Change in blog address

I just wanted to let you all know that I'm re-locating blog address's so I can use wordpress software to snazz up my blog and take advantage of some of their neat features that blogger unfortunately lacks. Check me out and bookmark me at http://elainemeyer.wordpress.com/.

Adjustments

One adjustments that I've endured going from collegiate to working stiff is coming to dislike things I used to like. Most notable right now is my palpable aversion to summer. What used to be the season of freedom and idling is now that of sweating and thirsting on the walk to work. When I had jobs and internships in Chicago between the school years, I started to feel a twitch of irritation at humid days, non-stimulating work assignments, long commutes, and early (for a college student) mornings. When this all becomes a consistent fact, it is even worse. Mind you, not morale crushing or dire, just a disappointment when recalling the way summer used to be. Especially here in D.C., where summers means a stultifying combination of work attire and ozone warnings, it becomes difficult to look forward to anything about the season ,save its end. Even in Chicago where it tends to get humid, Lake Michigan's unpredictable wind patterns can bring cool days, the kind that relieve you from the 80 and 90-degree days that are accompanied by glaring, cloudless sun that feels like it is an imperturbable spy following wherever you go. Summer is no longer a relief from school either now that I'm working full-time. It is just another season that blends in with the slow-moving quickness of all of the others in a working person's year. Seasons are no longer about events or milestones but about dressing for the weather.

A good quote

Just have to note this, if for no one else but myself:

A prime test of an historian’s skill is the extent to which he does justice to these complementary forces, repetition and novelty.

From this article, by Roger Kimball.

Advice, please

Something I fear most is that my desires are oblivious to that great caveat that "the grass is always greener on the other side." More specifically, I am afraid I will jump into a career about which I know little because those careers about which I know a fair amount seem daunting and uninteresting. This, I guess, is the existential worry that hovers around my interest in attending graduate school in journalism: I understand the career in broad terms but am not familiar with the headache aspects of the field.

A very wise person recently wrote this to me: in life, "we must make important decisions despite the obvious lack of essential data" and that "[p]art of becoming an adult and establishing one's own identity has to do with getting more comfortable making decisions with insufficient data." I have often operated under the idea that few things, if any, can be resolved and few conclusions can be made, and what conclusions people do attempt to make are figments of their belief that answers exist. Recently though, I'm beginning to see how, even if I don't believe I can arrive at certainty on many questions, I must at least try to make decisions "despite the obvious lack of essential data," because the alternative, which is awaiting the right amount of information in order to make a decision, mainly just leads to ruminating and unproductive stasis.

Yet, I still seek data, of a sort. If anyone reading this has anything to say about the merits of a career in journalism, please speak. More broadly, if you can speak on the existential issue of how to figure out what to do for a living and how to avoid idealizing a lesser-known career path simply to escape the perceived monotonies of a greater-known one, please speak too. Or e-mail me.

Oh, and I guess I should say that I am interested in journalism for a few reasons, some of which might not actually make good reasons to go into the field:
(1) I like writing. Does this make me cut out for journalism, though? I don't know. After all, a lot of journalism is about unfurling an event, policy proposal, etc., and not about writing with creative flourish.
(2) I like editing and revising. I'm one of the few people I know who actually enjoys revising papers and articles. I figure this must cut me out for some sort of writing job.
(3) I am interested in a multitude of policy issues and issues in general but do not want to acquire specialized knowledge in one of them at the risk of knowing less about the others. I see journalism as a way to avoid the opportunity cost of specializing, because a journalist is a generalist who can, in theory, give a digestible account of anything.
(4) I often consider why certain issues are covered at the expense of others and what are the relevant facts in a story or the relevant aspects to be covered about a political campaign, and so forth. I figure I would have even more food for thought here if I became a journalist.

Ephemerality in Movies and Life

One promise that D.C. residents make to transplants is that the spring and fall are beautiful and for those bursts of pink blossoms and golden leaves it is worth it to weather the stultifyingly humid summer and "cold" winter. Spring here is indeed beautiful but poignantly fleeting. Those famed cherry blossoms are here one minute, gone the next. I waded through the fallen flowers twice this week under the grove of those still attached to their trees and thought a bit about transience (while I wasn't busy ducking out of the way of family photos).

I finally saw Lost in Translation, which tells a story about transience. The relationship between Charlotte (Scarlett Johanssen) and Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is impossibly pure, the age discrepancy is almost an afterthought, because both characters are themselves fully aware of it, especially Bob. One of my favorite illustrations of this is the overhead shot of Bob lying stick straight on his back in his hotel bed while Charlotte is rolled over on her left shoulder, knees bent towards her stomach, facing in towards Bob. Yet, Charlotte and Bob go no further; their relationship remains innocent, a meeting of two people yearning for something that goes even beyond the other. In a way, Bob is just as much a model to Charlotte as he is a potential mate--especially as it becomes clear that their union is short-lived. He has navigated through the apathy that Charlotte presently faces and has appreciated those moments of meaning, as he reveals when he recounts the day his first child was born the "most terrifying day" of his life.

Lost in Translation to me had the feel of a mature rendition of the themes in The Graduate. Where in the latter, Dustin Hoffman's brilliantly-played Benjamin Braddock single-mindedly set out to win the affection of Elaine Robinson (Katharine Ross) so that it became an end in itself, Bob's sense of the transitory nature of affection hovers around his interactions with Charlotte. This is of course attributable to his age: he has seen his marriage harden from affection to indifference at best, coldness at worst. The iconic scene in The Graduate where Benjamin and Elaine flee her wedding ceremony and collapse on the bus, destination unknown, is the end of spring, the end of cherry blossoms--forgive this sap--but it is the end of romance and the realization of romanticization. To see hopefulness and plaintiveness so effortlessly merge in film is to experience the end of spring.

Writer's Block

To those of you out there constantly hitting your refresh button in anticipation of a new blog entry from me, I'm sorry I've been such a slacker. I've been feeling some writer's block lately, and I'm not even a writer. For some reason, I've not had as much to say about world and national events as I used to, I believe for a few reasons: (1) other people have expressed my thoughts very well (the Frank Riches, Paul Krugmans, and Glen Greenwalds of the world) (2) the opinions seem self-evident (3) I feel I don't have enough knowledge upon which to form a valid opinion. Perhaps I need to focus my energies on more local, conquerable issues, but this impasse does make me re-evaluate my interest in a writing or journalist career. What I like about journalism, though, is that there's little way around starting as a reporter as opposed to a columnist, and I think I need to know things--by virtue of being on a beat, or the like--before I analyze them.

Between W-2s and 1040s

Someone I knew once said, upon closing on a condo, that she could not wrap her mind around having completed such an adult rite, as she still felt she was 17. Myself 18, I nonetheless knew exactly what she was talking about. While closing on anything seemed far off for me, college, the supposed transition between adolescence and adulthood, was right around the corner.

About six years later, I can say that I still have not shook that feeling my co-worker expressed then, that of being a young person pretending to do older people things, like buying furniture, putting money in a retirement account, and filing taxes. Filing taxes in particular gets at the crux of what I fear about adulthood: building an ever-more complex life. After all, this year, I really did not have many tax forms to deal with and much income to report. Woe to the day when I have to itemize deductions and report dependents, when I have to buy a file cabinet for my papers because my simple sectioned folder no longer suffices.

I think these thoughts too about other adult things. Buying a home, for instance, seems to catapult a person into a sea of forms called notes, titles, and deeds and a series of calculations about what to insure and for how much. I feel the more I have to insure, the more I will have sunken into adulthood, which in this modern world, seems to mean owning things and having stakes in things, in some ways, being less mobile. Right now, owning a bed seems a drag on me, what will I do when I own a whole house? How will I be able to pack it all, should I choose to move? Will I be able to get away with not having to consult the terms I have signed onto on a contract, as I have with my filed away lease on my apartment, or will I have to bone up on contract terminology in order to haggle with this or that person about his or that problem? Yeah, I think too far ahead for my own good, though it seems as if some of us are inching that way already, those who are buying condos or getting engaged, for instance.

I'm in no hurry to accumulate stuff, to own, to be settled. I figure that time will come, but still, in this first year out of college, such considerations suddenly don't seem so remote. That doesn't mean they need be impending.

I Love this Guy

I have recently begun to avidly follow the column of Salon's Cary Tennis. Tennis has been in the job for awhile, but I think the tone and subjects of the column topics seem more relevant to me now that I have been catapulted out of college and into the so-called real world, where choices are not prescribed or easy. Tennis's column is a veritable display of the human condition: it features people who have pursued their dream and people who haven't, people who have been crushed by over-ambition and those who have been crushed by ennui. What it impacts upon me is that old saying that the grass always appears greener on the other side, a thought that actually can become somewhat freeing if one's life has been monopolized by investing so much in a future, in getting to that other side.

Tennis's effectiveness comes in his authenticity. He acknowledges that he hasn't figured it all out and lacks the condescension that is common among career advice givers which makes him far superior to the Ask Amys and Dr. Phils of this world. His writers tend to be very thoughtful people as well: what many among them seem to be looking for is someone who can reason with them--perhaps dispel as irrational their worst fears--without looking down upon them. He tends not to give straight advice but rather to expound on the writer's quandry with a mix of life experience and general reflectiveness. In yesterday's column, he responded to a creative writing student who, in pursuing her dream, had become fundamentally discouraged of her writing abilities and of her old definition of success. This is where Tennis's column becomes therapy--though hopefully not schadenfreude--for me: in seeing that others are also reckoning with past decisions and trying to make new ones and are feeling a little shaky and unsatisfied all the while. In all of this, it is so valuable that Tennis does not blithely and reliably say "follow your dream" on the one hand or "don't risk it" on the other, that he does not proffer a right answer. Instead, he talks about his experience. His answer to the paralyzed MFA student:

Thank you for writing. I am glad you are going to finish the program. No matter what you decide to do later, it is good to finish the program and get your degree.

I went to graduate school in creative writing as an egotistical person. I was concerned with whether people thought I was brilliant.

This brilliance was a brittle thing, a bright, cold shell I had made in junior high to wear to school and around town like a gown of dazzling and invisible power to keep predators at bay; it was a fast-thinking thing, a mean, clever thing, a way to stay aloft and aloof. I took it with me when I left home. I used it to not learn anything.

But you get older and defeat forces you to learn things you didn't think you needed to know, or didn't want to learn or didn't think were important, or thought were beneath you.

Here is the big main thing I learned: My writing is not here to support me. I am here to support my writing.

How it came about was I endured some failure as a writer trying to make money as a writer, and had to work at other things for five years. During that time I wrote but not for money. I wrote on the subway, alone, in a notebook, sitting by myself in the crowd. I wrote to save myself.

It turned out that writing to save myself was the best way to write. Here is why, I think: Our writing is the voice of a person who is innocent, powerless and in need of protection; our writing is the voice of a person who needs to be heard as he or she really is. It is deep stuff is what I mean. And shocking as it is to say, the person who is writing this -- the person I am today -- is the kind of person toward whom I once would have leveled pitiless scorn.

Mediocrity's Poster Child

I always kind of mentally roll my eyes when someone suggests that there should be an option on a ballot to vote for none of the listed candidates, but when the friendly driver of the Vamoose bus I took from New York back to D.C. last night gave us riders a choice of four movies to watch on the second leg of the trip, I saw where voting no confidence can seem to be the only way. Indeed, as we boarded the bus after a rest stop in Delaware, we were offered the following non-options:

• Big Mama's House 2
• National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation
• Just Friends
• Rush Hour 2

I wanted to laugh out loud or maybe cry at the wasted two hours I was about to endure. I voted for Just Friends, because it was the only movie of which I hadn't heard. Big mistake. First of all, as their names were flashed on screen, I realized I didn't know any of the actors, which is fine if a movie is trying to aspire to something but a really bad sign if it is merely aiming to be a romantic comedy. If a bunch of D-list actors are involved, you have yourself a D-list romantic comedy. I take that back: I recognized one name. Amy Smart. I somehow know who she is: I had seen her in that bad TV movie series "The Seventies" several years back as well as the movie Rat Race, which John rightly proclaims as having the worst movie ending of all time. The name of the lead man--Ryan Reynolds--was not particularly familiar to me though. Ryan Reynolds, Ryan Reynolds...sounds like I've heard the name perhaps but not instantly recognizable. Yeah, this movie's going to be bad, I thought.

Indeed, the opening scene presents an overweight man (fat suit, of course) sitting in a house in New Jersey in 1995. Fat suits never bode well for anything, especially comedy. The scene was kind of funny though because the heavy man, who turns out to be a high school senior about to profess his love to his best friend, is singing along to the song "I Swear" by All-4-One. I think my own memories of an overnight camp counselor who used to play "I Swear" every night right before our cabin went to bed made me laugh in recognition and appreication of this sad portrayal of being a teen in the 90s. It was all downhill from there, however, with the predictable effort at winning the viewer's sympathy through portraying the mean treatment of our fat protagonist at the hands of others paradoxically coupled with the script's own derision of him (he eats a lot, he is too sensitive, he cries, etc.). Heavy man then vows he will get revenge on all of the people who laughed at him in high school by being very successful. Okay, fine, that's a good enough story, even if it's been done a lot.

Ten years later, he is a Hollywood agent who can get any girl he wants. Fat suit gone, I recognize this man to be Ryan Reynolds, and I now realize I do know who Ryan Reynolds is. He's one of those people who you've seen in a few movies but is easily forgettable, and for good reason. Indeed, I feel a pang of longing for an earlier time when I could not put the name Ryan Reynolds to a face. There's nothing distinctive or interesting about him. He's not attractive, he's not a good actor, and, this lead part in Just Friends is probably the best role he's capable of. He was in "Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place." He's a poor man's Paul Walker. [I later recalled that he had a small part in the movie Dick, which I do enjoy, though no thanks to Ryan Reynolds (his part could have been played by a lot of people).] Here are a few actors I equate with Ryan Reynolds, in terms of sheer badness: Jerry O'Connell, Matthew Lawrence, and Seann William Scott. Here's a guy whose biggest aspiration is probably to be in a sequel to Old School. Ryan Reynolds is the Nickelback of movies.

As good as I thought the Vamoose bus ride was, I just have to wonder why they have such an awful stock of movies (the movie that was shown first was RV). And yet, I must also say, there is something elegant about the mediocrity personified by Ryan Reynolds, because if you ever want to illustrate the thorough unremarkable, uninspired, forgettable nature of something, just say two words: Ryan Reynolds.

Is there a difference between Chinatown bus services?

Can anyone who has more experience riding one of the several bus services that start at a Chinatown in one city and end in another tell me if one is decisively better. I have only taken New Century Travel. I first took it to Philadelphia, as it was one of two bus services that go there and the only one that had a schedule amenable to my own. It was very prompt (actually, it even left early!); however, the time that the bus left was such that we were delayed by an hour and a half or so because of awful D.C. rush hour traffic. The bus ride from Philadelphia back to D.C. was on a Sunday afternoon and encountered no problems. When I went to New York a couple months later, I stuck with New Century Travel, because of my positive first experience. However, the bus was about an hour and a half late arriving into D.C., making me an hour and a half or so late to New York. (At least the outbound rush hour traffic wasn't so bad, though).

In anticipation of my next trip to New York, I might even avoid the Chinatown bus quandry altogether. I am planning to take Vamoose! back from New York because it lets passengers off right near where I live. The website is nicer than those of the various Chinatown bus services as well, which gives me (a perhaps false) sense of faith in their timeliness and general safety. However, if I leave after work on Thursday, I will have to take the Chinatown bus, because it leaves not far from my office. My question is, do I stick with New Century Travel and risk delay (or risk a more unpleasant experience, as happened to one of my coworkers, who got stuck on a New Century bus that was overheated and had a broken toilet), or is there another more reliable Chinatown bus service?

A little perspective for the holidays

Weather is such a mundane part of existence--the stuff of small talk when we've run out of other small talk--but it can destroy us all. That is hardly mundane. I am reminded of this again with the snows in Denver, or "fresh pow," as I have recently understood it to be called by ski bums (or just mythical ski bums). About a year ago, my mom and I set off to Boston to see my brother's biannual sketch comedy show. As it happened, the night, we left a big snow storm was predicted to hit both Chicago, and--if I recall correctly--Boston. (A sidenote: I don't know that I have ever been to Boston when it hasn't precipitated heavily or been very cold).

My mom and I could have gone into the evening with one of two mindsets: (1) What an inconvenience for us, we better get out of Chicago, getting delayed is terrible or (2) This is out of our control, we should only fly if the airlines assure us it's safe, and the fact that we're even getting driven to the airport amidst a snow storm and that planes are attempting to fly out is above and beyond what we should expect. It indicates something impressive about modern technology and in turn the way we become accustomed to convenience. We chose the latter approach, which made the experience much less vexing. We sat in a cab for maybe two hours and were delayed another two hours or so at O'Hare. That's all. Somehow we made it to Boston the same evening.

I try to think of that night every time I face an inconvenience that is beyond my control. It's amazing how much our society requires that everything move smoothly, that I think every once in awhile, it is worth stepping back and awing at it all. This year, if it happens to snow in Chicago when I fly back, I know I'll be frustrated, especially if I can't get there until the middle of next week--as is the case for people going to Denver this year--but I can't help but think that because we rely on things to be convenient all of the time, we forget how unnatural such convenience is, how hard people have to work to keep stores open 24/7 and airports running through the holidays, a time when inclement weather is hardly rare. Maybe every once in awhile, it's valuable for us to recognize that there are forces out of our control, especially in the form of our environment, and that we should therefore leave ourselves some legroom when those situations occur.

For more perspective on the holidays, better than that which I can offer, watch It's a Wonderful Life. It's a movie that's all about putting life into perspective, and it is always appropriate at this time of year.

Small Acts of Immense Laziness

On days when I walk past my apartment's trash chute to throw my garbage away, there are, almost unfailingly, large items underneat the chute cannot fit into it but are meant to be thrown away. Most annoying is when someone places a large box underneath the chute to be thrown away when s/he could easily collapse the box and fit it into the chute (or better yet, recycle it). A vaccuum cleaner and a roll suitcase missing a wheel are just some of the other items that my neighbors have put under the chute. The neighbor(s) responsible for this are not only creating a small mess in the corridor but communicating their immense laziness. This neighbor apparently deems him/herself too good to properly dispose of his/her trash and rather leaves it to the people who clean our apartment complex. Behavior like this is just plain lazy; there is no other word for it. No one is above taking out his/her own trash.

Generalism in a specialized world

Society becomes more complex when individuals become more specialized, and individuals become more specialized when society becomes more complex. This is a truth I despair of every time I confront it, yet it is a truth. As I have said before, I have a visceral aversion to jargon, as its use deters the layperson from understanding the subject matter at hand. At the same time I understand that it is helpful for specialists to have a language with which to communicate with one another. Still, the idea of following a specialized career track, in which one learns the language of the field while moving further away from all other fields, turns me into a commitment-phobe.

And yet, there are fields that are generalist. Law and journalism are the two that come to mind. Both still require the practitioner to learn a language, though journalism's is a language of universalism. As a person who enjoys writing, I fear any stifling parameters to language, which appear in the law, such as legal jargon (too much Latin! and so forth) and a fairly strict writing format. These demands--flexibility in form of communication, generalism--do not comply with the needs of a complex society. So what is a person who wants to be both useful to society, gainfully employed, and interested in her work do?

Be cognizant of this "predicament," I say (to myself). I am in truth living among a luxury of choices. Maybe the new anomie springs from such constant consumerism, where choices are plentiful and perspective takes too much time to summon. I once asked someone several generations older than myself why he had chosen to be a doctor. "Because back then, if you wanted to go to professional school, you either went into law or medicine," he said. It was that easy. Of course, I know it was not easy: medical school is no cakewalk, but the point is, when one has few other choices, one has less room for doubt. As one of my teachers once told me (paraphrased), "the more I have learned, the less I realize that I know." Sometimes the source of paralysis is knowing too much.

Amaaazing!

So as you may notice, I am now using what is called the beta version of Blogger, which allows me to label my posts and categorize them. I will focus my blog energies on labeling now, with the ultimate though daunting goal of labeling every blog entry I've written. I will try not to make too many categories. How do categorize this post? It will get the "Meta" label since it is about the blog itself, and the fact that I'm talking about how to label an entry I've written about changes to my blog is a little to meta-Meta for me.

There look to be many other neat features that I will be sure to investigate.

Stories and Citations

I recommend that everyone do a Google search of themselves at some point. You never know what you'll find. For one thing, my Google search of "Elaine Meyer" yields as the number one web hit the site ElaineMeyer.com, revealing that not only has someone else claimed my name as her domain (it helps her case that she happens to be named Elaine Meyer, as well), but that the more amazing feat of being mentioned in the Northwestern Observer isn't recognized by that site being the most highly visited of those that include the term "Elaine Meyer."

That's right, I got a mention here and a flattering description as a "new graduate" who "influenced" Barack Obama's Northwestern Commencement Speech. That is definitely a little generous but cool.

Elsewhere on the web, I found that someone quoted me in a blog about the New York Times' recent article on female versus male performance in college. The blog is called BlogHer, apparently about women's issues with a roundup of women bloggers' opinions on various stories.

Okay, self-promotion over, or, as an html nerd would put it .

Stuck in a Book Rut

I display a photo of the book I am currently reading for all of my blog readers to see. Scroll down a bit and you will learn that right now, that book is Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Ligthness of Being. I had heard of the book for awhile now, mainly because it is a fairly frequent favorite on Facebook profiles, but for some reason, I was under the impression that it was a fairly generic Oprah book club title until I saw it listed in the New York Times Book Review's Books of the Century: A Hundred Years of Authors, Ideas, and Literature. Maybe it was the title's explicit stating of its theme that made me look down upon it, not that I cannot appreciate overt grandiosity in literature.

I am somewhat underwhelmed by the book, which is a blend of storytelling and the narrator (presumably Kundera's) own sporadic interjections. Much of the book describes the life of an accomplished doctor who is also a consummate lover. The consummate lover aspect takes over a bit too much of the plot. That the Soviets have just occupied Czechoslovakia is somewhat tangential until towards the end of the book (it is set in Prague and a bit in Switzerland around 1968) which is kind of surprising.

So this brings me to the source of my rut: Why is it that I cannot get into even some of the most acclaimed books? Held above all other books in my mind is, probably unsurprisingly, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I mark myself as one of the most unoriginal people on the planet when I say it is the perfect book. What about it do I think is perfect? Well, I think Fitzgerald does a uniquely good job developing his narrator, Nick Carraway. In books where a third person omniscient voice narrates, there is an implied sense that an impartial force can give an objective account of the lives of the characters. That Gatsby's narrator subtly undermines himself at points, revealing that he too is flawed and not always trustworthy indicates a wise grasp of people and their tendencies on the part of the author. At the end, Carraway's account of Jay Gatsby comes off as a little too romantic--something I've seen the book criticized for. However, after reading it again a couple of summers ago, I truly did not know whether Fitzgerald thinks Gatsby a tragic figure or a pawn of a mythical American Dream, and we are mistaken if we equate Fitzgerald's point-of-view with Carraway's (though I'm sure Carraway is an outgrowth of F. Scott in many respects).

This leads me to another point of the novel's perfection, which is that it is strongly thematic without being heavy-handed. (Okay, maybe Fitzgerald overdoes the time motif a bit, but I still like it). Put simply, to illustrate themes about the large, conceptual themes like the American Dream, the passing of time, and the effect of place on people, Fitzgerald shows rather than tells. He shows the carelessness of the entitled wealthy class and their reckless automobile crashes and aloof insularity, and he shows the new money consumption of Gatsby that buys shirts of every hue and builds a sprawling mansion to get the girl.

So this is a little bit of what any other novel I try to read is up against. If anyone has any book suggestions, let me know. Just keep in mind that I'm not very original.

There's no Organization in Organization

Leading up to when I began college as well as during my first weeks there, I got it in my head that I would need to stay organized. I made several trips to Cost Plus World Market to buy items that I expected would help in this effort: collapsible boxes, a couple of baskets, wall-hanging containers. I lacked only one thing: knowing what I was trying to organize. As I sit here today, with those same items I purchased four years ago doing nothing but cluttering up my already cluttered bedroom, I am forced to acknowledge the futility of trying to get organized by focusing on the meta-organizational aspect of organization. That is, rather than spend so much time worrying about how I would stay organized at the beginning of college before even being disorganized, I should have just waited until stuff became vaguely disorganized and then began my efforts at staying organized.

As mundane as it seems, I think my shopping spree at the beginning of my college career and the over-preparedness and arguable misplacement of priorities it evidenced can be a metaphor for the mistakes that one makes in all types of organizing, be it people, things, or time. Rather than worry too much about how one might organize, rather than spend too much time on the existential aspects of putting things away, rather than buying too many containers or file cabinets or folders, or in human terms, rather than forming too many task forces or calling too many meetings, the most efficient, organized way to do something may be to just...do it.

And, in that vein, I should really clean my room.

Fork in the Road

Once in a vision
I came on some woods
And stood at a fork in the road
My choices were clear
Yet I froze with the fear
Of not knowing which way to go
One road was simple
Acceptance of life
The other road offered sweet peace
When I made my decision
My vision became my release.-Dan Fogelberg

Why am I quoting a singer whose best-known hit has probably been played in every elevator and dentist's waiting room in the nation? Well, in fairness to Mr. Fogelberg, I like this quote and when I was younger, pondered it when his tapes were playing in the family car. I remember, for instance, never really knowing which road he meant for us to think that he chose.

I ponder this line again because I am at something of a fork in the road in my own life. I have an exciting--though somewhat open-ended--opportunity to live in France for about eight months of the 2006-2007 year. On the other hand, I can get a job in D.C. in areas that I have long thought myself to be interested in (policy, political advocacy, or public interest). Back when I was merely applying for the job in France, I had it in the back of my mind that I was doing so simply to keep all my options open. The fact that the position didn't seem to promise the beginning of a career (teaching job) and didn't pay very well (though the work hours are hardly demanding) made me nervous. At the same time, gaining a stronger command of the French language and returning to a country I love excited me.

Now, as I think more seriously on the choice, and get admittedly excited about the opportunity to go to France--and simultaneously nervous that I am idealizing this opportunity--I think back to the fork in the road metaphor. For me, this "fork" brings out a conflict of impulses that I have had for awhile now: on the one hand, I get frustrated over the way in which my generation is expected to have everything planned out. From day one at my high school, many students were participating in activities and striving to get grades that wiput them in an ideal college so to get to an ideal graduate school, so to get an ideal job. There's no room in this mentality for what is called (melodramatically, maybe) soul-searching. I long for the era that my parents' generation came of age in, one that I have mythologized as more laid-back than our's. If I go to Europe, I'll be living at least some semblance of what I imagine this era to be.

The other impulse reminds me of how much of an investment college is, how much I want to work to change certain things about the United States (rather than just become a temporary expat), and reminds me that many of my peers are getting their careers started in law school or with impressive jobs. I wonder if only decadent people can afford to take off to France after four years of college.

Maybe I am just as bad as the societies that idealized the "noble savage," when I say that I want to return to a simpler life. Still, I think that there is something to be said for the perhaps trite idea that money and power are not everything and in fact, can make for a complicated, stressful existence. Yes, some level of comfort is ideal, which is why I am for such things as universal health care, but the way the United States values the act of striking it rich (or more recently, being born rich), does not account for the way this devalues other important aspects of life. Such aspects include having a good balance between work and leisure, eating well, getting outdoors (rather than just to the gym), and keeping oneself entertained without the latest entertainment technology gadget. France, to some extent, still allows for this lifestyle. (Granted, they have their own problems there).

Anyway, those are my current thoughts on this difficult but definitely exciting decision.

Daily musings

Today I had some free time and walked out to the lake on the far eastern end of our campus. I'm not the first nor will I be the last to muse about our peaceful natural setting and its ability to transport one to a different plane than is the norm. Life seems fleeting staring out at a vast expanse that appears unending, and it can be liberating to realize this.

Now I am sitting in the library where students are working on various assignments and checking e-mail. For some reason, my eyes are wandering over to the note on my Diet Code Red bottle that says "For Best Taste Drink by Date on Bottle." Maybe none of this is that big a deal or maybe I'm just hopped up on Code Red.

Daily article

Check out my article in the Daily Northwestern. It is basically a rendition of this post from earlier, so I won't post it again, but feel free to give it a read!