Rainy Day

Well, I had wanted a more cheerful post, but I woke up this morning and discovered one of my "aunties" passed away yesterday. My thoughts are with her daughter who was one of my good friends and the rest of the family. They were very kind and welcoming to me when we first moved to Thailand, and I miss them all.

So, here is what I am currently thankful for:

I still have my mom. And soon I will get to see her. (In person! Not just on Skype!)

Even though I am sad about graduation, I will most likely be in the same time zone and I will be able to visit. (Y'all know I'll be lurking in my department. It's inevitable.)

I have friends who are there when family cannot be.

My sisters are nearby. I mean, that's pretty unique.

Spring will come soon. It will, it will.

I have interesting things to write about and study, and the world is full of interesting opportunities. I just have to, you know, be willing to write cover letters. (Worst. Activity. Ever.)

So I guess this is a bit more cheerful.

Ugh

Today (I guess it's yesterday now) I finally just sucked it up and started contacting local friends and family about graduation. I'm still not sure I want to go, but I AM sure that I will not be going if no one will be there with me. No way. There is not enough vehemence on the internet to express this refusal. It feels like there's no good option here. I don't want to graduate, but I had an amazing time, I did well, and I should celebrate it. I'll be sad if I go, but I'll regret it if I don't. Closure. Such an old, sad word.

Also, well intentioned and interested people keep asking me what I'm doing next and seem perplexed when I don't seem to be overjoyed at the thought of graduating. (I know, I know, pathological love of school is very rare.) They assure me that whatever I do next will be totally awesome and everything will work out and it wil be GREAT and it just frustrates me and I get upset. I think I've figured out why, though. It's because I know, of course, that I will enjoy whatever it is I end up doing and I will love it and all that jazz. But I'm mourning this present. This ending. I'm grieving and I feel like that should be okay. Should be. My therapist calls this complicated grief. TCKs and other global nomads often experience all the other griefs and all the other leavings they have ever felt or done in times of transition. I can attest to this. Unfortunately, it also makes me just want to run as far away as I can. Choices, choices.

I realize I haven't written about writing much lately. Or walking. Transition takes over! I am writing. And thinking. And everything else I have to do. There is a phrase from some version of the Bible and I can't remember where or what or anything like that. But I've always liked it: "He set his face like flint." It's very dramatic and that is probably why it appeals to me. Gotta set my face like flint and just get this over with.

I'll write a more positive post tomorrow, probably. I always feel these things strongly and then I get embarrassed. It's all part of me though. Integration. Process. All that.

Also, also, I really wish Spring would come for real.

i who have died am alive again today

ee cummings (or E.E. Cummings or however his name is supposed to be) is another poet that I love. That particular poem, which I am too lazy to look up the original printing info for, is like a prayer to me. When I was inducted into the English Honors Society in college, we were asked to bring our favorite poem with us to the fancy schmancy dinner to share. That is the one I brought. I was very proud/happy that one of the professors, who was a department favorite and had been there FOREVER, brought the same one.

Everything feels kind of distant, but real. I can't actually remember what I started out to write in this post. I suppose this could be a good thing. I think, I think, what I feel, which is weird and I don't really trust it, is, that everything will work out. I feel this much more peacefully than I think I have ever felt before, and it comes from the knowledge that no one thing will make me happy. I grew up thinking that there was "one right path" for my life, and through prayer and supplication, I would find my way and walk in it. This led to me being absolutely terrified that I was doing the wrong thing, and worrying that if I stepped off the right path, I would forever regret it and be unhappy and it would be all my fault. So knowing that I could potentially do many things, interesting things, things that I would not have thought about but might be cool, is freeing. I guess I just wish I knew what exactly I will be doing next. But again, underneath, I feel like something will work out. It probably won't look anything like I was expecting. And that will probably be okay.

A Tribute to Diana Wynne Jones

So, I was going to write about other things today, but I just found out that Diana Wynne Jones has passed away. DWJ, as I fondly refer to her, will always be one of my favorite authors. Young Adult Fantasy is one of my favorite genres, and DWJ was an excellent author. Just as the Chronicles of Narnia provided transitional support when we first moved overseas, I discovered DWJ when I moved back to the States for college. I was smitten. One of the things I appreciated most about her work was that usually, her plots and characters have darknesses to them that means even in a happy ending, there are losses as well. Frankly, I doubt there could have been a JK Rowling without DW Jones. (Once, when I was working on my college campus over the summer, I discovered a book of literary criticism of DWJ's work. I was in heaven.) DWJ attended lectures with JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis way back in the day. I thought that was so cool.

She also included literary allusions that tickled my English major snobby soul. In fact, in one of my all time favorites of her work, Howl's Moving Castle, a poem by John Donne is a key part of the plot. In each of her books, she slides in sly references to Lord of the Rings. Even in "other" worlds, she dealt with issues that are relevant to our own. Case in point, Darklord of Derkholm, which, in my opinion, is both a comic send-up of the high fantasy genre and a post-colonial critique. (Magical world has been turned into a theme park for Tourists from our world. The world's most inept wizard is designated the yearly Darklord. Hilarity and mayhem ensue. Also, there are griffins. GRIFFINS. This book makes me want to have griffin brothers and sisters.) I could go on and detail why I like every single one of her books, but that would take a lot of time. Each of her books has something in it that makes me laugh out loud every time. She has interesting, complex, and strong male and female characters. (Sophie, you are me. It's just true. Take care of Howl for me. Keep him in line.)

Good-bye, DWJ. I'm so sorry that you're gone. I wanted to have tea with you in Bristol.

The Book of Hours

I've always liked that phrase. And yesterday someone reminded me of Rilke's Book of Hours, so I've begun rereading it. Lovely, lovely poetry. I'll probably write about it sometime. When I figure out if I can narrow down to a few poems to share instead of raving about the whole book. I find that I can read poetry, but anything else I get bored/tired/distracted too easily at this point.

This is the point in the semester where I just don't sleep. Actually I've been pretty productive this week, so there's really no reason why I'm not sleeping. I just think too much. And the future is looming fast...

I have finally gotten my camera. It is so cute! It fits in the palm of my hand. I'm thinking about names. Sometimes I name electronic things. Something to fit a wee camera. (I like the word wee. It reminds me of one of my favorite high school teachers. She was a lovely maths teacher from Northern Ireland who explained that the song line "Zaccheus was a wee little man" is redundant and incorrect. She is also the reason I cannot say "pants" with a straight face. When I visited her in Northern Ireland she took me to a revival meeting for singles and really the only thing I can remember is the speaker said, "Hold on a wee minute!" very often. It has become one of my favorite phrases.)

Impatience

I bought a camera online the other day. Saturday, I think it was. I realized I have very few pictures from my time in grad school. In general, I tend to let other people take the pictures. I think this is something I should change. Another step to self-agency or something. Living in active voice, not passive voice, I have been writing a lot recently, omg.

(I realized I actually do like being in the library and writing. Most of the time.)

Anyway. I bought this camera. One of the best things about my trip this summer was the camera my department thrust upon me. I didn't want to take the nice camera. I'm so glad I did. I loved taking pictures and sharing the albums with the important people in my life. So this new camera, it's not the nice nice nice camera I planned to buy with my (oh please please someone hire me) first salaried paycheck. I figured, I can't justify the DSLR yet, but I can (and did) get a nice digital camera. I'm so excited!

I was hoping it would be here when I got back from diligently editing a paper for conference submission. (I really was being diligent. One of my undergrads sat at my table in the library and I felt the need to be a good example.) Alas, it has not yet arrived. (Amazon Prime, you failed my great expectations!) I guess the anticipation will have to do for now.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives

I would say I experienced this film rather than watched it. Wikipedia quotes a review that called it "a floating world" which seems about the best description that could be found. Wikipedia also informed me that the film was shot on 16 mm film instead of digitally, which I wondered about because the picture seemed old looking. (My amazingly technical description. Don't judge me. Editing my own papers liquified my brain.)

I would describe UBWCHPL as a film of waiting, of nostalgia, beginnings and endings flowing together. It sort of wrapped me up and enthralled me, even though I don't really know what happened exactly. A man is dying, and he knows it. He wants to make sure of things that he will leave behind. He doesn't seem to worry too much about what is ahead, but when his dead wife appears to stay with him in his last days, he wants to know where he's going. "What's heaven like?" he asks. "There's nothing there," she tells him. "Ghosts are tied to people, not places." "But what happens when I die?" he wants to know. There is no answer. As he dies, he remembers one of his previous births. It is extremely poignent.

There were some very odd things as well. (The monkey ghosts. I can't think about them or I will be frightened to look out my window. Also, there was a side story about a princess and a catfish. It is possible it was one of Boonmee's past lives? If I hadn't read about the scene prior to watching the film I would have thought two movies got overlapped. The ending was odd also. Did the future split and multiply? I am not sure.) But overall, I enjoyed it very much. Particularly, it was gorgeously shot and the Isaan setting was simply beautiful. The jungle provides a good backdrop for ghostly happenings. It is so easy to imagine you might see something... The sounds were wonderful too. They sounded like home. There was not a musical score, so what was heard were the setting noises: the bugs and chinchoks and monkey birds. Painfully ordinary and everyday and comforting and strange at the same time. And that's the thing: the spiritual and supernatural are found everywhere in this film. Even (especially) in the mundane.

Poetry, identity, and the construction of home

So after the woe-is-me post of yesterday, I feel compelled to write on that is a little more upbeat! I'm striving for balance in all things, even my blogging, haha.

When I was in high school, I felt genuine disdain for poetry and its adherents, mostly because they tended to be the same people who thought that Romeo was the BOMB and so romantic, whereas I felt he was really immature and stupid. I did like Emily Dickinson and her brevity that still conveyed deep passion. Everything else, well, I could care less about sonnets.

So when I got to college and switched into the English major, I was not switching for the poetry. But when I got my Introduction to Poetry anthology for English 108 (a class of terrifying reputation), I discovered a poem called "Learning to Love America" by Shirley Giok-lin Lim. I was hooked. It was beautiful. I felt it, this struggle with learning to love a country. "it is late and too late to change my mind" read one line, and I knew it, even though I felt like I had not really had a choice in the choice my mind had made. This poem encapsulated a journey of acceptance that I knew I had to make, and contained both resignation and hope. Unfortunately, we never covered Lim in class, which I think is a shame, but discovering her certainly changed my perspective. I even wrote a response poem that I'm very fond of and revisit every so often to tweak. Sadly, the earlier iterations were lost in the Great Laptop Failures of 2010, but I have the most recent version and will keep on tweaking to reflect my continuing journey.

Probably the line that stuck with me the most deeply from "Learning to Love America" was "countries are in our blood and we bleed them;" yes, I thought. Sometimes more than one county mingles there. And our blood, it is inside, hidden, sustaining us even when no one else can see. When Thailand's political situation got so volatile, this was the line that was my personal mental refrain. That particular line also helped me shape a paper I wrote regarding a particular protest in which Thailand's Red Shirts collected their own blood and threw it at various government buildings. (Which I'm thinking/hoping/planning will become the central focus of my thesis also.) I bought Lim's anthology What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say on the justification that I needed the "real" citation of the poem for that particular paper.

I just got around to reading the rest of the poems. I was hooked from the first, titular poem, with the lines, "they never told about leaving, / the burning tarmac and giant wheels." It was a lovely anthology, with airplane poems! About flying between, always between, places that hold your heart. Belonging and not belonging. Deciding to love in spite of displacement. I also loved the final poem, "Self-portrait." Sometimes I think we come across what we need, when we need it, and I needed this poem yesterday. Here are the final lines:

I have more desires than
there are wigs in the world:
to be what I am not.
Also to be myself. To speak
many languages, each
as useful as this one
I wipe my tears with.
I want to be good and better
than I am. I want to sway
like the swaying palms
and hold heavy books in my hands.

(Shirley Giok-lin Lim, "Self-portrait." Found in What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say, pg. 82, published 1998)

Beautiful. A new refrain. I'm putting her other anthologies and memoirs on my motivational summer reading list.

Musing

This is probably the first week I've really, truly just wanted to be done. Done, and gone. It makes me sigh. I feel like now I have to mentally go through what I want to keep from the last few years and how. It's draining and sad. I want to keep everyone and everything and that is just not possible. And I don't have energy to waste on trying... It's very tempting to just use my thesis as an excuse and cut everyone else out completely, finish this up alone and then skedaddle. It's kind of a bad habit. And then I get a text from a friend I haven't talked to in ages, just wondering how I am, or an email from a friend saying that she knows my parents won't make graduation, so would I join her family? And then I realize that I really am not as alone as I often feel. This helps.

I have started a reading list of fun books for the summer. It's supposed to be a motivation.

Sometimes I think it was stupid of me to not apply for PhDs this year. If I had, I might have a more definite idea of what I will be doing next by this point. But when I consider this in my heart, I know I really just wanted to stick around here for a bit longer, and it still feels right. I suppose it's a plus that I feel so stressed about other things that the hows of this next step are not yet too scary, although they are worrying. How will I get it all done? I'm not sure. One day. One step. One moment at a time.

Traces of something

This is just a weird limbo period. I feel like I'm waiting to start so many things, and at the same time, I can't decide if I'm waiting because, again, I feel on some level, if I don't start, they can't end. So maybe I like the limbo stage. I'm not sure what to imagine for the next stage of my life. Wanting to do things is a novel experience, but it is also overwhelming. In some ways, it was easier when I was convinced there was One Right Path for my life, and that I had to be careful to get it right. Now that I think there are lots of good options and no condemnation for choosing one above another, I actually have to take ownership of my choices.

On a more positive note, it feels like I'm getting a handle on thesisy things. Actually, this is the second situation in the last few weeks where a professor was like, you should make your project do this: ____. And then described what I was trying to do. So I'm not sure if that means I need to be more clear and have more confidence in my own work? Probably. I called my mom to tell her this because I felt she needed a conversation with me where I was not in tears. I miss her. She's defending her Master's Thesis on the 31st. We're just a thesising family at this point in time.

For a class assignment I wrote an imaginary lesson plan. I seriously enjoyed myself. Then I realized I was imagining a class of students who were all like me. I know that this is unrealistic! I guess I'll deal with that when the time comes.

Assemblages

That is the name of an art show I picked up a flyer for on Friday night. It made me giggle, especially since on the back of the card there were five definitions of the word "assemblage" which I thought perhaps a little unnecessary. However, since I was joking about writing an essay called "Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction" after talking to an artist who creates his pictures using digital technology, I really have no room to judge. (His most famous "model" is called Symmetra and has gained a following, apparently. "What kind of following?" I asked, intrigued, wondering if there were an online community centered around images of a beautiful woman who does not exist except in the digital imagination. I thought it would be awesome if she had a twitter. Unfortunately, there is not; the artist just meant people like to buy the pictures. I was disappointed. Also, I wonder, would a digital image of an imaginary man ever be so popular?)

Then I got into a big discussion with my friend about objective standards in Art; specifically, why there're can't be completely "objective" standards. He's a maths person, so to him it seems completely reasonable that this could and should be so. There's no way to account for the infinite amount of variables in human life, I told him. And then we got into language and social construction and I'm sure that the art galleries thought we were appallingly rude. Say what you like, I just don't believe there is a way to encompass all aspects of human interaction and culture through axiomatization (is that even a word?!). There are patterns, there are tropes, there are ways of examining human behavior but there is infinite complexity in life that can never be fully understood. (Feel free to blog a rebuttal, phuan. Haha.)

Speaking of complex life... back to the grind this week. I don't think I'm ready.

Destinations

One thing I forgot to do this trip was to make sure I booked aisle seats. On these short flights it wasn't too bad but I seriously dislike sitting in-between strangers. On two of my flights this trip (because I can never travel with under four flights roundtrip) I actually sat by the window for the first time in... seven years or so? Since I started traveling alone I just prefer sitting on the aisle so I'm not stuck and I don't have to bother anyone to move. I'd forgotten what it is like to look at the world from such great heights. I especially like watching highways and seeing the cars merge and separate, seemingly so seamlessly.

I really enjoyed my rental car. It accelerated so smoothly I had to be careful because I'd hit 80 mph without (totally) realizing it. I noticed I didn't get tailgated so much this trip, without PA license plates. (I guess my greater confidence with high speeds might alos have had something to do with this.)

This was the first time I'd used a GPS. It was very strange, listening to a disembodied voice telling me where to go. I have to say, though, I didn't get lost at all. So that was pretty awesome. In a way, it was comforting to have another voice in the car as I navigated around.

When I got to RDU this morning, I tried to remember if it looks at all the same as it did all those years ago when my family left the States for the first time. Honestly, I don't can't remember. I do remember that when I was very, very small, we could go with my dad to the gate and sit with him until his plane took off. It's hard to believe it now.

My aunt remembers the day we flew out of Raleigh to meet the world. "Your dad was going nuts trying to check all your bags," she chuckled. And I remembered the crazy luggage we had. The requirements were different then, and we had at least five trunks and as many suitcases, a combination that added up to twelve, two checked pieces per person, even my brother who was a day away from four years old. I was terrified that somehow we would lose him, and I kept him and my sisters close to me.

Oh that luggage. It was the culmination of months of sorting and weighing and much heartbreak that I only dimly knew at that time. How do you figure out what to take half-way around the world to a place you've never been, with four small children who need some sort of stability? (And now it's mirrored in the question, what do you take back?) What is worth keeping? How important are things? I wonder this still.

My journey from Raleigh today was quite different. Just me and my two small carryon bags. Tracing my way through the sky towards school and work and decisions about the future. This is just another time when I wish I could stay in limbo. In life, there's not a clear destination. Sometimes this terrifies me. I waited on the tarmac for the earth to fall away, effortless and beautiful. I could be going anywhere. I just might.

Lines of flight

I've been feeling homesick lately. Not for any particular place, as far as I can tell. More for a feeling of security, I think. (Although I was showing someone my pictures from the summer and that did make me miss Thailand a lot.)

I spent the weekend in Philly, which always makes me happy. This was especially important because I'd discovered that I'd accidentally booked my ticket to NC the day after I thought I had. I was so upset about that. But Philly made it better.

Then I got myself to the airport and flew right on down to Raleigh. It was a bit of an adventure because my dad called as I was packing to get on the train (being so smart I didn't pack until the morning of my trip and when I was on the plane I realized I'd forgotten the presents I've had for my small cousins for over a year) to tell me that the airline had called HIM to tell me that my flight was delayed. My dad stressed stresses me. I decided I didn't have time to call the airline if I wanted to make the correct train so I hopped it and got to the airport and hoped. My flight had indeed been delayed but I got to the gate before the man got tired of questions about my flight and put me on an earlier one that had been delayed to my original departure time, so that was all right.

It was strange to be back in Raleigh's airport because that was the airport my family flew out of way back when we first moved to Thailand. Life seems to be going in strange circles lately; ones that provide closure and new possibilities simultaneously. This trip was also noteworthy because I got my first rental car for myself, and not for a group trip. I felt so grown up I could hardly stand it, and also slightly terrified. I do love the higher speed limits in NC.

My small cousins think I am the coolest thing ever because I'm new and different. The youngest girl fixedly watched me brush my teeth. It was slightly disconcerting, but it's also great fun. (Especially since I don't have to keep them!)

Then I visited PhD type people. It was really fun, and really good, and I feel better about taking time off before I apply and also about eventually applying. So, I guess that's good. At the same time I feel sad about the fact that I will eventually fit in somewhere else. I'm a strange creature.