When my profile wasn't saving right in Trillian, for some reason I almost enjoyed typing the song lyrics that I was trying to use for a profile over and over again to try to get it to save. Now that I've figured out the problem and gotten it to work, it seems less satisfying to have it there. There's something about the act of invoking the words, of creating them over and over again, that is important when trying to apply their meaning to my life. It's why song lyrics or poems are so often away messages, or are so often written in notebooks, spiralling around the back cover or written carefully in cursive underneath my notes. It's why some lines from Bad Religion are presently on my whiteboard, and why I have poems taped up on the wall by my bed. Partially, it's why I sing. Calling the words forth again affirms their relevance to me, somehow, in ways I can't explain. And the process is more important than the product.

Often as I walk around and look at the plain white walls of this house I imagine covering them with words, lyrics, poems, spray painted here, written there with pen or with finger paints, overlapping each other, words everywhere. Someday, I think, when I have a house of my own, maybe I will manage to be just eccentric enough to actually do that, and be constantly surrounded by the words that speak my thoughts and feelings more clearly than I can myself, so that the only thing left for me to do is rewrite and rewrite and rewrite them...

This evening, napping on the futon, I had a dream which ended with me looking out of the window of the kitchen and seeing people galloping across the Great Lawn on horses, under a perfectly clear navy-blue sky with a full moon. They pulled up right outside the house (in the dream there were no roads in the way, just a great stretch of lawn all the way up to our house), and I saw that it was a bunch of students who were being filmed for a movie, and riding with them was a cameraman who was on one horse with his camera and was also somehow guiding another horse which had other equipment on it, perhaps for lighting or something. I was looking, fascinated, to see how he was steering the second horse, when suddenly I woke up.

Later, going downstairs to get my laundry, I was almost convinced that the landscape and stars and moon and horses were still there, and had to look outside to remind myself that there was only the fire escape, a bit of grass, the potholed driveway, the street, and the overcast sky.

It's been a long time since I've stayed up really late at night to get a paper done. This year my preference has seemed to be to go to bed fairly early and get up early (but never as early as I intend to) to finish up my work. But in the last two nights I've remembered the energy and bizarre intensity of concentration that can come from staying up late, alone. The second wind that comes once you've resigned yourself to staying up most of the night. The silence of the house. The way words on a page can immerse you because after a while they seem to be the only things that are real. The light from the desk lamp illuminating the only things that are important to see.

I kind of want to go to sleep right now, but I'm kind of enjoying this, too. When you live in a triple it's a rare moment when there are no distractions and you can really focus on the things before you.

And not too long after that long, tangled, emotionally involved post, this appeared amongst my class readings:

As a citizen who moved from the working class to a world of affluence I have long struggled to make sense of class in my life, to come to terms with what it means to have a lot when many people have so little. In my case, among those who have so little are my own family and friends...I want to live in a world where there is enough of everything basic and necessary to go around. Applying these beliefs to everyday life experience has not been an easy or simple matter.

~bell hooks, in Where We Stand: Class Matters

Not that the book really provides any answers, but it is in some way comforting to know that others have asked and are asking some of the same questions.

So the little crossroads in my everyday life (should I work with the sound people for the John Vanderslice show or should I get this reading done?) turn out, essentially, to be parallels for the larger crossroads which looms ever closer ahead: with this anthropology degree that I seem to be acquiring, do I go forth and do what anthropologists do, that is, go to grad school, get a master's or PhD, do research, teach, or do what all liberal arts students apparently want to do, that is, get a white-collar job working for some company doing whatever people do when they sit in offices all day? Or, do I do these things that I want to do (by writing them here will I somehow jinx myself?) which involve ignoring the fact that I've spent four years getting a SOAN degree, going home, working for my parents while taking classes at the college in my hometown (since it didn't occur to me to take these useful courses while I was here), and then getting a job that I could have gotten a few years after high school anyway without this odd detour into liberal arts and the snobbery of an expensive, private college?

I am painfully aware that either way, I am expressing the ridiculous problem of a spoiled brat, who was given an expensive education and now has the privilege to sit back and decide whether it really suits her after all, as though it were a pair of shoes that doesn't quite match that dress. And no matter which path I choose, either continuing on a highly-educated upper-class career track and being dissatisfied with it, or pursuing a job which I may turn out to enjoy quite a bit but which involves turning my back on four years of apparent wembling and money-squandering, I will still be agonizing over which of two perfectly good options for earning money will be more intensely life-fulfilling. When some people are, you know, looking for just a job, to earn money for food and a place to live, not the very essence of life in the form of a job.

And I've thought through the strange concept of "deserving" too much, and read too much about the reproduction of social classes in these sociology courses of mine, to believe that there is something I have done which makes me worthy of being here in the first place, not to mention being able to make bizarrely privileged choices like this. The whole idea of deserving is a faulty concept. It relies on the notion that the world is fair, that good will be rewarded with good and bad with bad. Everyone who's been alive for a few years knows that can't be right. Bad things happen to good people. I've seen it over and over again, heart-wrenchingly. And, somehow, good things will continue to happen to people like me, who have hardly faced a challenge in their lives. I've watched friends overcome immense hardship; I've seen people's worlds crumble around me, and what do I get? A clear path ahead. A chance to whimper over a decision some people would beg for. I know that I've had my life handed to me -- my social class, my family, and my health being the big ones, and then just a ridiculous stash of life's luck to smooth over any remaining bumps. And I know that there's nothing in this world that will explain why me, why not someone else.

It's been pointed out that at least I know, at least I'm aware of my privilege. But it seems too easy to just pat myself on the head for noticing and go on my merry way. In a sense my frustration is based on that same legend of deserving that I want to let go of but can't. Having become aware of the futility of finding fairness in the world, I for some reason want to reestablish it and fix it, as though I could somehow pay off my debts to fate. But how? Sometimes I think it would be easier to just take a bullet for someone much more worthy than I, as though this would restore some cosmic balance. But I suspect it is unlikely that I'll have such an opportunity in the first place, much less the nerve to act on my carefully-thought-out formula for evening out the score.

The question, really, is how to live this life with self-respect, and not despise myself for having it easy or be disgusted by the petty, privileged problems that I'm constantly preoccupied with. How to make these little decisions and move forward with my life without feeling ashamed for being at this particular crossroads in the first place. And how to reciprocate a world which has given me everything and taken nothing from me, in these twenty long years.

earlier -- later