flip flop
There seems to be less rhyme and reason to my moods these days. I guess to a certain extent that's due to the fact that before a couple of days ago or so, there were only lows to contend with. Lows and lower lows. Now I have my good moments (see the last post), my stupid happy moments. My stupidest happy moment today came when I spied a pod of dolphin frolicing on the Intercoastal Waterway in front of the b&b. I was blindsided by eight-year-old Melissa-ness; I morphed into a totally goofy little girl in an instant. Standing on the sidewalk, watching the dolphin play, clapping my hands, and babbling incoherent "yays!" every time I saw another dolphin breach. Yay! yay! Wow! Cool!
And then I had one of those "Oh, Chipman, you're in public" moments and stopped the clapping and kept the yays in my brain for only my other personalities to hear.
It was nice. Nice to know that small things still please.
Yay! Dolphin! Cool! Wow!
Yeah, not tonight, though. Tonight I'm in a funk. For no damned good reason either. Just blue blue indigo.
And I stress: no good reason. Had a lovely night. Tom Corcoran is here teaching at the workshop. Tom writes mystery novels set in Key West. I've read two-- Gumbo Limbo and Bone Island Mambo-- and they're really, really great. Much better than your standard genre drivel. His characters are wonderful and he does a fantastic job of setting. So I was pretty honored to meet him, and then absolutely enchanted by him once we started talking. It was a great night, listening to him talk about hanging out with Jimmy Buffet in the 70's (he co-wrote "Fins" and took the cover photo for 7 of Buffet's albums), about his "old college classmate, a journalist named PJ O'Rourke," and about his lifelong friendship with Hunter S. Thompson (he just returned from a road trip to go to Thompson's funeral/fireworks). And he's just a really nice guy, too. The kind of guy you wish lived next door.
And then the evening was over and I was checking the news-- and sure, it's bad news, but nothing newly bad-- and I sighed this great big sigh and Jason said "Oh, that's a big sigh, what's wrong?" And before I thought I said, "I just want to go home." Jas said: "What's wrong? Aren't you enjoying yourself... oh... you mean home."
I miss my life. And that's saying a whole hell of a lot because I wasn't 100% thrilled with my life when I left it behind on August 28. I was, as some of you know, in the midst of what I have been told to call my "one-third life crisis" (as opposed to my midlife crisis which means I'll croak in my 60's). Feeling the wanderlust. Feeling some wacked out existential crises things like "what do I want to be when I grow up" and "do I really have a purpose here on earth." I was, I daresay, rather unhappy. And now, geez louise, I would gladly reclaim that BS, I would gladly suck the very marrow of my one-third life crisis. Hell, I would love to go back and grade papers all weekend and have no life to speak of and be overworked and underpaid and listless and questioning and grouchy... just to have the chance to teach a damned poetry class. I never even GOT to TEACH a single poetry class this year. Never got to whip out my Yeats and stun the girls with the brilliance of "The Mermaid." Never got to see the little lightbulbs going off all over the classroom when the girls realized that they, too, could write sonnets. I want to go home and listen to my fricking landlord play crappy Southern Rock until 4am. I want to go home and live in the crowded, messy apartment-- you know, if we'd stuck out the storm and died in the apartment, rescuers would have noted that we were "eccentric pack rats" much like those news stories you read about elderly men and women who die and go undiscovered for months and are found in apartments with back-issues of the New York Times and Southern Living piled to the ceiling... Yes, I want that back. (Tangental note: Exile really shows you how little you need to live. I have designs on going home, shoveling out the apartment-- I shudder to think-- and seizing a life where all I own can fit in the trunk of a car-- it's doable.)
I want to go home. And that's selfish and self-centered and lousy for me to even think because so many people have nothing-- and worse, no one-- to go home to. But perhaps watching dolphins today triggered my child-mind, and now I am just a kid-- a 32 year old kid-- who wants to be in the place that she knows, doing what she knows how to do, knowing what will come next, tomorrow, next week, next month.
And then I had one of those "Oh, Chipman, you're in public" moments and stopped the clapping and kept the yays in my brain for only my other personalities to hear.
It was nice. Nice to know that small things still please.
Yay! Dolphin! Cool! Wow!
Yeah, not tonight, though. Tonight I'm in a funk. For no damned good reason either. Just blue blue indigo.
And I stress: no good reason. Had a lovely night. Tom Corcoran is here teaching at the workshop. Tom writes mystery novels set in Key West. I've read two-- Gumbo Limbo and Bone Island Mambo-- and they're really, really great. Much better than your standard genre drivel. His characters are wonderful and he does a fantastic job of setting. So I was pretty honored to meet him, and then absolutely enchanted by him once we started talking. It was a great night, listening to him talk about hanging out with Jimmy Buffet in the 70's (he co-wrote "Fins" and took the cover photo for 7 of Buffet's albums), about his "old college classmate, a journalist named PJ O'Rourke," and about his lifelong friendship with Hunter S. Thompson (he just returned from a road trip to go to Thompson's funeral/fireworks). And he's just a really nice guy, too. The kind of guy you wish lived next door.
And then the evening was over and I was checking the news-- and sure, it's bad news, but nothing newly bad-- and I sighed this great big sigh and Jason said "Oh, that's a big sigh, what's wrong?" And before I thought I said, "I just want to go home." Jas said: "What's wrong? Aren't you enjoying yourself... oh... you mean home."
I miss my life. And that's saying a whole hell of a lot because I wasn't 100% thrilled with my life when I left it behind on August 28. I was, as some of you know, in the midst of what I have been told to call my "one-third life crisis" (as opposed to my midlife crisis which means I'll croak in my 60's). Feeling the wanderlust. Feeling some wacked out existential crises things like "what do I want to be when I grow up" and "do I really have a purpose here on earth." I was, I daresay, rather unhappy. And now, geez louise, I would gladly reclaim that BS, I would gladly suck the very marrow of my one-third life crisis. Hell, I would love to go back and grade papers all weekend and have no life to speak of and be overworked and underpaid and listless and questioning and grouchy... just to have the chance to teach a damned poetry class. I never even GOT to TEACH a single poetry class this year. Never got to whip out my Yeats and stun the girls with the brilliance of "The Mermaid." Never got to see the little lightbulbs going off all over the classroom when the girls realized that they, too, could write sonnets. I want to go home and listen to my fricking landlord play crappy Southern Rock until 4am. I want to go home and live in the crowded, messy apartment-- you know, if we'd stuck out the storm and died in the apartment, rescuers would have noted that we were "eccentric pack rats" much like those news stories you read about elderly men and women who die and go undiscovered for months and are found in apartments with back-issues of the New York Times and Southern Living piled to the ceiling... Yes, I want that back. (Tangental note: Exile really shows you how little you need to live. I have designs on going home, shoveling out the apartment-- I shudder to think-- and seizing a life where all I own can fit in the trunk of a car-- it's doable.)
I want to go home. And that's selfish and self-centered and lousy for me to even think because so many people have nothing-- and worse, no one-- to go home to. But perhaps watching dolphins today triggered my child-mind, and now I am just a kid-- a 32 year old kid-- who wants to be in the place that she knows, doing what she knows how to do, knowing what will come next, tomorrow, next week, next month.
posted by M at 7:19 PM
1 Comments:
Do your students have access to a computer in this crisis? If so, it would be kind of cool if you could have them do some poetry on your blog. Seems like this could be an amazing time to see those lightbulbs going off in there head.
I went to New Orleans in April for JazzFest and a girlfriend's bachelorette party. I'm 34 with two kids so I went smack in the middle of my mid-life crisis. For some reason, I felt compelled to drive from Houston to New Orleans to see all the funky bayou towns. And I am so glad I did. People kept saying I was "crazy" driving all that way by myself, but I think it's more crazy to just go through life without asking hard questions. So keep asking them. Stay safe. People are rooting for you.
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