2014 New Year
It has really been a long time since I've posted, and almost any reason that I could offer for my absence would be little more than an excuse. I will say, though, that I have been taking online courses on HTML/CSS and jQuery, and am designing and coding two new websites on which I intend to host my content. New pieces of writing will likely go there, but I will still link to them from tumblr, since it has been such a great platform so far in finding people who enjoy reading my writing. Thank you for following so far, and I look forward to seeing more from you in the future, too. Enjoy this piece.:
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The winter solstice is my favorite moment of the year. Almost every December 21st for as long as I can remember, I have stayed up until the appointed time and celebrated the days stretching out longer and longer before me. In a winter climate as mild as that of my hometown, however, it is hard to appreciate just what significance the day really holds. Although it often drops below freezing at night, and we get snow on the desert floor every year (even if it sticks maybe 1/5 of those years), we simply do not know winter.
I thought that I knew a hard winter when I slept away last New Year's Eve in the backseat of my car. Winter, I felt, was already defeated. I remember skating back to my dorm at two in the morning a couple of weeks before that date and inhaling deeply the air as cold as it gets in the lower part of the San Francisco peninsula. It felt less like an intrusion and more like a conduit of cooling fluid stopping the steam engine inside me from overheating. I watched the frost wither away on the windshield when I breathed on it hard enough that NYE, and in the rush of a rash, fresh romance, the days ahead all felt like summer. Of course the real significance of the winter solstice, for paleolithic humans (the humans that I have always admired most), was the start of the most bitter days. The hardest to survive. Until the thaw, usually, they would be battling hypothermia, and starvation, and pneumonia, and the lengthening of the days was, at best, a flicker of shadow along the ground, lost in the dancing of the flames anyway, and at worst, an ironic mockery, a hopeful symbol flying in their faces even as more and more of them died.
I think that people in cold climes viscerally understand this fact. The first time that the autumn winds stop rustling the leaves and start biting the bare branches, they ball up unconsciously to bear it, just as my skin rises at the first hint of summer heat in March. Our skin knows the seasons, at least for those of us fortunate to have a distinct physical geography to always, for all of its flaws, call home. The way we bear climactic hardship is regional, is homogeneous, is some instinct which we cannot really share with a person unless they are from a similar biome. And, along with how our body leaps with joy at the kinder seasons' first heralds, the way I get goosebumps when I feel the humidity and static electricity of a summer monsoon, these reactions are our most fundamental being. Never knowing the gnawing of a truly ravenous December, I was missing, I think, a half of my life, a yin to my fearsome yang. And though summer carries with it its own set of hardships, most notably those generated by a lack of water, only having the hardship of the heat emboldens a spirit with an arrogance that can turn to hubris, and I think, this past year, it did. Purveyors of the old Chinese alchemy would find the signs of this pride steaming out of my every pore. Too much spicy food, too much summer, too much aggression, too much passion, too much success, a charmed, charmed life no matter how many times I insisted that it was only semi-charmed, across which I had glided like magma.
Too hot. Hot potato hot potato. I was tossed away before I could burn the people who felt my ardor. I was quenched in the blacksmith's bucket before the sword was ruined. Last New Year's Eve I felt like a molten ingot. The bar had outdoor heaters which burned so hot that they melted the wax carefully holding my hair in place. The person in my arms had her hands up my sleeves for warmth. Yet, come the morning, I felt cold, a cold that I couldn't shake, as if somebody had drilled the marrow from my bones, frozen it, and driven it back in as icicles. My car heater, broken and costing more to replace than the value of the vehicle, didn't warm me on the slow ride back to my house. Perhaps I should have seen the significance. Within a month, whether I knew it or not, that romance was ashes in the breeze. I ate shit on my board and broke my phone and had to buy a new one on my dwindling bankroll. I graduated and proceeded to spend six months failing to find work in my field. A filling fell out of my molar. Emblematic as they are of the cold of this year, it's hard for me to call these hardships. Somebody that I know once asserted, in relation to her friend hyperbolizing yet another trivial event, that suffering is suffering, no matter how small. Whatever any person deemed suffering, she concluded, was just as bad as any other, and merited sympathy accordingly. Every once in a while, when I throw a little pity party for myself, I cave and agree, but most of the time I scoff at the notion. Elizabeth Wurtel's piece in NY Magazine last year, fittingly, a review of 2012 (which I should do a full critical review of in another piece), is the embodiment of this sort of self-pity. I don't like to trivialize depression. Having suffered from it myself, I well understand the legitimate impediments it can erect before a path that you might have otherwise planned for yourself in life. But beyond the fact that I think so many people lean back on that as an excuse for their failure to adapt to hardship, I think that we, exemplified by Elizabeth Wurtzel in this article, all too often complain about two things which don't merit complaining: inevitable obstacles, and situations into which we willingly place ourselves. And at least she faces it. She makes clear what some of her choices are: living in New York, never kissing anybody out of anything but pure passion, etc. But she veils others, acts as if it was a foregone conclusion that she didn't save money, went to law school on a lark, failed to do the arduous, rigorous research to write something more than confessional literature. And then she had the audacity to publish the piece and expect praise for it. Moral choices are not just difficult. That oversimplifies the conundrum that such decisions confront us with. Moreover, they are difficult because we often receive no praise for making them; they do nothing for our self-interest. These are the sort of choices that I have been making for the past four months. Tottering along beside my grandmother's walker, my hand steady on her shoulder so she wouldn't fall. Picking my niece up from school and taking my time out to tutor her in math and then play Chinese checkers with her afterward to decompress. Cooking dinner for the family.
These are not glamorous choices. They do not reverberate on the only scale we have been deluded into valuing: large. But quotidian tasks for which nobody thanks you are the very things which keep our world running, which ease your grandparent's arthritis for an afternoon, which, in short, fuel our lives. Nobody will give you a Facebook merit badge for them. You can't check in to the geriatrician on Foursquare, unless you are terribly morbid. They simply are. They are like the burden of our bodies, which we cannot drop until we die.
When my Na[i]na[i] asked why my mother was driving to Phoenix when my cousin delivers her next child, my mother simply responded, to the woman recovering from a fall under our care, "She is family. And that is what family does. Take care of each other." I admire that axiom. My bias for filial piety aside, it aligns quite perfectly with how I imagine the seasons. Winter is an inevitable reality which somebody, somewhere, must bear. If you are sitting in your home, warm by the fire, then somebody had to chop the wood for the hearth, or frack the natural gas from the shale, or maintain the mechanical loom which whipped out your jacket. Somewhere along the line, the burden must be carried, and this winter, I finally stopped, in many respects, looking around for somebody else to shoulder it. This has made it hard to focus on myself. I haven't written a reflective piece since November, and for that I apologize, because I know that many of you enjoy reading them, but I was tired of talking about myself. I had little more of value to say about my recent past, and that left nothing but the present to write about, since my distant past and future I reserve for fiction. And for many months now my present has been helping out the family in the, as David Foster Wallace deemed them, "myriad, petty, unsexy ways" which constitute real freedom. The kind that "involves attention and awareness and discipline" and the virtue which is not only the sum of those three, but also, by my account, the most important: patience. If summer is the season of vigor, and activity, then winter is the season of patience. The very habits by which humans once had to survive past the solstice in December are testament to this fact. Our metabolisms slowed, we waited longer between meals, we slept. For me, it has been a year of patience. Tutoring middle schoolers, tottering beside old schoolers, tailing sluggish vehicles across the surface streets of my city. I definitely have been a patient person for four years now (the discreet events four years ago, which I identify as the start of my patience, constitute a story to be told in detail another time), but this is the year that put that vision of myself to the test. And it was frigid. I have never been so cold in all my life. After graduation, I returned home, and have been geographically and increasingly emotionally distant from many friends ever since. I have felt the burning depths of FOMO as I watch dozens of people leading lives (read: posting Facebook photos) in new locations. But then I remember that social networks are a screen, are a resume that "gets lost" in human resources, are a sash of merit badges that we put away in the closet when we're done flaunting them, and that what details make up our lives are not the photographs by which we remember the roadtrips, but the moments when a particular song hits you like a catalyst, and you come howling out of the stupor into which driving for four hours straight lulls you, or the moment when you laugh at the absurdity of breaking down in Gallup, New Mexico, and make up for the freezing weather with an order of chicken fajitas. Or, alternatively, our lives are simply what we choose to feel about them, and I can, I have discovered, be just as happy fixing a crappy car as I would be at the best party, high on the best, hangover-free drugs, with the coolest people, in the coolest building, in the coolest city. If I can be thankful for one thing this year, this winter of a year, it is that when my scalding steel was quenched, I didn't harden effectively. Something naïve in me, since I nearly always deem optimism naïveté, is still ready to be forged again, to be made anew, to live. I will not die. Nihilism didn't grab me in hibernation. But I did learn, viscerally, through my first string of significant failures, that hot streaks don't last forever, and that even if they did, important things do not happen hastily.
A couple of weeks ago, I looked out over the desert from the 31st floor of a skyscraper in downtown Phoenix. I had never seen my world from that height as a static observer. All of my bird's eyes of the sand have been dynamic pans as I gracefully come in to impact the tarmac. Standing still, while the world moved around and through me, I could sense the slow changes in the land I love. A crane whirled with an I-beam in tow about ten miles off. Dust clouds smoked off the roadways. Even the destruction (read: development), the kind which sears me with an atavistic revulsion, is mercifully gradual. All of our monuments will eventually go the way of Ozymandias, I know. We are sand, and to sand we shall return. I imagined a haboob roaring in, the most destructive form of sandstorm engulfing the structures. Yet still, little changes in the wake of a single storm. Sand takes centuries to erode stone. The only thing that sand moves in the short term is other sand. Then they called my name for the interview, a breeze picked up, and I flecked against the monolith.