Being alone/alive
ALONE
It's been a long week without my girlfriend. I always feel conflicted when she leaves me or I leave her. It starts out appearing to be a welcome vacation to just veg and be lazy; or it takes on an even more "me" vision: a time to continue chugging through the multiplying unread books that populate my room. The image of me "finally" sitting down in that dusty library, the stacks providing a cave in which, huddling under the dark green rim of a golden table lamp, I lose myself in illuminating texts. Yet, it never turns into either of these things. The laziness feels good for about 1-hour and then I get bored--I just can't be that unproductive. And the books...just never feel in the mood to be read... nor do I live near the library in my mind. Instead, I usually just end up running aground into the shallow shore of reality, with my mental wheels spinning in muddy 3:00 AM infomercials or unseen HBO movies with unsettling endings (Falling Down with Michael Douglas and Robert Duvall is a good movie, just not one worth staying up all night watching and then thinking about). I also devise a lot of messy, mixed metaphors, apparently.
That being said, this particular stint could have been a lot worse. The pits I fell in this time have been pretty shallow and short-lived. This is mostly thanks to my friends, I should say good friends, who I see much less of when Erica is in town. The last five or six nights, I've hung out with them, seen a few episodes of "House," and had some good fun. They should probably think less of me, seeing as how I'm essentially falling-back on them in the absence of my girlfriend. And maybe they do. It's no coincidence that I've been there so often and they know it. I appreciate them a lot right now, though. They've kept me from hitting a real low moping point. And maybe they know that too. I dunno. I should definitely tell them.
Aside from my nights with them, I might also take a little credit for some brightness in my solitary week. I've managed to keep myself busy thinking, writing (well, idea-jotting, if that counts), going to assorted social functions that I would usually have frequented, and minimally, working out. But's it's still a fight. It reminds me, vaguely, of the feeling I wrote about in my freshmen year, when I was sans female. I talked about life feeling like a series of tightropes that I jumped between to prevent falling into some ominous abyss of meaninglessness. I've only felt a slight echo of this sentiment in the previous days, but it was definitely around.
Being alone is such an abnormal state for me. I've always had a close group of friends, back as far as elementary school. Even at home, I've always had my brother, a fellow renaissance egg-head like myself, and my loud parents who conditioned me to be of a similar nature. Although my appartment is inhabited by three other relatively-organic humanoid figures...they only occasionally exhibit more than one dimension of existence. There vocabulary consists usually of various synonyms for the male reproductive organ and its oppositely situated orifice on the rear-end. They spend there time mimicking the clocks in "The Persistance of Memory" all over our couch and playing the PS2. I do not mind them, per se, but I relate to them on a very thin and superficial level most of the time. Perhaps it is because they allow themselves such a thin level of expression. Perhaps it's because two are training to be engineers and the other is a sports economist. And I'm the resident, you know, wanna-be poet-philosopher. So, putting them all together, it's sort of equivalent to me living with one whole person with whom I can rarely relate.
My friends that have been so welcoming are, by far, the closest thing I have to a family in college. We've been through a lot of drama, which must be some sort of universal rule of human group interaction. But the more I write about this week, the more I feel like they deserve my thanks. Maybe in the form of an ice cream cake.
ALIVE
Being in a precarious financial position this semester, I have had to readjust my Monetary Sense Perception (MSP), in order to shake a feeling of overwhelming panic about my future. I watch the loan bills sit and accrue interest, and I watch the homeless vets on the side of the street look to me for a handout. All I can think is: at least they're not in debt. I guess they could be, though.
Yet, I have--to the best of my ability--managed to continue my dispiriting search for an actual job, while not allowing my fears eat me alive. I am, in fact, alive. And the more time I waste wondering how I will stay alive and afloat, the less time I actually will. A metaphorical chinese-finger trap.
So, with all the time in the world to kill, I've been trying to worry less and actively appreciate my place in the world more. I've noticed the good weather, the collegiate atmosphere that I so revel around the brick buildings on campus, and the park benches among shady trees. Trying the Zen thing, perhaps not explicitly, but subtley, in unplanned moments and calming breaths.
And I think this is working. We'll see. My theory: The less I focus on my problems, the more likely they will be solved.
Update: few days later
So, I was finally offered the library job I was so furiously courting. After two interviews, drug tests, spelling tests, a twelve-page essay on Proust, and a four-act, one-man play, I was offered the job: a part-time, minimum-wage, desk job answering the phones. Okay, so perhaps that was a bit overexaggerated (and certainly too many over-hypenated words), but the point is...it worked. Maybe that was a fluke. Or maybe a cosmic lesson learned. We'll see.
