27

I am now 27.

I just fell in love with the BurdaStyle website, and especially the Ellen pants, which, should I ever get to make them, will probably be disappointing since I’m not a stick thin/5′10.” Working my way up to that, and looking forward to sewing again.

First phase of the project is almost done, so work is coming along. Portfolio is coming along more slowly, but progressing. I have a new layout that’s a bit more clear, but I’m still working on how to get some of the spontaneity of the old one in there. The projects are developing into better stories the more I work on them.

Sasha’s visit was wonderful, and I’m looking forward to her moving up to Portland.

Many more plans and thoughts. Finished Howard’s End, reread The Diamond Age (again), and started Rebecca.

Also, I put up the last year’s photographic highlights on my Flickr account.

Returning, Moving On

I’m going to write something because I’d really like to return to blogging, but I’m out of practice. At a point, life just got too complicated to tell about. It’s not that the plot was so convoluted, more that the characters all got a little out of hand. But, we’re beyond that now, and in fact, the plot has also straightened itself out quite a bit.

I am a Master now. Finishing grad school has been a bit anticlimactic. It was wonderful to have the celebration in June, and I do feel done, for real. However, I now feel the weight of the Internship Development Program (IDP) and licensure bearing down on me. I have a job, which I am very happy about both because the economy is bad enough that it’s rare for a recent grad to be offered a job, and because said job is actually interesting and closely related to what I want to do in the long run. However, I’m acutely aware that it’s not a job that can get me closer to actually being an architect, and it’s not a job of the type for which I have been preparing myself for the last three and a half years. So, despite enjoying it, I very much am continuing to wonder, and occasionally actually work towards figuring out, what I will do next.

So, it’s portfolio making time.  It’s time to organize a game plan for applications, to get recommendations in line, and to feel a little untethered from the future, which, as you know, I like to have some grasp on.  All of that is fine: the portfolio is taking shape and I like where it’s going.  The rest I can deal with, and may even enjoy.  But, there’s one thing I’m really struggling with – where to be.  Theoretically, I’m likely to move when I get a job in an architecture firm.  My current plan is to first apply to the set of firms at which I would most like to work, which are primarily in cities on the west coast and in the UK.  Here’s the issue, though.  Rent runs out on the 15th of next month, and I’m not sure what to do at that point.  I will almost certainly not have another job – fine, because my current job will still exist through January.  But, do I move somewhere else in Eugene?  I can, but I’m starting to feel like I want to move on sooner, rather than later, and not move all of my stuff just to move it again.  I can’t really afford to move to one of the big west coast cities on my current salary, though, and that might also end up meaning that I move just to move again.  I could see going home, but what about all of my stuff?  Do I lighten my load of worldly possessions – can I afford to sell everything just to buy more things wherever I do settle next?  And the same goes for moving back to Vermont, which I would love to do, but where I am unlikely to find a job, probably would have to pay some rent (unlike Florida), and where I would be split between friends in Burlington, Brattleboro, and Great Barrington, Mass.  The reality there, too, is that I don’t know if any of those friends have the same spaces in their lives for me as I would like to imagine they do.  Could any of them live with me on their couch/in their kitchen for any significant amount of time?

The likely answer – stay in Eugene.  I’ll move soon enough to a new place, and in the mean time, didn’t I promise myself that I’d spend my time Being Here?

It’s one of those decisions that I keep coming back to, though.  One of those unresolved questions that niggles me throughout the day, in part because it is unresolvable. Since it will be resolved in the next month, because someone else is taking over my house, I guess I just have to live through the uncertainty.  Would that the plot were still twisting, not just aiming straight into the murk.

***

On an entirely different note, played at Spawnfest this weekend, which was very good – both fun frisbee and fun time partying/hanging out with the teammates/laughing at Vern Fonk and Bawls and playing 20 questions.  Excited to get into better shape, although somehow I keep missing my running dates and workout times.  We went 6-1, but unfortunately the point differentials on Saturday put us into the B-bracket, so we only took 9th (out of 34? teams).  Read a lot of the Huddle last night in an exited frenzy to get back to being really useful on the field.

Childhood

Today I had the overwhelming feeling that despite being 26 years old, I am still firmly within a personal era of childhood.  Not a childhood of skipping around on the playground carefree, but one of being somewhat powerless over the circumstances of one’s life.

In this way, it seems that childhood extends throughout our lifetimes.  What does it mean to be an adult?  I have the wherewithal to cope effectively with this powerlessness, despite the fact that it is frustrating and sometimes painful to me.  Hopefully, I also am able to use the shifting ground of circumstance to my benefit, by taking opportunities as they come and seeing the potential in each situation.  Although that’s not the carefree life, maybe it allows me to lessen my cares as I remember that I’m not in charge, nor do I know the ultimate solutions or answers to each question.

In fact, the childhoods we experience transform over our lives, I think.  I have responsibilities now that go beyond keeping my room clean, but I still have this powerlessness, and oftentimes a feeling of vulnerability.  Powerlessness and vulnerability ebb and flow throughout our lives.  So too, I hope that I can say that sometimes I have moments of uncomplicated thought, moments of wonder and joy, moments when someone else takes care of me.  Those moments may come sporadically or infrequently, but they are a part of the ongoingness of childhood.  Now, with those moments, I have an adult appreciation of what I am experiencing.

I wonder, with the gaining of skill and the establishment of a pattern of living that’s not based around the paradigm of school, how the childhood that I inhabit will transform.  I know that in a new job there will be plenty of powerlessness and vulnerability, plenty of moments of discovery, and hopefully an encouraging amount of wonder and help from others.  Does the feeling of childhood eventually melt away altogether, as responsibility and the constant consciousness of thought expand, or does it always remain, even as the thinnest residual film?  Perhaps one day I will be able to answer my own questions, and at that point I will know I’m no longer a child – but it seems to me that day is illusory, and happily so, since the reliance on others we learn in childhood is one of the greatest gifts of that age.

Breaking News

Monday September 1

 

News today has come of a massacre in the apartment of Rachel Auerbach, a woman friends describe as “nice – you wouldn’t expect this of her.”  Worms in her “beloved” worm bin fled its environs last night in search of a better life, only to dry to their deaths on her kitchen floor.  As she knelt to tend the bin this morning, she wondered at their shapes on the linoleum, only to realize that she knelt in a field of death.

“I had no clue they were so unhappy” stated Rachel in a press conference this afternoon.  ”Those worms meant the world to me – literally, I thought that with them, I could do my part to help the planet regain some of its fertility and fecundity.  They worked tirelessly towards their goal, sacrificing every day.  But I guess I just didn’t see the signs.  Fewer mature worms, slower composting…I should have known.”

The remaining worms, of which there were few, had difficulty speaking about the horrendous events of the past week.  ”The bin has been drying out for a while now, and frankly, Rachel’s been pretty bad about giving us new bedding.  She’s violated our rights on multiple occasions, and if it were up to us, we would have gotten someone else to tend house a long time ago.  We can’t afford any more time with her in charge.”

The worms have steadily graded down Rachel’s performance on vermissues since arriving under her care in mid-April.  To begin with, they rated her highly, just shy of 100%, saying that “she still has some things to learn, but we trust that she’ll get better with some tough on the job training.”  Last month, they began to seriously organize for change, but they said that despite giving her a low approval rating of 54%, she didn’t listen to their pleas.

Rachel admits to turning away from the worms in their time of need.  ”It’s been busy around here.  My plants aren’t doing so well either, and I’ve had a lot of other things to take care of.  But, if only I had heard them, I would have done anything for those worms.  I just did’t really know what they needed.”

A service will be held this evening in honor of the worms.  Steps are being taken to amend for the mistreatment so that any remaining worms will not meet the same fate.

Oberlin, Again

When they told me at the airport desk that I was flying standby because I had no seat reservations, I knew I’d be writing about going back to Oberlin.  It’s been so long since I blogged that they’ve entirely changed the WordPress layout, which, by the way, looks really good.  But sometimes you just have something to say, or far to much to say, and you realize that even though your last post, from two months ago, was about how long it had been since you wrote, it’s time.

I got on that plane on Thursday night, flew to Vegas, and Chicago, and finally Cleveland, where I begged my way back to Oberlin.  We drove in pretty quietly, everyone on the airport van watching the landscape for change, trying to remember what had been there last time we came that way.  Finally, past the Farm, we arrived.

Getting back was like inhabiting a memory.  In my mind, the place had become more real than the actual, alive Oberlin.  I knew where everything was (with some notable exceptions, like the A-level remodel), remembered everything, but it all just looked a little flat.  Maybe that was in part due to the fact that when I arrived, the town was still quiet.  Friday was a day of arrivals, and after I found Sam at his gas station and put down my bags at his house, I returned to Tappan to collect people.

This clumping was something I hadn’t quite experienced as a freshman, coming in for preseason and missing out on that first week of orientation friend-finding.  It’s a thrill to have a posse, though, and I thoroughly enjoyed adhering first to Melissa, and then to Tina, Phoebe, and Henry.  In the Feve by around 3, it just felt so good to be back.  The whirlwind started.

The dance party at the Sco, the dance parties/porch sits at 189, the alumni game, the trip to Chance Creek, breakfast at the Black River, stumbling into the Swing Dance, schmoozing at the art show, visiting the AJLC to use the facilities, showering, drinks at the Feve, the front lawn of Tank, softball at the Pleasant street park, the Bippy show, weirdly, partying in South, buying a sticker at the bookstore and a postcard at Ben Franklin: all over the place, reuniting.  Sleep a little, do a lot.  Miss even more.

Revealed (or rerevealed) to me:  

1. I want to do everything I ever find interesting, and am frustrated at the impossibility of that desire.
2. I know a lot of fantastic people doing amazing things, and am frustrated that I do not
   • know them better
   • keep in touch with them more frequently
3. There is a script for the reunion meeting that is a little sad and progressively harder to overcome the more you use it. Phrases often repeated:
   • Where are you now?
   • I’m in grad school/I’m going to grad school/I’m working in this amazing environmental job/I’m getting married
   • I know you look familiar, but I can’t remember what context I knew you in
   • Meet at the Feve tonight
   • Do you know where Hans is? (a representative example)
   • When did you get in?
   • What’s going on tonight?
   • and my repeated conversations – about Eugene: how close it is to everything, how it took me a while to like it but I do now, how it’s not as rigorous as I like but you just have to make it what you want, how if you’re ever on the west coast you should visit me/I should visit you – about Oberlin: how much it feels like this weird memory that I’m inhabiting, how I’m in sensory overload, how when I was there I could deal with a lot more going on all at once but since I’ve left I no longer can be in that close proximity with that many people and be comfortable and happy, how the people even if you didn’t know them that well just feel like the kind of people you want to be with, how everyone is doing such interesting things, how I feel kind of dorky taking pictures of the buildings but I feel like I need to because they come up in my architecture classes – about the reunion: how so many people are here!, how certain particular people are not here, how amazing it is to be here, how it’s not actually my reunion but I knew that I couldn’t come next year and maybe not for some years after that and this was the last year I knew anyone graduating and plus the people in this cluster (02-04) were the people that were there when I was a freshman and I felt close to them maybe even more so than my own cluster.
4. Oberlin is beautiful, especially in the spring.  The people there are pretty amazing, and really are different from the general population of the US.

So, a mostly wonderful experience.  Even the hard parts, the not getting enough of the people I wanted to see and soak up, the occasional awkwardnesses and left-out feelings, the being excited when you’re so sleep deprived that you want to cry, even those were pretty good.  Maybe the hardest part, scheduling my plane so that I couldn’t find a ride to the airport and had to spend a lot of valuable party time asking people to borrow a car and then leaving straight from a dance party and not getting to really hug people and say goodbye – maybe even that was pretty good.

When can I go back?