Wow! I can't remember the last time I sat down and decided to conduct a wrestling match with my interior life via PowPow. I feel like I used to do it all the time. Then I got all "professional" and moved on, for the most part, to my more "professional" blog, and posted goofy things here now and again.
But sometimes I feel like life calls for a person to sit down and expel a long blog post. It's cleansing for the soul, maybe. And now is that time. Maybe you'll stumble upon it and find comfort in a random person's confusion as she makes her way through life.
Lately I feel like a toy rocket with an uneven flare, one that sends me ambling generally upward, but in weaves and spirals. Right now my future is a gaping question mark, and the only thing I have to bring to it is my Master's degree (and my little knapsack full of life experience!). If we're gonna start to get existentialist on this shit, we could say my backpack is packed full of tools for my future endeavors. But as far as what I want to do with them-- like I said, a big effing question mark.
Life isn't what I expected it to be. I wouldn't say it's harder-- actually, I think it's not so bad, but I didn't expect to have to wrangle so much with my own emotions. That's not to say I'm an overly-emotional person, but staying happy is one of the biggest and most constant challenges I face. It helps to do the right thing and be nice to others, but to err is human, and besides, bad things happen anyway. And I didn't expect people to surprise me so much. I pretend I think they're predictable, and my Master's degree has prepped me to design things based around assumptions about human behavior, but
my goodness, do the exceptions beat the rules every time!
And I didn't expect my life to spiral in and out of the lives of so many other people. When I was a kid, life was pretty quiet. I had friends, but we were into kid stuff. Life was all possibility and future, and most of our friends were new because we were new. But when you grow into adult sized problems and begin having romantic relationships, your friends take on a new light. They become your family away from your family. And I think, if you are me, you feel love for them that kind of makes your heart want to burst. To contain it, you think of that kind of love as an amorphous blob of friend love (and if I'm not mistaken, I'm not the only one who feels this way, which is at least partially why we all get so excited for Tundig weekend every year). I just saw Where the Wild Things Are, and there's this part where they all sleep in a friend pile. I could identify with that.
And yet, as is true of your friends, you are free to float in and out of each others' lives. I'm writing this now because big changes are coming. I've lived in Michigan, except for that one year, for almost 27 years. I moved around the state a lot when I was younger, but my whole adult(ish) life has been pretty firmly anchored in Ann Arbor. I know this city from many angles and from most hours of the day. My heart's been broken and healed here, I've fallen in love. I've walked home, taken taxis, lived on the North, South, East and West side. I've seen Red Hot Lover's close and open and become Ray's Red Hots. I've tried to grow dred locks. I've tried being vegetarian. I've taken weekend road trips to Chicago, Grand Rapids, Leelanau, Marquette, Niagara Falls, New Hampshire and Connecticut, but mostly to Chicago.
I'm afraid of change, and yet I'm putting my face up into the wind for a taste. I have every opportunity in the world, and I'm afraid of what will happen if I don't exercise at least some of them. The phrase is "be the change you wish to see in the world," and that's asking a lot, because life is mutable but continues, and because I needed to pause and say but I like it here.