I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way

Hoo boy.

So I haven't written in five months.  I'm a bad blog mother.  Almost as bad as that time I forgot to feed my Neopet for 11 years.

In my defense, it does seem that there is an inverse correlation between how much I write and how much stuff happens in my life that I deem worth writing about.  When things happen to me, I'm usually too busy thinking about them or laughing about them or crying about them or just experiencing them and THUS...I never write.  It's been a long, pretty packed 5 months.

I don't know how to go about bringing everything up to speed.  I don't know if I have the patience to detail all of the different feelings and thoughts that came up.  There were a LOT.  There still are a lot, wispy remnants, like the smell of tobacco that stays in the walls weeks after someone's last cigarette.  I've already spent the time watching the smoke rise and disappear, and I have no particular desire to rehash the experience.

At this point, I feel like there's not much more that I can say, save for one nice little realization that came to me yesterday as I was burning my omelette in my crappy frying pan on the crappy stove.  My culinary skills are also crappy; I believe this may have contributed to the problem.  But despite nearly starving to death before cussing out the entire kitchen and resorting to cereal, it's pretty great being me, right now at this very point in time and space.  The past month and a half or so marks the beginning of a wonderful period of my life; for the first time in a long time, I really really am happy.  There is nothing more refreshing than being asked, "How are you?" and realizing that I can say "I'm doing wonderfully" without lying to myself.  Not to say that I've been in a state of abject misery for years on end.  But for a very long time, there was always SOMETHING that wasn't entirely right.  That something varied from day to day, week to week, year to year.  And now, it's gone.  The albatross has flown.

My jimmies remain unrustled.

It's going to be a pretty summer in California.

The bravest writing you've ever seen

An open letter to my sophomore and senior year English teacher,

I'm still not entirely sure why your senior seminar class proved to be the point at which I took it upon myself to write down everything (really, everything; there was a lot of crap I'd forgotten, either intentionally or unintentionally, until I wrote about it).  You weren't the teacher I historically had the best, most candid relationship with - that distinction must go to the theater director with whom I spent several, several extra hours of my high school career with.  The composition of the class itself was nothing particularly special; I knew every kid there, but I had no great friends, no one person I felt particularly comfortable and open with.  Maybe I didn't need any great friends.  Maybe just having known those people for as many years as I did was enough.  Many of my fellow classmates I'd known since I was 11.  Maybe that's all I needed.

Visiting the old haunt is always an interesting experience, especially as my sense of self becomes more and more separate from the school.  Shortly after graduation, I still felt like a student there, but inexplicably old and wizened and indomitable.  That illusion fortunately shattered very quickly upon entering college.  I can only imagine how insufferable one must be as a college freshman that retains all the self-assigned and misguided grandeur of a recent high school grad.  When I visited Country Day this year, I was more humble and more aware of the fact that for as many years as I spent there, I no longer really belonged.  It seemed to me as though the school itself, all the buildings and grass and paint and stair railings, was saying, "Of course it's always nice to see you again, but don't forget: you left and another, younger student quickly and eagerly filled your place.  See, there goes one now," and right on cue comes a group of 15 year old boys looking curiously at you, wondering who the hell you are, being very aware that you're too old to be a fellow student, all of them half-upset that you're brazenly trespassing on what is now their territory, yet half-excited about seeing a real-live college girl up close.  The school didn't try and push me out, but it took care to ask, in its own way, how long I'd be staying, which is the polite way of saying, "When do you leave us alone?"

What makes that discomfort worthwhile is returning to old teachers, who never share the same odd, saccharine aloofness as the school itself.  As much as they enjoyed you as a student, they're delighted to see you return as a real, actual functioning person they can talk to.  I come back to find the ones that really mattered, to show them how far I've progressed, but also to show them that if they peel back the new coats of varnish, their student has remained much the same.  To show them that their work, the daily sculpting, stitching, melting down and reshaping they subjected us to and pushed us to do ourselves was ultimately too important to touch, and that whatever we become 1, 5, 20 years on has that original mold at its core, with new embellishments and polishes being compounded on top of everything all the time (a clumpy palimpsest, if you will).  A silent tribute I pay unintentionally, simply by returning a year older.

I think the point I'm trying to come to is that we left, we let go, we continuously build ourselves into new people that our former classmates may not recognize.  But we come back, and all of a sudden all of those new layers become translucent and there's that original, untouched core form, clouded over but distinctly there, like a fish you see only through the ice over the lake.  So when you tell me that two years later, two years after I left, my portfolio is still the bravest and boldest writing you've ever seen, I'm not the only one that hears it.  That small, perpetually unsure student, who remains just as she was without the armor of time and experience hears it too.