some people have real problems
Feb. 2nd, 2009 02:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenI was complaining, you see, about how it never snows here. (Well, it doesn't. Places a mere quarter-mile from the sea do not get snow, unless the apocalpyse is coming or you're in Montauk.) It is snowing in London. It is snowing a little in Oxford and Liverpool. And then it started to snow here as though someone somewhere had turned a handle, all in loops and whorls, and I went out for a while. It didn't stick, but came down prettily against vistas of bare trees and slate grey.
I am bored, and seized with a feeling of you-can't-go-home-again. I am going back to Oxford tomorrow, and I don't really feel... anything about it, really. It occurs to me that up here, where my parents are, is not home for me, and Oxford isn't home either. It's transient, it's uncertain, and I'm a little tired of living a life in between places. I don't know what I want: stability, or the complete reverse of it. Whether I want to find a place to live and a job and something to ground myself on, or whether I want to go running out into the snow and out towards the water and keep on going out into all those muted-colour horizons and just not stop. Wanderlust, it's called. I love travel, and journeys, and distance. That's not news to me or anyone else - but I haven't felt it quite so strongly for a long time. I want to pack up and get up and go.
(Is this a displaced-person thing, I have always wondered. If you have the lifetime of being between places, and in my case two such different places - England, quiet and grey and peaceful, and India, noisy and high-coloured and full of family passions - then do you always have the nagging feeling that where you are is fine for the moment, but it'll be time to move on soon? Because you weren't of one place to begin with, you don't have the roots to hold you? It was something I meant to raise during the latest race and cultural appropriation debacles - that the concept of "home", also, comes laden with privileges and losses.)
I wonder if I'm bored of what I'm doing, and I don't think I am. I'm just... not driven. In a time when I should be working and writing and applying and preparing, I'm... not. I'm reading fiction and going for very long walks and escapistly scanning the adverts for bookshop and library jobs. I don't want to go out, I don't want to go home, I don't want to be a lawyer, I really don't want to not be one, I don't want to run away and I don't want to stay. It's just, the next six months of my life seem to be there to be endured, and I'm not sure I can do it. I'm tired. I had so much ambition and I'm not feeling it. An old friend of mine keeps telling me that self-worth is not in any way correlated with academic and professional achievement, and she's right, and I don't think I'm doing that again. I just... I need something in my life that is not there already, and I don't know what it is.
edited to add: fuck this shit, have a poem.
Life Story
After you've been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what's your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do
sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.
You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course
there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd intended to all along,
and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?
Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,
and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms.
Tennessee Williams
I am bored, and seized with a feeling of you-can't-go-home-again. I am going back to Oxford tomorrow, and I don't really feel... anything about it, really. It occurs to me that up here, where my parents are, is not home for me, and Oxford isn't home either. It's transient, it's uncertain, and I'm a little tired of living a life in between places. I don't know what I want: stability, or the complete reverse of it. Whether I want to find a place to live and a job and something to ground myself on, or whether I want to go running out into the snow and out towards the water and keep on going out into all those muted-colour horizons and just not stop. Wanderlust, it's called. I love travel, and journeys, and distance. That's not news to me or anyone else - but I haven't felt it quite so strongly for a long time. I want to pack up and get up and go.
(Is this a displaced-person thing, I have always wondered. If you have the lifetime of being between places, and in my case two such different places - England, quiet and grey and peaceful, and India, noisy and high-coloured and full of family passions - then do you always have the nagging feeling that where you are is fine for the moment, but it'll be time to move on soon? Because you weren't of one place to begin with, you don't have the roots to hold you? It was something I meant to raise during the latest race and cultural appropriation debacles - that the concept of "home", also, comes laden with privileges and losses.)
I wonder if I'm bored of what I'm doing, and I don't think I am. I'm just... not driven. In a time when I should be working and writing and applying and preparing, I'm... not. I'm reading fiction and going for very long walks and escapistly scanning the adverts for bookshop and library jobs. I don't want to go out, I don't want to go home, I don't want to be a lawyer, I really don't want to not be one, I don't want to run away and I don't want to stay. It's just, the next six months of my life seem to be there to be endured, and I'm not sure I can do it. I'm tired. I had so much ambition and I'm not feeling it. An old friend of mine keeps telling me that self-worth is not in any way correlated with academic and professional achievement, and she's right, and I don't think I'm doing that again. I just... I need something in my life that is not there already, and I don't know what it is.
edited to add: fuck this shit, have a poem.
Life Story
After you've been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what's your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do
sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.
You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course
there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd intended to all along,
and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?
Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,
and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms.
Tennessee Williams
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no subject
on 2009-02-06 09:31 pm (UTC)(Okay, I have to ask. What happened to her after she'd drunk the dead-possum water?)
...You say this like I made her the guinea pig! Actually we both drank it. And nothing happened. WE HAVE TOUGH YANK CONSTITUTIONS.
We have no concept of nature in this country.
Huh. You guys sure have written a lot of nature poetry for yourselves, though. :)