues, work stress, a breakup, a fight. To clarify for all those who might be worried because they can see fatigue in my face, or read it in the subtext of what I write lately - yes, I'm tired, but it's largely "good" reasons draining my resources. In the past few weeks, I've had huge work projects, multiple holiday parties, I finished a draft of one play and started outlining another, crossed state lines a few times... The next week will continue to be hectic, though still all for happy reasons - a visit for a grandparent's birthday-celebration, holiday celebrations, a wedding celebration - more crossing of state lines (but maybe a little more down time in each place).

It's the good kind of tired - and in order to prevent it from becoming the kind of tired that leads to falling under the weather, I'm taking a rain check on a "real" post... look for one midweek... and am going to bed. Sweet dreams, dear readers.

Monday, December 15, 2008

What Comes Next?

I'm racing to finish a script that I want to submit for a December 31 deadline. Well, I say I'm racing; it's not a marathon, though, more like I'm doing a series of sprints to try to get it done. I haven't been able to sit down and work on it for more than one consecutive hour for the past several days.

The script is very different in tone and structure than my usual style. Without revealing anything about the (slightly bizarre) plot, I can say that one of the central questions of the play is "What comes next?"

One of the characters desperately asks another: "What comes next? What am I supposed to do next? I don't know, and I need you to tell me - please - what comes next?"

I feel as if right now that bit of dialogue applies to my process of writing this script... and to my life in general.

I realized today, while driving from one Sunday appointment to the next, that I'm well into my second year of really not knowing what comes next. Clearly, we never really know - but at least for me, all the way up until I went to college, "college" was what would come next. Then I put in four years of college, not knowing exactly what would come next - but before graduating, I signed on for a finite two-year job. So I knew two years of work would come next. And then I was pretty set on the idea that after that, graduate school was what would come next. That too came to pass, and that too was finite and structured - another two years of knowing, at least basically, what was in store for me. Those two years ended in April 2007.

Now, what comes next?

I took one job after graduate school and then unexpectedly moved into another. I didn't expect to change jobs. I moved into a "temporary" apartment with a month to month lease, and expected to move out of that within a few months - but nearly two years later, I'm still in this apartment. I have no quantifiable life timeline at this point. No schedule. No "next."

I have goals and dreams and deadlines, of course. I have busy days, weeks, events on the calendar scheduled for months from now. But no big moves on the immediate horizon, no academic calendar to follow, no next step charted out. Liberating? Terrifying? Depends on the moment.

It's eleven thirty on a Sunday night. I have a conference to attend tomorrow. What comes next? Bedtime. That's all I can say definitively right now.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Erstwhile Weekly Postings

This poor blog is suffering yet again.

If it's any consolation, dear readers... every night, when I come home tired from work, I dutifully turn on my computer and begin writing. Not blogging, clearly - but I have a full-length play I must finish for a December 31 deadline; a dissertation that a soon-to-be-Ph.D. needed some feedback on; a periodical I edit is going through an exciting overhaul and I'm working on that this week as well...

Don't give up yet. This site is neglected at the moment, but not yet officially abandoned!