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Month: September 2000
To Return or Not?
I’m up at a little past seven, writing in my journal — I can’t remember the last time I did this. I guess it was sometime in August when we were still living in that hellishly small place on North Beacon. When I came downstairs this morning and closed the door that leads upstairs, I realized yet again that our downstairs area, just the living room and study, are about as big as that whole apartment — and I shuddered to think that we lived there for a whole year. We’ve only been here about a month and already I can’t imagine/remember what it was like to live in such a small place. Hopefully we’ll never have to live like that again.
Of course considering the thoughts I’ve been having of late, that might be something of a moot point. It’s insane the certainty with which I imagine going back to Lipnica sometimes. Yesterday, while walking home, I was sure I would come back and tell Chhavi, “I’m going back to Lipnica next year.” And while I woke up this morning thinking almost the very same thoughts, I still said nothing, last night or this morning.
Sunday morning my folks called. They’re going to try to come for a visit in about a month. In fact, they’ve tentatively planned to arrive a month from today. Anyway, for some reason Mom asked me, “What are your plans for after this year?” “Good question,” I said, and hemmed and hawed a bit about why I couldn’t answer it. That night in bed, though, I asked Chhavi what she saw us doing in a few years. Her final answer seemed to be, “You need to go to India before we can answer that question.” But coming home from work yesterday, I said to myself, almost out loud, “I need to go back to Lipnica before I go to India.”
In some ways I think I’m just trying to justify it — as if this is something I want to do for which I really don’t have a good reason, yet I want to legitimize it in some way. But it’s something I truly want to do, and as such, I don’t know that I have to legitimate it. The best analogy I can come up with has to do with Kathe: I remember when I was thinking we would break up, “I need to come up with an explanation why — and a good one, one that she’ll accept.” But that’s not the point — I needed to come up with a reason I would accept. Eventually I did — I realized that the desire to break up was enough to legitimate the break. And in some ways I see this situation as similar. But it’s more than that. I keep thinking that if I don’t go back and find out for sure once and for all, then this will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Time to get ready for work, I guess — and time to wake up Chhavi.
General Thoughts
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Critical Conversation
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General Entry
I was reading a little from Luci Shaw’s Life Path and if course I’m thinking, “I should be writing in my journal every single day. Every morning.” I write more in my journal these days about the fact that I never write than anything else. What all could I write about? My job — dealing with the nonsense that goes on there. My continuing frustration with Kali’s “I don’t get it” juxtaposed to her increasing “confidence.” There we go — I’ll write about that for a while.
Kali seems to be almost arrogant with her confidence at times. It’s very strange because on the one hand she complains about “not getting it” with certain things that I have written that I think are crystal clear, and then she seems to say that she can do anything she wants, that she’s the greatest asset our whole company has. I’ve just learned to deal with her on a case-by-case basis and realize that almost everything I give her will be declared completely incomprehensible at some point — one passage, one sentence, one silly word even.
I’m listening to BNL’s “When You Dream,” and it’s making me think about what it would be like to have a child. Originally I wrote “what it will be like,” then changed it to “will/would,” then dropped the definitive verb altogether and just stuck with the conditional. Second conditional in fact — used for things that aren’t the case and probably won’t be the case. Like saying, “If Bolek were a king,” I might have explained in class with last year’s IVB. So it’s almost the middle of September and I still haven’t talked to Chhavi. I still haven’t asked her a short (but not simple) question: Do you really think you’ll ever want to have a child?
And I guess I really need to ask myself beforehand: how much do I really want a child? Would I want one right now? No — certainly not. There’s no certainty in our life right now. We don’t know how long we’ll be living here or there or anywhere. And why would that stop me? Because it goes against everything I’ve always imagined my life would be like as a parent: having someplace that we stay for several years. A place to settle down, to put roots down — all those stupid cliches for which there are no other words, or for which I don’t want to search for replacements. So that’s the situation. I have this preconceived notion of how my life would be — probably an image I’ve had since I first took an interest in girls — once I fell in love and all that jazz. And yet nothing else has turned out as I would have thought when I was 15 or 16, so why should this be any different?
What are my alternatives? If C were to say she didn’t really think she would ever want children, and if — and that’s a huge “if” — I were to decide that because of this I should go my own way, what are my alternatives? Not many as I can tell.
I’ll finish this later today I hope.
More Complaining
It seems that every Saturday or Sunday morning these days I wake up feeling that I really don’t want to do anything — as if it’s too much work even to get out of bed for a cup of coffee. It’s not like I’m really depressed or anything. I just feel that it’s more effort than it’s worth to get up. I think of all the things I could do that day — today for example I could work on the little light box I’m going to try to create — but I just don’t feel like doing anything. Do I lie in bed thinking of LW? Not really. I just don’t feel like there’s anything worth doing. I think, “At least during the week I keep myself busy.” It was similar to when I first arrived in LW, I think. No — I was just generally depressed and alone at first.
It’s amazing — I just have nothing to write about. I could write about Marlon coming over for dinner last night, but why? We just chatted. I don’t know how I could write so much in Lipnica. Page after page. And now I haven’t even finished a full page in the first nine days of the month. In Lipnica — this would have been just the beginning of my first entry, writing about the first day back to school.
This week it’s been really weird walking to work. It was so sunny out — not a single cloud in the sky — and it made me think about the beginning of school and such. Fall crispness and I was thinking about not the beginning of my own school years, but the beginning of the three years in Lipnica. And how technically this should be the beginning of my fifth year there.
I’m still so sad. I still feel like I’m not where I belong. I still feel like I’m missing out on life. “When you dream, what do you dream about?” sings BNL. Lipnica. Always.
Moving
The move is finished — accomplished — done. Or perhaps more appropriately, survived. I left at 7:15 Tuesday morning to pick up the moving van and I finally fell into bed at 55 Adams Street, 99.99% of our belongings in the apartment, at 11:30 that night. And of course we’ve spent the next several days unboxing everything and working the stiffness out of our muscles. It was, in many ways, hellish, but it certainly wasn’t as bad as I was expecting.
The new place is a dream. We have more storage space in this apartment than we would have had we used the whole apartment at 168 North Beacon for storage. In other words, we have more storage space now than we had living space at the last place. And as far as living space goes, we have so much of it here that we don’t have enough furniture to fill it! As far as I’m concerned, we can stay here for as long as we live in Boston.
The only bad thing is the movie rental situation. The closest place is Blockbuster but they won’t let me get a membership there without a valid Mass ID. I can rent a truck that costs tens of thousands of dollars with my VA driver’s license, but I can’t rent a movie. I asked whether a passport would suffice — no go. So I can get into any country in Western or Central Europe with my passport, but I can’t get a Blockbuster membership card. How insane.
I’ve been thinking the past few days about the obvious: Lipnica. It’s now been four years since my arrival in Lipnica Wielka. I would — perhaps should — be starting my fifth school year if I were still there — and I think in many ways I should still be there. More later.