Switching back and forth between home friends and Colgate friends and friends who I have seen recently and friends who have been far away has gotten me all hyperaware of the fragile web of connections that I exist in. It is so, so hard to hang onto them all at once and not drop any or tug any too hard, but it is so very necessary even though sometimes it seems irresponsible and dangerous to even try. Connections are funny things.

We live in a world where people break off in pairs. We must choose one. One? But I would choose all, or at least many, if I could. But in a sense we are always choosing, whether we notice or not, and even if we aren't choosing others perceive us as having chosen, and slip away. Forces conspire to narrow down the array of connections, or weaken them, and I can't hang onto them all.

For some reason I imagine myself, when we are older, as being the one to take care of everyone, all my friends who need it, and my house is always full of people and animals that I love and care for. Perhaps because I always delude myself, believing that anyone would ever depend on me for anything, and perhaps because it is unbearably frightening for me (admittedly still too young to see the world straight) to imagine everyone separated off into their individual inaccessible pairs and suddenly be connected only in such a limited way to everyone that I try so desperately to cling to now.

Proving once and for all that I am the biggest band geek ever, I spent much of this lovely Saturday night in the band room, remembering how to play clarinet and practicing trombone. I do like clarinet a lot and it's wonderful to play an instrument on which I can sight-read and play difficult things without much practice and attain a decent level of tone quality as well. I can just strive for higher things with clarinet, whereas with trombone I tend to pat myself on the back for attaining mediocrity. But even so, trombone is fulfilling, and not just because I can add another instrument to the list of things I can sort of play. It's the band culture. I feel valued on trombone. I'm needed, I'm important. Even though I'm not great I don't get snide remarks about my insignificance all the time. Not to say that the band is truly mean, not to say that anything is meant by it. It just wears at me after a while.

It seems like a cop-out though. There's a girl in the clarinet section with a fierce and vocal pride for her instrument, and she and the others don't let anyone's remarks get to them. But for some reason it gnaws at me more deeply. Sometimes I see it as a parallel to other forms of marginalization -- being female in this society, being non-heterosexual. Other things that I cope with every day. And I'm not going to go around whimpering about how I'm so oppressed or anything. It's just that it gets tiring after a while, to constantly shield myself and fight off the world's beliefs about who I am and how I'm supposed to behave and whether I matter in the least. And so, you know, in situations where there is an easy cop-out, maybe it's okay to go for it, just so that in one context at least I don't have to fight anymore.

Life is strange. I find two people, similar in many concrete ways, who pull similar tricks in the game of friendship, during different years and different settings of my life. It is like a novel, with an author who, unsure of her craft or her readers, makes the metaphor as obvious as she can through these parallels. It is symbolic, as though event one were trying to prove something to me about event two, as though I should have learned something from experience A that would help me figure out experience B. But life still remains more complicated than books; people, though eerily similar, continue to be too different to truly compare. All I can think is that for some reason I am being given a second chance, but the problem is that the situation that I should have learned from is far from behind me, and there is no way to flip the pages faster and skip ahead to see what happens and what I'm supposed to do to make this metaphor tie together.

Sometimes, when I'm tired and having trouble comprehending things in the normal way, it seems strange that in some parts of our lives, we do ordinary things, manipulating objects, putting things together, having conversations, and yet in others, everything is a symbol, shadowy, amorphous, with meanings just outside the edges of understanding. I remember, earlier today, cutting bread, taking a red lighter out of my pocket and using it to light crayon-shaped candles, folding warm clothes. But there is an unfathomable abyss between those tangible activities which brought me from point A to point B in time, and the twists and turns my mind is constantly making, trying to wrap itself around little events and ideas hidden in the folds of my daily existence that form my symbolic life. I create a world from scratch in my head every day, and when I look out of my head at my life I realize it's a wonder that my body and mind walk around in the same world at all.

earlier -- later