And off it goes. An oversaturation of information drowns my mind and I can hardly conceive of myself in a vacuum let alone in context of the world swirling around me. The cross-country explorations of summer feel eons ago, reduced to photographs and the casual anecdote. I no longer laugh at jokes about my hubris being checked as I now fail to cash out, reduced to a bystander as the body ambles forward.
I’ve never been a big talker – I like to be strategic with my sentences, only speaking only when I have a point or at the very least a sarcastic one-liner. Some folks out there have this remarkable ability to speak in rapid-fire succession, primed and ready to go with automatic fire, spraying the room, rarely hitting the mark but making a lot of noise in the process. Some days it feels like I only have one shot and the winds of discussion are moving faster than I can keep up with. I enjoy listening and observing, sure, but it’s a common phenomenon that I come out of a chat feeling that had I just been able to collect my thoughts just a second or two quicker I really could’ve said everything I’d wanted to say.
Usually this just leaves me feeling slightly guilty or lonesome as a big group ping pongs about and I’m resigned to only the sparsest of incisions, where, to my credit, I do tend to have an outsized impact relative to the amount of words I’ve said. Don’t speak so much that you say nothing at all. It’s different in grad school. Certainly it’s partially just me adjusting, but I’ve done the same readings as everyone else, I have thoughts, yet God damn I can’t get a lick in sometimes! It’s not that I need to dominate every discussion, it’s just that some days if I don’t speak a millisecond after the last person was done speaking I don’t get to say anything at all. Either these people’s brains just work faster than mine and I truly am the dumbass oddity there, the dirtbag other, or nobody’s bothering to fucking listen. Maybe both.
To the latter point, a decent amount of the time folks speak it is just scholastic static composed of benign buzzwords meant to prove the moral and intellectual righteousness and their commitment to the groupthink agenda to everyone around them, redundant of whomever spoke right before them. This sentiment is arguably just me lashing out to cover my own insecurities, though I do make great pains to ensure that I’m not just saying a shittier version of a point somebody already made. A lot of the time, folks do in fact have things to say, though, and by the time I have a decent response we’re onto the next point or somebody with a hair-trigger for a tongue has already beat me to the point I wanted to make.
Oh no, the thing meant to challenge me is challenging me. Shocker. Wow. Who would have ever guessed such a fate would befall me. That doesn’t negate the fact that some days I feel all I have to offer is stares, head nods, and a slew of sentences almost uttered before somebody else catches the silence before I do. I’ve never felt dumber, or at least more inadequate. In undergrad, I had to hold myself back from dominating conversation, allowing others the chance to speak but being ready to seize the gap when it was needed. Writing that out, I guess I see the need for my hubris to be checked. It fucking sucks! I’ll grant myself that, frankly, the classes that I did feel that bold about in undergrad I found far more pertinent to my interests than the classes I have now, and when we broach topics more pertinent to me now I do regain some of that vigor. Still, I have work to do.
Free time has hardly come freely. The other week I visited Jacob up in northern Virginia to see some classic pop punk acts at Jiffy Lube, a stroll down memory lane for my middle school self. He went through enough, he deserves that bone thrown. Before meeting up with him I walked around DC a bit, my old stomping grounds now trampled under the heels of the Dollar General’s legions. Between the jackboots, the streaming banner of His face, and the air permeated with anxiety, this was no longer my city nor yours nor anyones. Maybe that’s the point. I thought returning would help me recognize myself like it used to, but I found no catharsis strolling by the closed doors of the Forest Service Center and the Rothko exhibition at the tippy top of the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art only reflected the wayward confusion with no promise of rectifying. The only solace I found was in a small room in the gallery’s west wing as I gazed into Winslow Homer’s 1892 watercolor Hudson River Logging. The answer is out there but it keeps moving. I thought of Lake Tear of the Clouds. What I’d give to be back.
Driving back from the concert I was overcome by melancholy, despite the fact it was a good show and it was good to catch up with Jacob. I’d spent the day so focused on visions of my past self I had forgotten the beauty of visions of now until I got a call from Stilly, Adelina, and Audrey. They were all at Adelina’s housewarming which I figured I’d miss, not getting back to Richmond until midnight, but based on how they were talking I could tell they’d be there a while more. They called to tell me they missed me at the party and hoped that I’d be able to come by and I could feel my tiredness and self-pity lift as I was once again reminded that despite how I might feel, there’s folks out there who care and I don’t have to do this alone. How many times can I learn the same lesson, I wonder, but there’s no use in self-pity and reminiscing over past wrongs when there’s present rights to be had.
Last Saturday was Brian’s birthday bash, featuring two members of Kendall Street Company doing a live acoustic set in our living room. Strangers in a familiar place as me and the core retreated first to the gear room, and then to the workshop to drink and gab in peace. There was one moment when the duo did a cover of Courtney Barnett’s Avant Gardner as I downed a bottle of wine trying to distract myself from how much I disagreed with their take on it (I’ll note that it was a good set overall) but all I got was besieged by anxiety and shallow breaths as from the living room I hear “I’m not that good at breathing in.” Yeah, I’m not that good at breathing in. The night ended with strangers and the strange alike playing some sort of card game as I looked on, hit by the same horrible thought I’ve had in the classroom – I have nothing to say.
It’s been a process of adjustments and I think I’m finally hitting my groove and finding some sort of balance that I can at least sustain until May of next year. Now as work slows down and I find my graduate groove I can reincorporate escaping back into nature once more, just in time to frolic in the foliage. It’s been too long since I’ve been out there and my body knows it. Sometimes I find myself crying out loud to be back in Port Angeles or the North Country or at the very least my darling Dolly Sods, but Richmond’s a cool town and I’m doing the shit I need to right now so I can do the things I want to in the future. It’s all a process and I’ve been working to embrace the present instead of fixating too hard on the unattainable past or unknowable future. Let’s keep finding ways of knowing. Pretty pictures next post, I promise.