"He who plants the first tree is he who will look for the Messiah."
-Buber

la di dah

I'm sitting in the library "working on my thesis." As I have been for the last two hours. This is, approximately, how I have spent that time:
10:20 - 11:20: focused and much-needed editing on what's written thus far
11:20 - 11:30: thinking about my categories and how to organize them, since nothing I've written is actually IN any kind of order
11:30-11:45: wandering around the library, looking at books with pictures (I found the section on Idaho history)
11:45-12: surfed the internet
12:00-12:15 - wrote a couple paragraphs from my most recent research and notes. Slightly distracted by listening to Clap Your Hands, which indicidentally is not very good study music
12:15-12:30 - checking email
12:30-present - writing on my blog

Woot.

I think I might have a fast-developing case of ADD. Or maybe I just need a break.

the question

is my course now going in circles?

I was in the middle of my shift at Wild Ginger, a slow Saturday lunch, when a server stood before me with an intense and surprised gaze.
"Do you ever hang out on the hill?"
I look at him. He does not look familiar. I tell him I do, but not often.
"Why?"

And then I remember.

Don Quixote. Standing before me, in the daylight, as sober now as I had been that night. The stranger who now suddenly isn't.

When I get home, I dig out my myriad journals and search for the entry I know I have written. It is small and inconspicuous, starting at the very bottom of a page, with the words, "Tonight I kissed a stranger, and it was a very very bad kiss." I remember the moment, I remember the distant feeling that it was a one-time occurrence, that we were two ships passing in the night. Because when he told me about myself, he said things that were true, and I needed to take them to heart.

And have I?

I can't shake the feeling that we weren't supposed to run into each other again. And he is not the one who is in the wrong place.

Here are the truths that I never speak. Because what Don Quixote told me was that I felt estranged from my family, from the people closest to me, that I felt they did not understand me. That I hungered for a place I hadn't found.

My parents are facing the first move of their married life, as my father gives up the only profession he has ever known and they leave the farm and the farmhouse that holds my entire childhood. Not by choice, really, but with no other options, as the weird and chronic disease that has been part of his life for over a decade has gradually taken away his ability to work.

My grandmother on my mother's side is in the later stages of Parkinson's disease. She is slipping away from us. The last time I saw her, I don't think she recognized me. But what if, for one last moment, she did?

The question arises, as I walk the cement streets between cement buildings, and work at jobs I don't really like, and watch the city with a growing hunger for sunshine and open space---

Why am I here and not there?


"

how to live, according to Buber

"...firstly, everyone should preserve and hallow hims own soul in its own particularity and in its own place, and not envy the particularity and place of others; secondly, everyone should respect the secret in the soul of his fellow man, and not, with brazen curiosity, intrude upon it and take advantage of it; and thirdly, everyone, in his relationship to the world, should be careful not to set himself as his aim."

I turned around and he was there
Like a tree I hadn't noticed growing before
or maybe had mistaken for a weed
And suddenly there it was
With roots and leaves,
a trunk sturdy enough to lean on
a shade big enough to sit in
a tree
a thing to wait for spring with
in a reasonable hope that the summer will bring fruit
knowing that the frost could still bite
but knowing that all that is needed now is a little sun
that success is a simple thing,
is mostly just a matter of avoiding
a big mistake.

the spareness of my time

I've decided to chill out a little.
Because, honestly, what is the point?
I'm trying to think a little more about what I want, and after watching Mona Lisa Smile yesterday afternoon, I currently feel I want to be a hot, bohemian professor, and have trysts with Italian professors at romantic cabins somewhere in New England.
In the meantime, how much should I really care about any job I might have to pay the bills?

Let's say my philosophy has changed a little. A job may not merit attachment at all, because a job doesn't actually promise to be there for the long haul. My friends and family are stable and important, and in many ways my passions and ultimate goals are stable and important, but employment? Employment deserves exactly no more of my attention than the hours I am paid for, and any job deserves to be dropped the second you find something better, or the second it stops being what you need it to be.
This is something I wished I had realized a few months ago, when I first asked myself if I might find a better place than Tutta Bella to work at, a place with more customers and more tips.
I could have had a head start. But they had convinced me to be loyal, and silly me, and thought that loyalty went both ways.
Loyalty or not, the basic realities of money can sometimes trump all. I could have made the decision first, and I wish I had.

I wish I would have had a little more foresight; or actually, I wish I would have trusted my intuition in thinking that the over-staffing and under-tipping of this new restaurant could not go on forever. Lesson learned. And really, it was fun while it lasted.

As far as looking for a new job, I've decided January is a harsh month to try to do it, so I'm not going to obsess over it. If I find the right thing, awesome. If it takes a while, well, I guess I will enjoy my extra free time. The modern economy is not designed to be stable, but should that be my problem?

the current confusion.

Today was when it hit me:
I have no job and no direction, and I don't know what the hell I am supposed to do with my life.

Partly, I feel intensely frustrated with how the modern world works, how nothing ever feels secure in the world of employment and money. Partly, I know that if I only work for money, I will always be dissatisfied.

And partly I wish I could move away from the city and learn how to throw pottery, and sell it from a tent at craft shows, and live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with a lot of books and a dog. Because that just sounds like peace.

Sometimes, I feel I have no idea what my 'gifts' are, and how I am supposed to use them, and how that could actually be beneficial to the world.

Sometimes, I miss the structure of school, the assignments turned in and the comments received back. I hate the feeling, out here in the real world, that you are doing something wrong, but you don't know what it is and no one will tell you. I feel like the heroine of the Moviegoer. Just tell me what to do, exactly, and reassure me I can do it, and afterwards tell me I did well. I am a product of public education and that's the only way I function.

But the truth is, this is the point at which I am the one who decides what I should do, and I am the one who judges whether I've done it well. Currently, I feel rather inept at both.