Never Cease from Exploration

As I am sure some wise person said sometime, the only thing that is almost as common as an abandoned blog is a resurrected one. I’ve just remembered how much I enjoy writing about things not related to non-representative government and Marxist economic theory, as I do here, and I’m pretty sure you like reading about lighter (or maybe just different) things too. So I guess I’m back, as it were, with a new picture in the header and a new goal to make you think and make you smile, in either order. - AES

Despite the many road novels and country songs warbling its merits, young people hate the journey. The smart, ambitious, handsome ones want the destination. Whether it is getting in to the best college, or getting into the best graduate school, or landing the best job, their main goal is results. The whole alphabet is Type-A people, and they are very goal-oriented, probably because that’s what Very Successful People are, according to the books.

The primary motivation for going to college is, especially at a B-list state school like this one, monetary gain. We go to college to make more money. It is not, at least here, to learn how to live, or to learn how to be a citizen of the world, or to learn how to recognize and promote goodness and beauty. Even the foolish liberal arts majors will more than likely end up being dental hygienists who can list “explication of post-modernist poetry” as one of their skills. The object of a class here is the grade. The object of the experience here is the diploma. The object of a diploma is a job.

My classmates and I do try, I think, to learn for the sake of learning, but we’re liberal arts majors. We read Pound and Proust because we love literature (and we like to name-drop), but we are constantly thinking about graduate schools/teaching degrees/that novel that has yet to arrive. Society is organized to reward the practical man who can set aside his passions to knock out a degree in engineering, or something, and pity the poor English major who can’t or won’t.
I realize that this view is limited by my youth, that one’s job is not one’s whole life, and that money is fulfillment enough for some people. But I live inside a system of endemic waste and misguidance every day, wasting taxpayers’ and certainly my parents’ money so I can “learn” of such idiotic things as phonetic keys, or basic grammar structure, or plays that I read and understood passably well in the eighth grade (really – The Importance of Being Earnest). It is a constant struggle to remember that every day is my life, not the day I will be graduated and, hopefully, making a living doing, well, this. Today is my life. Today, a day spent learning more reading Wikipedia during one “general education” class session than in the entirety of the class itself.

Though I have little understanding of economics or life or anything, I know this much: learning is good. Money is cold. Passion is rare. Whether in the classroom or outside of it, young people should learn that life is now, not the indeterminate time sometime in the future when you land the privilege of wearing a suit and tie for the next forty years. I’m probably stupid and I’m certainly arrogant to chose to take four years studying, essentially, how to read, but my story is at least as sad as the person who gets a degree in finance because she thinks it will guarantee her a job.

So here a few more clichés I’ve heard from my more learned (or at least experienced) sensei: enjoy the journey. Your life is not more in the future than it is today.

Flight Attendance: Leaving, Living, and a Little Girl

Hello, readers! Apologies for the extended delay, I hope to be posting at least once a week for the summer months. I thank you, as always, for reading, and I ask for your feedback: Are the posts too long? Too short? Too personal? Too general? Too serious? Too conversational? Do you prefer the social commentary, or the introspection? Do you enjoy reading, or do it only because I so forcefully suggest you do so? (I love you guys!) Anything you have to say, I would be thrilled to listen. Please comment! I promise to incorporate and improve by your suggestions. -- Anna


Whenever I see an airplane interlacing its contrails high across the “wild blue yonder,” as my mom calls it, I feel a little tingle of excitement and jealousy. “Wow!” I always think. “Those people are so lucky! Those people are going somewhere!” When I was a little girl I spent hours trying to figure out some way I could know where the tiny white jets were heading, why the people on the plane were going there, whether they were going away or going home. Part of my mind was always on that plane, like it was trying to hitch a ride to whatever exciting destination to which they were flying. I also spent hours trying to figure out a method by which to measure the height of the towering white clouds I almost never saw in Arizona, and I had no progress on that topic, either, except that now I spend hours figuring out what the psychological meaning or impact was of my young self so frequently craning my neck to ponder the cerulean-and-cirrus cosmos.

My recent flight from Arizona to western Washington State, where I am spending the summer, really excited that little girl I guess I still am. In the airport I studied to arrivals and departures boards, thinking, “Wow! There are people going to all those cities!” and, “There are people out there existing, right now, in all those places! Just like I am existing here! Awesome!” I almost missed my boarding group because I was so enthralled by all the exotic possibilities. Even when I was waiting on the tarmac to deplane in Seattle, I watched a plane take off and thought reflexively, “Those people are so lucky! Those people are going somewhere!” It took me a second to realize that I was already on a plane, I was one of those lucky people. Even when I am in my desired destination, my subconscious is jealous of people jetting off elsewhere.

Why is it that I am so drawn to leaving? (Or is it going, or coming, or something else?) I have been talking to my friend Danny about this compulsion to “escape”: when you are going somewhere, you should be sure that you are going for the action of going to your destination and not going for the action of leaving the place which you were previously. You should beware of what it reveals about the place you are most of the time (the place you probably call your home), Danny and I have determined, if you are more eager to leave that place than you are to arrive another place. In this psychology of geography, you’re pretty much okay if you at least want go “home” after a little while of being away. But for me, at least, I always seem to caught up in the act of going, of wishing I was in a plane zipping across the globe. In an old episode of Bones I was watching last night, Agent Booth was talking to Brennan about his upcoming trip to Jamaica, and he summarized the leaving/going paradigm like this: “I always think about not coming back.” I think a lot of people do this, but I am more filled with the wing-footed restlessness of always wanting to be a departure, never a return.

I know all this can be explained by my age, my circumstances, and my head-(literally)-in-the-clouds inclinations. It could be both dangerous and foolish of me to live a life according to these airy desires, and though I don’t think I could quite do life as a homeless vagabond, the idea can be sort of seductive. Like the first three-quarters of Into the Wild, I love idea of leaving the lifeless life that I fear will await me in middle-aged wasteland for an alternate path of taking chances, casting off the constraints of society, and leaving it all behind. This, of course, would be going to leave. While McCandless did some amazing things – kayaking down the Colorado all the way to the Gulf of California, for example – I think he was mostly leaving to leave, not leaving to go. If I can learn something from the story of this man who died too young because of his desire to be gone, it is that the ties that bind, the ones that seem to constrain us, are the ones that tie us down, from floating off into the vast lonely blue unknown.

In my deeply youthful and selfish desire to live a life that is adventurous and exciting, I always wish I were going somewhere new. The sound, like one escaped from the inside of a seashell, of a jet across the sky makes me become that girl with her eyes on her only limit. But as much as my subconscious is excited about my life and my body always being up in the air, I am trying always to learn and enjoy the good in arrival, in coming home, in existing fully where I already am.

A Venezia, Con Amore

Just to satisfy my guilt for such a delay and what I know is your clamoring for a new posting, dear readers, here's a piece a wrote a while ago about travel and disillusionment. It's a little different from my usual stuff but it was great fun to write, so I hope you enjoy it. Buon appetito!

Stepping off the water taxi into Piazza San Marco was like stepping into a daydream. I’d seen a thousand pictures of couples kissing in the murky sunset off the lagoon. I’d read a hundred books set in the romantic decay of the timeless floating city. I’d imagined a million times of the lavish jewel on the lip on the Adriatic and the exotic edge of the world to my suburban mind.

Sitting on the gray industrial carpet of the public library in my suburban home, Venice was better than fairy tales. A city with a proud and a sad history, where beauty and heritage were a way of life and not something one had to use the library catalogue to find. I was enchanted by exotic words like major domo and campo and gelato. I couldn’t imagine a better place than a sinking miracle where Shakespeare set his tragedies, Casanova roved the canals, and American expatriate modernists wrote their best work. I had always loved books, and Venice was like the best hardbound gilt-covered monstrosity to me, smelling of salt and fine perfume. Anywhere where elaborate masks were a fashion statement, where the whole city participated in a month-long masquerade, and where a narrow black boat was the transportation of choice was better than the best book, because I could actually visit.

The siren call of the lagoon seemed to answer something inside me. In a new American city, beauty and art seemed like an inconvenience, not a goal. I drowned myself in the stories of long lineages of Doges, that exotic governmental beast so much more refined than a mere king. I read of the fine families, with their own majestic palaces on the Grand Canal, filled with old art and good breeding. I immersed myself in the architecture, longing for the thousand types of exotic marble conquered and pillaged from far off lands to adorn the façade of Basilica San Marco. I grew up with drop ceilings and asphalt, but the Venetians of my imagination would scoff at such ugly practicality. They were a people who lived on thousand-year-old wood pylons, who created the world’s most beautiful glass out of a fiery pit, who built the world’s most famous and elegant bridge for their prisoners. Venetians were a people with the Renaissance in their blood, to whom recent history had not been kind. All I had in my blood was annoying WASPishness. Where I grew up, the only gold decoration is in dashes down the middle of the street. Waters have been lapping at the palaces in my beloved city for a thousand years, before people even inhabited the area where I was born.

Venice seemed to whisper my every answer in a majestic and elegiac language I longed to understand. I imagined the tiny fresh squid and squash blossoms in the open-air markets, or the swish of a long black cape around the corner, or the fierce gaze of a Venetian woman out of a purple velvet mask. I scoffed at the Las Vegas version, with their chlorinated canals and slot machines, of all obscenities. In the real city they gambled with their medieval conquests, their Papal power struggles, their eastern influences, with the foundations of their houses, but never something so unrefined as actual money. I was drunk on the exotic spice of a real city that I had invented.

Finally visiting the corroded emerald on the Adriatic was going to be like going home. I wanted it to be the answer to every question in my heart, a contrast to every annoying and abrasive and juvenile thing about the United States. I wanted thousand-year-old mosaics and my own personal library just about the piano nobile floor in my own majestic palace, named after my well-respected family, which had included maybe two doges and even a pope in the tenth century. I wanted to put on a Carnival mask and lose my boring, unrefined self in the rise and fall of the tides.

Stepping into the Piazza San Marco was not the emotional catharsis I wanted (and half-expected) it to be. In my desire to create a place I wanted, I couldn’t image Venice as a real city in the present day. The romantic place of my creation was a dark cloudy mystery, but it never actually rained there. Even the ride across the lagoon soaked me to my skin. I invented a place where people actually lived in the Doge’s Palace, actually went to church in Basilica San Marco, really lived like the Renaissance conquerors I’d read so much about. I didn’t imagine them as places to wait in line to see, places to tour in ten minutes following a tour guide with a German accent. I imagined finding myself while getting lost in the winding streets of ancient homes where Ezra Pound and Robert Browning had written their love poetry, finding love in the streets that wound in on themselves until opening into the campo of my imagination. I did get lost – but whether it was the negotiable validity of trying to get lost or the map of Venice that existed only in my head or maybe in the early Renaissance, I didn’t find what I thought I was looking for. I didn’t find myself, dancing by the light of tapered candles in a room full of masks and fine tapestries. I didn’t find love, not even the love of the crumbling city of so many stories. I did find Venetians, in their leather and glass shops. But they didn’t whisper me the answers in what I felt to be my native tongue, even if I couldn’t speak more than a few words. They asked, in English, “Can I help you?” All I could say was “No, grazi,” before turning on my sneakered heel back out into the rain. The rain was not more beautiful and exotic there, or perfumed with the smells and wisdom of the ancient merchant city. It was exactly what I’d never been able to imagine it to be – wet. Cold. Real.

I had hoped and willed my imaginings to be real in Venice, the most fantastical place I could have found to incubate my dreamings. It was both beautiful and sad, but it was also crowded and smelling and in precipitous decay. I had foolishly imagined that history would be real there, and it wasn’t until I was already side-stepping the pigeons outside the façade of Basilica San Marco did I realize my fault. Many things are indeed a mystery in Venice, but time is not one of them. And as I let my dreams of a gilded identity I’d imagined for myself dissolve into the murky teal waters of the ancient lagoon, I did find something: perspective. The winged lions welcoming visitors and guarding from foes at the grand entrance to the once-grand city were still beautiful, but I could finally for what they were: corroded, collapsing, and most importantly, a make-believe creation. Those lions could no more fly than I could, but as I stood in the rain in the most famous plaza in the world, I learned that is was probably better that we both stay on the ground.

It's Really Something, To Know Nothing About Everything

When I was very young, people told me that when I was eighteen I would think I knew everything about everything, but I would really not know anything about anything. As a young child in league with adults against those crazy teenagers, I always thought, “I’m not like other people. I won’t be like that.” I think this experience is pretty universal. Now that I am that hallowed or horrible age, people still tell me suspiciously frequently that I don’t know anything about anything.

Of course I sound very young in saying this, but: I know I don’t know anything about anything. I know I am young and stupid and foolish and ignorant and arrogant and every other awful-yet-true adjective that can be used to describe young people. I feel that, every day. Why else would I make such poor decisions, do such silly things, and care so much about things that even I can see do not really matter? I use my youth as a crutch; what else can I lean on to prove that my dramatic nature, my critical tendencies, or my difficulty with authority are not deep character flaws but things I will grow out of, like baby teeth or loving Seventeen? If my parents, my relatives, and my teachers had not indoctrinated me with the notion, I would still be aware of just how little I really understand. I don’t claim to know or understand everything, or even much about anything. The only thing I ever claim to come close to understanding is the depth of my own ignorance: I understand that it is infinite, and then some.

I don’t know the capital-T truth about everything, and I may not know it about anything. No one knows everything about everything, the be-all-end-all Truth that quiets all dissenters and squashes all inquisitive young people. Each of us is limited by who we are, as people, as individuals, as Americans, as teenagers, as adults. Our influences, our society, and, yes, our youth all separate us from the capital-T Truth about life and love and existence, and, really, anything. I agree that a truth about any subject as I understand it may be less well-informed, less experienced, or less sophisticated than an older person’s take on the same subject. Mine may be farther from the Truth as it is without human limitations. But as no one can ever consider Truth completely without being held back by his or her own humanness, my truth is still a truth, valid and worthy of consideration like any other. Not the Truth, yes, but a truth nonetheless.

It is my default setting as a person, especially as a young person, to consider the world as it relates to me. I am very tempted to make witty-yet-shallow, true-yet-hurtful comments about anything and everything. As John Green said of a poor review a teen gave of his new book after reading ten pages, “When you are young, you want to make critical judgments on things, and you want to do it quickly.” I do this often, of course. I am very tempted to group things – books, people, concepts, age groups – into Good and Bad, or Smart and Stupid, or True and Not. But, as John Green went on to say, “Reading is not about deciding what is good and what is bad. That’s not even the job of the reader.” I, in my infinite youth, understand this, and I try very hard not to comment until I have thought about a subject at length, devoted much time to it, or read the whole book. Even then, I must remind myself that I can never claim to know what is True or Not. That is not my job as a person. My job as a person is to extend and adjust my view of the world so that it is close to the capital-T Truth as possible, to shake off the limitations of my youth and my humanness, to not need any crutch to lean on. I also need to know that I can never fully accomplish this, and know that others’ truths are just as deep and important and legitimate, if not more so, than my own.

Just like anything with growing up, it is a process, a long and hard journey that never really ends. A journey that includes at least one self-serving rant, at least one snarky/annoying anonymous comment, at least a million Good and Bad good and bad judgments. As much as I would love to be the strong, sure woman people seem to think I am in informing me I know nothing about anything, the closest Truth I have is that I am absolutely, infinitely, still a little girl.