moody piece of junk

I wrote this last night, frustrated about not having written on this lately due to no internet at home. It's more personal than Mexico or travel related. I'm not sure if I should really post it, but why not? Also, today I played the violin for a while and it made me happy. Here it is:


We've had cool weather recently. So cool in fact, I'd venture to say the high of the past two days was not above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. After this afternoon's scuba lesson, Mallory, Megan and I were all shivering. Fortunately our teacher's enthusiasm for air conditioning had subsided for our trip back to Merida. It was a nice medium – still warm and with wind in our hair. Not too cold, artificial, and icy, like life is with A/C on full blast. It's just about balance.

As the sun dove ever deeper it just kept getting cooler. It was so nice when I got home that I changed into shorts and took a stroll around the neighborhood with my ipod and music to set my mood, which was nothing short of unprecedented.

I've considered myself pretty lucky to avoid a lot of stressing about what I'm going to do after I graduate. In fact, I really almost never thought about it; since my year off it's been a pretty straight path. That mildly fatalistic combination of persistence and self-negation, I think, has had a lot to do with how I make decisions in my life, and especially big ones. It's a comforting, easy, and, dare I say, insincerely-buddhist manner of navigating life's milestones. But I don't think I want to do it like this anymore.

That's why I chose my college. I just sort of did. I had a good visit. To me it wasn't particularly profound although to some of my hosts I became some sort of religious symbol thanks my cramped spread-eagle sleeping posture. And I was relatively happy with the decision. And I'm not complaining about what my future is looking like, either. I've got a guaranteed job (assuming I don't quit or perform abysmally) that's salaried, with benefits, and summers off. I might also get a masters degree. Even though I wouldn't dare to complain, what good would the best liberal-arts education money can buy be if I couldn't critique this situation?

Do I know what I'm getting myself into? Not really. I listened to an episode of This American Life a few weeks ago which featured that hipster economist from NPR. He had a story about the economy in which he tried to convince his cousin to go back to college over a three-way phone call between them and an economics professor. The cousin had a pretty good job as a carpenter, and he said that he loved it because he leaves all his work at work – he never talks about work at home. Professionals, on the other hand, do this all the time. Yes, being a badass teacher and viewing that role as central to combatting unquantifiable social juste issues is something that I want to do, but the fact that I will continually be making choices about living my own life simply by choosing how much I will work is a incredibly intimidating. My job's training materials make it very clear that my job will take a lot of work and that I will pretty much eat, sleep, and breathe teaching. It sounds a lot like college, but with a little more freedom and less being continually subjected to others' judgement.

Right now, I'm going into this future optimistically, believing that I'll get a lot out of this experience. I think the training curriculum has just gotten me down – I've been reading it all weekend, and it has successfully bludgeoned one key idea into my head: think about everything you do all the time and in many ways. There's a lot of good specific info in it to be certain, but the general message is: think about what you're doing. Ok, I will. I know I'll learn a lot by teaching, and I'm pretty interested in that as a possible “career” in the future. Luckily, it's a pretty versatile “career.” Summers off, and every corner of the world with human populations needs some sort of teacher. Lots of opportunity. The world is wide open to me.
I think I can get out of debt, too. This is a big one. But what if I can't? It might mean getting trapped into this lifestyle where work never ends. Perhaps this is where Marx went wrong in the manifesto: professionals are workers whose work never ends. They have to keep producing the same results all the time, meaning taking their work home with them. What if I end up with a life like this?

I know that I can be successful at whatever I really set my mind too. That's not the problem. The problem is that success isn't really aligned with happiness. I mean, who really wants to not have time to explore themselves, diversify themselves, do something, anything artistic. Play music, write, paint, wear funny clothes, tell a joke, play a sport or game, dance (of course), belligerently mumble with urgency of existential matters and paradoxes, recognize the essential unity of everything in the universe. What if I don't get to do these things anymore?

When I think about my life, I think the times I've been most “successful” in ventures such as these were times when I was least traditionally “successful” in others. During both of those times, I left my work at work and didn't really do homework. I'm thinking of course of the last two years of high school and the year I took off of college. My senior year of high school is kind of a blur. I'll leave it to you to extrapolate that implication. I partied a lot, I played guitar a lot every day, I had the wackiest job I will ever have. I'm convinced this year deeply affected my in many ways. I think, during this time, I learned how to creatively converse with people. Mainly thanks to Liz, I'd say I have excellent conversational skills.

There was one time we came up with the idea to make a comic based on a combination of Star Wars and Seinfeld. The Star Wars characters would be living in New York and have funny incidents happen to them. We had a whole issue planned out but never really got around to it. There was one night during which we listened to Zaireeka a few times and, gradually becoming more and more disoriented (infer away, dear reader), became more and more confused about just what the fuck was going on anyways!? It's a tricky album. Or the roman candle wars, swimming in the lake at midnight, drinking our sorrows away when Phish “broke up,” the cable access tv ping-pong tourney, or living with a hobo. (Yes, I really did live with a homeless guy for a while in high-school.) I was pretty much free. Sure, I was in high school and depended on my parents for stuff, but I made the most of it in a pretty positive way.

Since then, the only other time when I've really been able to do stuff like that was when I took a year off of college. I left my work at work, and did a million other things when I wasn't at work. Innumerable potlucks, bike rides, concerts, beers, game nights, weird situationist zines, drum circles, comics, conversations about the importance of the avant-garde and how to apply it to video game design, community spanish lessons, skill-shares, activism stuff when the EPA (no joke) tried to dump a bunch of toxic waste in the city, and daily celebrations of life. I can honestly say that I would be a very different person if not for that year. I'm a lot better for it, and the kids in Kalamazoo are family to me.

I'd say that I've felt like I'm accomplishing the most when I'm accomplishing the least according to a “professional” viewpoint. That's why I'm worried: what if I don't make it out of debt? I'll be trapped into continuing this cycle of “professional” employment. I might never follow some crazy dream of becoming a mad farmer, acoustic wonder-boy, or member of the traveling nation. That would make me sad.

I don't think I'm the only person concerned with this type of conflict. I'm bred for success – educated at an elite liberal arts college and storming onto the scene with a truly challenging task (slash job) which will provide opportunities for personal growth in certain ways. But probably not in others. At Grinnell I learned to read, critique, and write like a pro, but almost never played my guitar. And I lament this. What will I end up sacrificing next time around?

I see this conflict springing up in some other places, too. Today a friend and I were talking about globalization in a corporate coffee-shop. During the conversation, two other friends came in. We looked at each other, and, rather than saying hello, justified our presence in the belly of the beast. “It's just that all the independent cafes are closed today (Sunday). You'd think this was like... a small town or something.” “Yeah...” We got back to unpacking some weird theoretical mumbo-jumbo about production in a neo-liberal globalized economy as antithetical to education. Very weird and hard to decipher, probably French (translated into Spanish). If people need to acquire increasingly specialized skills to work, does that mean that teaching the skills of critical thinking goes down the tubes? The liberal-arts as irrelevant? Outdated? Ha! I think not.
I was reminded of a brief history of this radical simplicity commune place in France called The Ark (L'arche?). I heard this story in another radical simplicity commune place in Missouri called the Wren Song Sanctuary when I went there for a bit in March 2008 (and how I long to go back!). Some of the founders had previously lived at the Ark when it broke down. It was supposedly one of the biggest, oldest, most successful communities of this kind in the world. But as time progressed and the new anti-capitalist movement was began to take shape, the residents slowly but surely sorted themselves into two groups: one dedicated to the simplest, most peaceful living possible as a way to offer change, and one which wanted to travel and use a lot of technology to stay connected and on-top of every issue. Over time, the chasm between these groups became so vast as to end in a dissolution of the Ark. Sad, but true. I think this story is a parallel to what I'm facing personally and what the privileged sector of the new counter-culture faces. To be badass professionals and work to change things with some degree of integration or just opt-out and seek love, creation, and spiritual truth.

This is why, for me, the stakes are so high. And why I'm, for once, concerned about what I'm doing with my life. I'm hoping that I can find a balance. It's all about balance. I've been envisioning my life on that premise for a while. It will be tough. One side will want all of myself and I there won't be much of me left if I oblige. After this is over, I'm going to take a big step in the other direction – working on a biodynamic (and all that good stuff) farm for a while. I'm praying that after these two or three years of teaching I will be free of debt. I'm hoping that my cell phone will be obsolete, and my car (eek! buying a car!!!!) will be stolen, but my biking muscles will be stronger than ever. I'm looking forward to the day that my computer will break and my mind will be sharper than ever. I'm counting on the day my ipod dies but my guitar is still cool.