Empty

My bedroom is basically empty right now. No books on the bookshelves. No perfumes atop my dresser. No pictures on the walls. Except that picture of Michael that I put up for Diego. He wanted that so badly. Asked me for it over and over. It’s mine.

The room is empty. Nothing to distract me. Nothing to hold me back, to keep my heart and mind in the past instead of moving forward. I feel so light in here right now. Like a feather just resting gently, drifting easily, calmly, silently.

It’s freeing. To not be surrounded by shit.

I can’t even think of what the hell is so important that I had this space stuffed with. I have six, seven boxes packed full of stuff of mine, that uesd to fill this room. What is in those boxes? Books. Shelves. Cases of CDs. More books. I have way too many books. I need to get rid of more of them. And I’ve already donated a lot since we started packing.

Just shit. A bunch of shit that I hardly ever touch or see or much less use. I want my next room to be empty like this. Spend lots of money on a very comfortable bed. Sleep is important. Have one bookshelf with the most important books, or ones that I’m currently reading. why keep the others?

A lot of my stuff was given to me by other people and I keep it around. Emotional baggage. An intricately designed and hand-created wooden box from India given to me by my grandfather. A little box given to me by a best friend in 5th grade. Elephants knick nacks given to me by Diego, my grandmother, my sister, my mother. A picture given to me by my dad.

“Have a piece of me” everyone says. What about me?

I’m not here. I’m in my journals. I’m in my blog. I’m in the vibrations that echo from the body of my guitar. I’m in my laugh. None of this is me.

I like this bed. I like my things, they’re alright… but they aren’t me.

It’s nice to be given things. But most of it’s crap. Weighing me down. Holding me back. You’re nice, but you’re not me.

Maybe I’m just tired. But I’m being honest right now. I am pretty tired. But I’m writing what I feel. This is me.

I’m thinking about busting open all these taped up boxes tomorrow and throwing most of this shit out.

I’ve had the desire to do this, off and on, since I was a sophomore in high school. I used to blog about it. Not when I was depressed or anything. Just because it seemed right. “I’m wanting to throw away all my stuff again. Get rid of all of it.” It confused people. They were concerned. To me, it just seems right. That desire went away for a few years. Now that I’m alone in my space again, I feel it.

I feel free in this empty room. Like I can just be myself, whoever I am at any moment, not obligated to myself or anyone else to be anything.

Shifting

One of the best experiences I’ve ever known are those moments when you can literally feel your attitude and view of the world shifting, like it’s a physical thing which is turning inside of you and altering your experience of everything around you. In my experience, this is always a positive shift.

Today I slept in. Really in. My single Tuesday class begins at 1:00, and I woke up with 10 minutes to spare. I didn’t go to class.

The day started as usual. It was dark in my room and the bedding was rumpled and too warm, automatically setting me into an uncomfortable and slightly agitated mood. I found my cell phone to check my messages and the news, but it was dead.

By about 5 o’clock I had showered and changed into clean clothes. I left my room to find the blind’s on our apartment windows wide open and streaming the evening’s sunlight through from the west. The apartment wasn’t as cold and airy as it was the first time I left my room – it was cool and I was warm from my shower. I love that feeling.

I cut up a mango that had been sitting in the fruit bowl for 4 days. It was slightly over-ripe, but when I cut it open it was rich orange and fragrant. I ate it standing over the sink, mango juice dripping down my elbows.

The sun continued to set and I grabbed a good book that I had been working on all week. I would finish it now. I grabbed a bag of pumpkin seeds and headed for the patio, change of pace from my usual spot on my bed in my room, but the light from the windows had me already feeling in higher spirits than usual.

I’ve always loved the warm desert nights. I don’t like when they’re hot, like the one night I was simply sitting outside talking on the phone at 10:00 and was actually sweating, just sitting there. I like when they’re warm. Tonight it’s warm, and slightly breezy.

There’s a huge pine tree that you can touch from the patio without even leaning, and the foreground is all pines and palm trees, a couple of roof-tops.

The shift officially took place as I sat there reading this book, mindlessly chewing pumpkin seeds and spitting the soggy shells out onto a pamphlet someone left on the table. Once in a while I would instead spit the chewed up shell into my fingers and toss it over the balcony, imagining a bird coming along at some point and snacking on my left-overs. I thought of my early, almost-human ancestors , and all living beings, doing similar things, unaware, unlike me, of their unintentional give-and-take with other living beings.

Maybe it was the change of weather from the terrible wind we’d been experiencing for what seems like a month now. Maybe it was having taken a day off from school and not feeling bad about it. Maybe it was that I slept in so late and was experiencing the beautiful Mojave evening as my personal morning. Maybe it was that I had been sick with a cold for 2 days and it was finally starting to feel like the pressure behind my eyes was letting up. Maybe it was that I hadn’t eaten all day but had just had a live, delicious mango for “breakfast” and was now snacking on my favorite seed, outdoors, sharing with the birds. Or it could have been the book that I was reading, coming to a realistic, grounded end filled with sentiments of contentment, awakening and “it’s not happily ever after but it’s better than it ever was before”. And maybe all these things, each in the right dose, are the secret ingredients of the recipe for shifting a person’s experience of themselves and the world.

I felt content with the world as I drove 4 miles down the road to pick my little sister up from her night class. I wasn’t sure if this feeling was going to last so I opened the sunroof on my car and put in a Jack Johnson album, just to encourage it to go a little longer.

This feeling the one I got as a kid when I got to experience something new, or some new place, with a parent beside me. It reminds me specifically of going to one of many Mexican restaurants with my dad. It’s bright, hot and monotone outside, and it’s bright, hot and colorful inside the restaurant. Tiles with painted designs in blue, red, yellow and green border the walls, the floor, the chairs, the tables. It reminds me of being at the pool with my mom and the rush of excitement I would feel when she would get in the water with us kids for a few moments before going back to sun-bathing. It feels like the world around you has opened up and some invisible force has decided to grant you reprieve from your burdens for a little while, lifting them up and away, so that you can see what the world looks like without all the weight. So you can remember what the world looked like when you were a child. So you can see that there are still beautiful things around you every day. But eventually the reprieve will be over and it’s up to you to remember, to hold on wherever you can, and to be grateful.

I’m home now, writing this, and the feeling is still with me. I’ll make some dinner (:eggplant parmigiana with green beans, garlic bread and some salad) then put in a movie which will hopefully not shatter this feeling. Enjoy the last glass of Reisling from the bottle I’ve had stored away for a couple weeks now. And then go to bed, hoping this feeling stays with me till morning.

I don’t know if any of this gives any inkling of what “feeling” or “shift” I’m talking about, but I hope that when I look back and read this again, maybe if I’m having a tough time, I’ll be able to remember.

THE Meaning

Thinking about graduation and graduate school and all of this also has me thinking about the grander purpose of life.

Right now my main focus is to graduate college with my bachelor’s, get a job where I can provide for myself, be able to accumulate wealth for my more distant future (read retirement). I have *many* other goals and plans, but this pretty much sums up all of my immediate goals and my long-term goals, put together.

But what after this? What *during* this, even?

Okay, let’s say, in a perfect world, I graduate with perfect cridentials for a good graduate program and I get a MA and a PhD and get a good position at a university. Or whatever. Whatever I end up doing. That’s my goal right now, but that *may* change – who knows. Let’s say I have a job and I’m supporting myself and I have my own place to live and all of this, just to keep things general, then.

Now what?

Now what?

The obvious answer, to me, is that with each goal reached, more new goals are spawned and those new goals are likely to “take over” and become what gives life meaning. Just as my education right now seems to give my life meaning.

So maybe there is never,  or at least *very rarely* a time in life when all needs and goals are met and there doesn’t seem to be much else to do. It’s said that a lot of people only look for the meaning of their life at times of great turmoil. I’ve never found that to be true for myself. For whatever reason, I notice that I’m pretty much just the opposite: I look into the meaning of life when things are going well or at times like this, obviously.

For some people the meaning and wholesomeness is provided by religion. For others it’s family. Others, it’s friends.

I don’t know what the answer is and to be honest, I’m not too too concerned about it right now, although perhaps I should be. I don’t know! I just don’t know. And as much as they’d like to think they do, none of the people who fall into the categories I mentioned about really *know* either. So nobody knows.

But somehow, if you’re not going to die feeling like a *total* waste of . . . life, we each at least have to find what makes the most sense to us. I don’t know what that is for me, yet. I have some general ideas of possibilities I plan to pursue and see where they go, but my guess is that it’s not just one thing, but a nice little combination, or package of different things that “matter”. I’m sure it changes throughout a person’s lifetime, also.

 

This happens much too often. Suddenly I’ve lost interest in talking about this anymore.

Bye!

April 4th

I spoke with the GA of my stats class today about joining the field practicum course this summer. He said he’s almost 100% sure that it’s full right now, and then my professor jumped in and said she was pretty sure it was full too. But then she said that she’s doing some research this summer too that she’ll need volunteers to help out with and that I could possibly join her on that. She said it is only 2 weeks, where as the actual course being offered this summer is 5 weeks, and it’s just volunteer work, not an official credited course. But she said she might be able to work something out to where I could get like one credit for helping out in the field, and then if I wanted more credits she could set me up doing some things for her in the lab afterwards.

I think this is a great opportunity. Here’s why: The professor who is offering the field practicum course this summer is a professor that I took Forensic Anthropology with last semester, but I didn’t get to know her very well at all because it was a very large class and there were 2 GAs and 2 professors teaching the class. I think she spent a total of 3 days in class with us all semester. I’ve spent a lot more “face time” with my stats professor and I’m doing extremely well in her class, so those things are obviously bonuses… (not that I did poorly in my forensic anth. course). The only DOWN side to this would be if a) she was doing the research during the same time that I’m taking other courses this summer and b) she’s not an expert in the field I want to go into like the other professor is. She’s an archaeologist. …Oh, I just double checked and looks like I was ill-informed. The other professor is also an archaeologist. Oh well. It would have been nice if she was a physical anthropologist like I thought, so that I could ask questions about physical anth stuff, but that would have just been a nice bonus. One thing I’m afraid of if I did work in the lab, though: I’m terrified that I’d develop one of those strange passions for ceramics! D:

So I guess at this point I just need to hope that her research schedule works with my summer school schedule. I’m going to email my professor about all this soon so I’m crossing my fingers all goes well!! It would be really awesome to get to do some work in the lab too, even if it is with projectile points and not skeletal remains. I don’t think the other field course includes lab work…

I have 4 exams this week. You’d think it was mid-terms time or something. Mid-terms this semester were less stressful than this week is going. The only class I don’t have an exam in is… wait, I have an exam in all 5! AH!!

I should probably be studying and not typing here! Oh well.

I need to get back to fixing my email though – nightmare of a thing it’s been…

My grandpa is in the hospital right now, too. Since this morning when he took a fall and severely broke his ankle. I wanted to call my grandma but I wasn’t sure what to say. I’ll think about it more and call tomorrow… I hate that my grandpa is hurt. I hate thinking of that. And I hate knowing how worried my grandma must be about him now too. Jeez.

Paycheck on Wednesday.

I wanted to say some things about the appreciation I’ve developed for the beauty of the desert. I’ll get around to that another time, though. Today is one of those days where so much is going on internally that everything seems to kind of slow down to accommodate it all. I end up half-way ignoring it all and there opens up this rarely opened void for appreciation of the little things to rush in. But I’m still cranky, because of all that sits under the surface of that… Does this make any sense? I guess it’s kind of a paradox…I tend to get a little annoyed at paradoxes.

** The Featured Image is of Tivoli Village in Las Vegas, NV. They are building it on the corner of my block. Beautiful architecture, I think. Nice to see something besides 4 dull stucco walls for once.

On LISTENING to Music

Everyone’s favorite “thing to do” is “listen to music” these days.

. . . Really?
Really? . . .

Today I bought new earbuds. I came home, powered up my laptop and found that NPR.com published an article today discussing the difference in how we listen to music today compared to just a few decades ago. It’s an interesting article, but at about the middle of the article they mention that physically, the way we listen to music, has changed.

I always have been, and I think I may always be, perplexed by people who walk around the world with buds stuck in their ears. It annoys me. To be frank, I almost find it disgusting. But that’s getting a little off-topic…

I know I listen to music differently than most people of my generation. I don’t listen to music and read. I don’t listen to music and do homework except for classical music while I’m doing math homework (I prefer Beethoven). And I never, ever listen to music while I’m just walking around in public. Ever. Ever. Ever.

Ever.

It disgusts me that people do this. Take the damn things out of your ears and engage in the world. Be with people. Be with yourself. Have a real, true-to-life experience.

I’m wondering: what kind of music do these people listen to? Is your music that uninteresting and made with such little talent that it’s not worthy of your full attention? I love the music I listen to. That’s why I give it my full attention. That’s why I sit my ass down and listen over and over to appreciate every nuance of the music. The instruments – each of them. The instrument of the singer’s voice. The lyrics. Or all of it at once. Maybe it’s not that the music isn’t actually very captivating, but that these people are really displeased with the world and are using this as a way to “escape”. In response to that, why not, instead of trying to escape, don’t you get *more* involved and try to change things? You’re sure as hell not making things any better by walking around all but completely disconnected from the world. Or are they pretending that this music is the soundtrack to their life and they’re in some movie where the camera is always on them?

I hike a lot and I haven’t yet brought myself to take music with me on a hike. I know a lot of people do this too, but to me it sort of defeats the purpose of most of hiking excursions: being with myself in a natural environment. Not music, myself. Now, I LOVE rolling down the windows of my car if weather permits and turning of the stereo while I’m driving out to the hike and on my way out from the hike. But ON the hike? Neh.

I mostly listen to music in my car. I love listening to music in my car. I regularly take the long-way-home if a good song is playing and I don’t want to miss it. I used to sometimes just get in my car and drive around in areas that I enjoyed so I could listen to music. This is probably the only thing that I do while listening to music, driving.

Other than that, when I listen to music, that is my activity: listening to music.

I remember once while on vacation at my grandparents house, my grandma came into the guest room my sister and I were staying in and asked what we were up to. We told her we were listening to music. Her response: “Wow, I haven’t heard of someone just sitting and listening to music in a LONG time!” I was a little confused. What else would they be doing?

Today? Anything. Reading. Doing dishes. Running. Walking. Talking to a friend. Shopping. Pooping. Watching TV, for christ’s sake! Eating. Playing a game. I’m sure some people listen to music while vacuuming.

How can people listen to music this way? I was bought an iPod when I was a sophomore in high school, now I’m a senior in college, and that iPod is still the only mobile music device I’ve ever owned. Works still, even though everyone said it would die after about 2 years of use. When I was in high school I’d listen to it sometimes on the bus home. I’ve never been able to walk around listening to it, though. In fact, I use it mostly as an easy place to store all my music. I see it as a storage device. I hook it up to my dock at home and it very, very rarely leaves that spot except to be synced (which I also rarely do). I know people who have had 5 iPods. WTF?

I never do this at home, but when I’m on vacation I often lay in the dark bedroom, plug in my iPod and listen to music just laying in bed in the dark.

So this is why I don’t listen to music very often. I love the music I listen to. But I don’t have much time to listen to it, except in my car since I do so much driving. So I listen a lot there. But I *listen* to music (as in really listen, not do other things while also playing music in some way or another) mostly on vacations. Which is still nice.

There’s Always a ‘Bright Side’

Only sometimes it takes a while to finally see what it might be. Sometimes years. Sometimes a lifetime.

Luckily for me this time it only took a few days.

I found out last week when I talked to an academic advisor that I have another year of school left. I was expecting to be through by the end of Summer semester, but that won’t happen. I was upset by this for a while, but as I’ve been getting geared up for Spring semester I’m actually kind of excited about it.

This is my first year at University, although it is my 4th year in college. I was kind of bummed to realize that I’d only have 1 year to enjoy university life. But now I have this semester, and a then whole ‘nother year. That gives me plenty of time to get involved in extracurriculars that weren’t available or as enticing as the ones at the college I attended for the first 3 years of my post-secondary education.

I realized tonight that the gym and wellness center at my school (which is AMAZING) is available to me for free as a student. All I’d have to pay for is locker rental – $20 a semester. There are also Outdoor Excursions that are offered by the university that I am ecstatic about. I wish I could go on ALL of them but I at least want to go on one each semester – 2 if possible. I can hardly contain myself over this… Then there are clubs that I’d like to get involved with, like the Anthropology Club.

So I can enjoy some of the “college experience” still. My “college experience” won’t include the stereotypical binge drinking and out-of-control parties. I’d MUCH rather go on a 3 day hiking and canoeing trip through Black Canyon on the Colorado River. OMG.

I’m really excited. Although it sucks to take 5 years to get a 4 year degree, and it won’t all be perfect and there’s still challenges ahead… duh… I’m excited to have the *opportunity* still to take advantage of this time in my life.

I have classes at 8:30 tomorrow. I took my car on the freeway for like the 3rd time in the 4 years that I’ve owned it and it did great. So my drive to and from school should be shortened and the wear-and-tear on my car lessened by that. Another thing to look forward to. I’ll be getting what *does* need to get done on it done Friday.

Things are going well for me right now.
SWEET.