New Age

Lots of exciting stuff is happening right now:

• Last Friday, I signed a one-year lease. I'm living alone in a studio apartment in Midtown Kansas City. After I spent months looking at places in other cities, I've realized that housing here is dirt cheap in comparison.
• Yesterday, I began working at a new job, at a health-food cafe on the Plaza. The team was exceptionally friendly and welcoming, but the work environment was scattered and disorganized. For fear of retribution, I will say nothing more about this company on the Internet, except that I hope I get another job soon.
• This morning, I'm interviewing for a position as an office aide in the Astronomy Department at a local university. Posting about this here makes me wonder if I'm hexing myself, but I am terribly excited about this job and I hope I get it. 
• Today is the forty-seventh consecutive day I've written. That thrills me like a drawn-out game of Jenga: I'm trying my best to keep the tower from toppling. Most days it's a paragraph or two in my notebook about my feelings (imagine that), but those little turns of phrase have a way of worming themselves into poems.

In short, I've decided to settle down here for a while. After all, I've never lived in Kansas City—living on a gravel road in unincorporated Platte County hardly counts. When I left Wellesley, I felt this heavy pressure to use my privileged education to go "change the world." And because so many of my peers were moving to huge new cities and working high-powered jobs, I told myself I had to do the same. But the more I thought about it, I realized that this pressure was entirely self-imposed, and that sometimes it's okay to simply be for a little while. My plan was to find a job to pay the bills so that I could focus on writing, and I'd already become enamored of the poetry community here. On top of that, I've realized how much I missed my friends and family here, and why I want to spend more time with them now. Staying here made a lot more sense when I looked at my priorities in that way. All of these factors pushed me to consider staying, and every morning I wake up more content with that decision.

I have a good feeling about today.

Plainsong (for New Beginnings)

I'm starting a new job, signing a lease, and writing spontaneous (and spotty) ekphrastic tanka poems about clouds:

When I leave this place
(even only if in thought)
dumb, I ossify
the highs of the arms-wide sky
that envelop me, all here

A Rainy Day in the Back Bay

It's been just over three months since I was in Boston.

I'm excited to be starting my "life" and to be out of the pressure cooker that Wellesley could be (maybe I'll just write a whole post about that sometime). Simultaneously, I miss it. A lot. At the most unexpected moments, I'll be entirely enveloped by this cavernous sense of longing and loss. In those moments, I'll wonder which street performers are out in Harvard Square, or what the breeze might smell like on the waterfront in the North End. Most of that feeling is fueled by a sort of nostalgia: I miss the place where I was an irresponsible college student, sheltered and safe from the world.

But there's more to it than that. Metro Boston was the first place I ever knew away from home. It was the first city I ever got to "discover," just by wandering aimlessly on the weekends. It was the first place I felt independent and confident enough to spend entire days wandering by myself. When the marathon bombings happened my first year, it was the first place I'd ever felt any sort of city-wide unity. (That's not to imply that unity doesn't exist in Kansas City; it certainly does. But tragedy and loss can leave deep and unique impacts on a place, and nothing similar has happened in K.C. during my lifetime.)

The point is: I grew there. A lot. That growth could have happened anywhere, but it was shaped by the buildings and the people I knew in Boston. And that city only exists in my recollection now, because when I do eventually return, it will be different: friends will have moved, buildings will have been demolished. I will be different, and my eyes will see the city differently. Even though that perspective will probably lack the youthful excitement of a first-timer, I can't wait to see what the years grant me and how my view matures.

I'll be back soon enough.

Commonwealth and Mass Ave; northeast toward the Common
May 2016

Atticus, In The Desert

I recently finished reading To Kill A Mockingbird for the first time. It was pretty good, though Harper Lee's style occasionally confused me (which was almost certainly her intent, I'd guess). I could write a lot more about it, but I'm slogging through cover letters and job applications at the moment. This Kishi Bashi song will have to suffice.

Ever onward.

- "Atticus, in the Desert" by Kishi Bashi, from 151a (2012)

Alone Again (Naturally)

Some Sundays.

- "Alone Again (Naturally)," by Gilbert O'Sullivan, released as a single in 1972

Moundridge

Last weekend, I went to Moundridge. This was significant for several reasons:

1. It's my mom's hometown,
2. my uncle Monte lived there his entire life, until his death in May, and
3. I hadn't been back to visit since my grandma's funeral in 2008.

So my mom and I trekked out to the wilderness of central Kansas, to see houses, streets, and cemeteries. The landscape was more captivating than I remembered, and the sunflowers were in full bloom. There was this unbelievable quiet. All you could hear was the wind skimming the tall grass; the sound of male cicadas calling out to a particularly blue nothingness. The low hills there stretch on in a way that makes it seem that they could contain everything.

It's a special place.

Breathing the air in Monte's house felt unusual. It smelled so specific, in a fleeting way. To see his space, his land...it gave me a sense of closure that I didn't have before. I still often forget he's gone, but being where he lived gave me a sense of peace that I needed. I'm grateful for that.

Along the way, I took a few photos using the cheap fish-eye lens I bought last year. And so this is all I have, for right now.

Potentially southward

Lying in Grass

I was in the middle of drafting a meandering rumination on the tragedies in Hermann Hesse's life, and then I thought better of it. Sure, lots of sad stuff happened in his life (he had severe depression and his wife was schizophrenic, which probably only exacerbated their myriad marital problems). Despite this, Hesse managed to write a lot of insightful, challenging work, and it seems reductive to focus on one already-overemphasized aspect of his life.

Siddhartha was his first work that I ever read, and the memory of experiencing that book still rests fresh in my recollection. I was just beginning my second semester of college, and I thought I knew everything. That book helped set me straight. It was one of the catalysts to my decision to study writing. It's short and stylistically straightforward, so I recommend it to any reader looking for a brief and enlightening novel.

Digressions aside, Hesse is lesser-known as a poet. The first English-translated collection of his poems was published in 1970, which posthumously afforded Hesse greater recognition for his precise poetic abilities. Here is one of those poems, translated from German by the American poet James Wright.

"Lying in Grass"

Is this everything now, the quick delusions of flowers,
And the down colors of the bright summer meadow,
The soft blue spread of heaven, the bees' song,
Is this everything only a god's
Groaning dream,
The cry of unconscious powers for deliverance?
The distant line of the mountain,
That beautifully and courageously rests in the blue,
Is this too only a convulsion,
Only the wild strain of fermenting nature,
Only grief, only agony, only meaningless fumbling,
Never resting, never a blessed movement?
No! Leave me alone, you impure dream
Of the world in suffering!
The dance of tiny insects cradles you in an evening radiance,
The bird's cry cradles you,
A breath of wind cools my forehead
With consolation.
Leave me alone, you unendurably old human grief!
Let it all be pain.
Let it all be suffering, let it be wretched-
But not this one sweet hour in the summer,
And not the fragrance of the red clover,
And not the deep tender pleasure
In my soul.

- "Lying in Grass" / "Im Grase Liegend" by Herman Hesse (1915), translated by James Wright (1970)

Everybody's Stalking

- "Everybody's Stalking," by Badly Drawn Boy, from The Hour of Bewilderbeast (2000)

Rediscovery

Recently, I spent an exciting and thoughtful day with my dear pal Tory. We hadn't seen each other in four or five years, and reconnecting with her felt like rediscovering a hidden treasure.

Tor and I first connected during junior high track practice. I was the new kid at school, but I could already tell that she was someone I wanted to be friends with. Being a shy thirteen-year-old, I couldn't bring myself to talk to her. Passively, I figured that fate would introduce us if our friendship was supposed to be.

And it was. While practicing hurdles one day after school, I completely biffed on the track. The coach told me to go up to the bathroom and wash the gravel out of my legs. I was almost certainly crying, and Tory offered to go with me. I have no idea what we talked about, but we took our sweet time to return to practice. There was lots of laughing. When we finally did go back, I remember walking down the hill together and feeling comfortable, and hopeful that we would become friends.

That was nearly nine years ago. Tor remains one of the most remarkable people I know: she's absolutely irrepressible, and she can make me laugh in absolutely any situation. She seeks out the best aspects of people, and of the world. She has given me countless treasures, of memories, of music, of ideas; and she has taught me much about friendship and perspective. In short, she challenges me to grow as a person, and for her being, I am grateful.

Goodies in the wall at Prospero's Books