She's gone!

And it's hard to believe. I never really realized how hard it would be to say "bye." I think more than anything I'm afraid of the unknown for her, afraid that I can't be there with her! I know she'll tear OSP up and be the greatest cop NOPD has ever seen. I personally can't wait until they start shotgun training and she outdoes everyone :)

Today at work sucks. It's a hard day, all the teachers are back. I am working on overcoming the negativity of last year, but it's a struggle. I get so irritated and today it's rough because I was so irritated to begin with. Channel scrappy doo is what I keep telling myself. Here is one of the little irritations: they passed out really cool polo t-shirts at the orientation meeting today, but a parent came in to enroll a new kids and I was the only one who went out of the meeting to help them. So I missed the part when they passed out the tshirts, and my boss (not mentioning names, but it's the one with the hugely fat belly) got ME a medium and got herself a small. I hate baggy tshirts, I will never wear it. When I finally was done with the parent and went back into the auditorium all the smalls were gone! Said boss then spent 15 minutes trying on the small and the medium to figure out which one she wanted and I could have the one she didn't want. Listen, when she put on the small, it was tight against her belly fat! It made me so mad! I was like, how are you going to give me the medium when I am way smaller than you! Not to mention that I missed the tshirt thing because I was out here actually HELPING A PARENT!!!! Shouldn't I have first pick?????

Ugh. That's what it's like working in the schools. Everyone just takes takes takes. Some days I hate all people.

All The Kids Gettin Ready,

Back to school we go!

Slow Twitch

She said, "my fiance pointed out as Damien left in his Escalade, 'hey that weird kid you were all making fun of just left in an Escalade' and I thought 'dang! guess he did okay for himself! I couldn't afford that!'" and I felt funky inside. Is that really what people do? Size others up by which possessions they own? If you will accept me for my escalade, I want nothing to do with the thing you call friendship.

You are Jindra's pride. I was thinking of some set of words to give to her as a gift, some thing that would help her to carry through. But then I thought, what she needs she already has. Just don't give your goals to the trolls.

I thought about why I'm not going with her and my mind drifted toward the subject of compassion. I think that she and Libby and Dad are the right ones to uphold the line because for them compassion is a tool to be wielded, and with great skill. It is an instrument in their arsenal, one of many, that works as a part of a greater whole. For me it would be a liability, called upon too readily and with misguided intention. This is not something that I grieve because I know that I'll find my calling elsewhere.

Tonight my legs burned as I watched pavement become a blurry black streak beneath them, and I thought about a million different lives that I could right now be leading. I felt the muscles in the tops of my quads strain as I amped toward the end of the run with sprint intervals. You are only incapable of doing that which you believe you are incapable of doing.

Just A Thought.

I was running last night at midnight, another one of the sleepless ones and I could feel it coming on. "Why not just run then, you're not going to sleep anyway." Laced shoes and stretched hamstrings and I hit the road, my brain turns into a crucible, my mind feeding the ryhthm of footfall after footfall, ideas waft in and out of consciouness and occasionally I pull one down and chew on it for awhile.

All it takes is discipline to be a good runner. I think that's why I like it so much, and probably why Anne likes it so much: I beat my body and made it my slave.

Anyway, the thought last night careering around my consciousness (between the push-pull thrum thrum of breath-in breath-out) was about the kids, how school is looming ominously not so unlike a sword of damocles (knot in the pit of the stomach over it) and how it was and isn't different than when I walked the halls as a student. There is a new paradigm (tm) to some degree.

First, I don't know how (most) of the kids do it. Go there everyday, have discipline handed down to them from on high by adults who don't themselves follow the rules they make. I hate the tardiness issue. I have addressed it before. If you can't make it on time to work, you have precisely no authority to harangue a kid for being late to school. But I digress. (I will always give you an excused pass.)

As I pushed past the first mile I started to think about image among today's youth, I started to think about the process by which identity is born. I think there is a huge oversight in our American Culture (tm) today, I think we've been remiss and the kids are suffering (and will suffer) for it. We are passing down a terrible ethos; that there is no difference between consumption and expression.

Let me elaborate. When I was in high school, there weren't any particularly discernable groups. There were athletic kids. Kids who were into music. Really smart kids. Art kids. Kids who floated among and between the groups. If you were to walk into the school as a stranger, you'd have no idea how to pinpoint one group from the next, as we all looked, talked, and treated each other pretty much the same. What seperated us as people was our interests, the things we did on our own and for our own sanity. The way we answered the call to arms from that unquashable voice on the inside. I think it has changed now, to the point that different groups identify themselves by the image that they transmit to the greater whole. And I think they're learning this from us, the adults. You are what you buy, and more gravely, you are what you can buy. Of course this isn't the totality of the student body that I'm talking about. But I think that for many of today's youth, to talk about the difference between consumption and expression would be nearly impossible because for them, you are what you consume. You are a target market but this isn't a thought that inspires fear. How do we teach kids that the core inside of us isn't a commodity, it's not on a tshirt at hot topic, and it's not in a ridiculously overpriced hand bag?

We live in an advertising culture where we are constantly told that the only thing that stands between our current state and wholeness is a particular commodity. It's the central lie of our culture, and the people who hate mainstream culture the most seem to cling to this lie the most intensely. Notice how many "alternative" people define their non-conformity by how readily they conform to an alternate standard? How they buy objects that articulate their rebellion for them? It has become so ingrained in our culture that the current crop of teenagers makes no distinction between consumption and expression. They are frustrated that consumption alienates them from their own feelings and desires, but they express that frustration by consuming more commodities. It's a vicious circle, and one of the great tragedies of our time. It is killing us as a society. America is so segmented, bifurcated. We have to stop before Walmart and Target become our cultural hallmarks, the things foreign tourists think of when they decide to travel to the good old US of A. We have so much more to offer.

The Life And Times

I have this fight or flight response in the most awkward and unlikely of situations, like,

I complicate my life too much by constant analyzation. Am I doing anything important? A constant question, a constant drumbeat soundtrack in my head, as if you even really know how you'd define that. As if you would even acknowledge it if some subconscious warrior in that pulp of grey matter you carry around started to think you were doing something as grandiose as to be labeled important. "I was drunk on the language of armageddon and I could see nothing else."

We make the world exactly what we want it to be. Just don't forget that. I am perfectly comfortable financially yet I let myself believe that financial ruin is just around the corner because I want to support myself with art. It would be so easy but I have such a hard time convincing myself. Today I made $100 on photos that have already been taken. Money in the bank. We were in her SUV on the way to the zoo and had stopped through the bank drive-up so I could cash a check and she asked me with seriousness in her eyes when the teller clicked through whatever she had to click through on the hidden screen, "do you have any money in there?" I am twenty-seven years old. At times the realization is like a ton of bricks. How silly! Yet there you have it.

The fight or flight. Sometimes I feel so thoroughly that I just don't belong. An anomaly. I am far too sensitive. Every small jab is a nail in the coffin and there are days that I am ready to throw my camera in the trash and start a life of financial accounting, or some such thing. Something stable. Understandable. Predictable. And as wholly illogical as that thought is, as consciously as I can see and appreciate its illogic, there are times at which, truly, I believe in my heart that a life of such granite routine and sterility would bring me happiness. It is as though a grandiose title would stop her from looking at me with the joking seriousness and inquiring about my bank balance. As though, finally, I would have made some mark for the family name. Perhaps this is all just in my head. There is a war waging in there and one faction would tell me to abandon these childish aspirations and grow up already. The other sits on the floor in an apartment on the westside of Oly making a dragon out of paper, and she just smiles, humming a tune without any words. She tells me to be a brave soldier and I try to abide.

"But man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death."

Next One's On Me