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November 18, 2004

You know, from MY perspective...

So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the process of growing up, making the transition from a “young adult” into an adult-adult. Maybe it’s the getting married thing, or the realizing I’ll be 30 before we have a new president thing, but I’ve been looking at a lot of things in my life lately through the lens of how much older I feel now than I did four, eight, ten years ago – all times of my life when, at the time, I felt very grown up.

I’m actually finding it a pleasant surprise that I actually do feel like I’m gaining not just experience as I get older, but perspective. Perspective seems to be the constant theme in my realizations: How big of a deal various events are to me, how quickly a day or a week passes, how long a year or a decade or a century seems – these are what’s changing. I've been able to understand historical events in a much more full and interconnected way than I could even in college, as a History major. I see patterns and themes there that never occurred to me five years ago.

But this gaining perspective thing, while I’m enjoying it, is also a trade-off, which is what Patrick and I were talking about the other night: When you’re a little kid, the reason it feels like the month before Christmas takes eons to pass is because every day is full of new experiences that seem to fill your whole life, your whole mind.

The playdough handprint you painted as a gift for your mom in kindergarten that day. The Star Wars lunchbox your neighbor Corey just got that you can’t wait to get home and admire. The new technique you and your brother have discovered for sliding down the carpeted stairs on your belly while emitting a Tarzan-like chorus ah-ee-ah-ee-ah-ee-ah. As a kid, you focus so hard on the moment at hand that it seems to expand both temporally and in its importance. It’s generally said that children have shorter attention spans than adults, but I think that’s actually kind of a misleading way of describing the difference, at least from how I remember my own childhood.

As a kid, I could absorb myself completely in the world of my Playmobile figures or Breyer horses, and go for half an hour or more without my mind wandering out of the imaginary world I’d created for them. True, perhaps after half an hour I’d get up to go to the bathroom or get a snack and decide that I wanted to read a book or play on the swingset or bug my brother instead of returning to my game.

But now – it’s hard for me to remember the last time I focused for even 15 minutes on something without those thought interruptions – Oh, I’ve got to remember to buy some canned goods for the food drive at work – Did I pay the phone bill? – I should really try to stop eating so much ice cream, I’ve probably gained five pounds – Housing prices keep going up, man, I should really get on that whole pre-approval thing – I haven’t emailed my cousin in a while – Yeah. That. So while I may look like I’m focusing on a given task for hours at a time, it’s a surface-level focusing. There are very few things I can still get as absorbed in as I could as a child. My perspective has shifted.

Though now, when I do still find those things that completely absorb me, it feels like a revelation. I realized it this summer while picking raspberries on Powderhorn Island in Maine – a tiny little treeless island in the Sheepscot Bay near West Boothbay Harbor, where I have been picking wild raspberries with my family every summer since I was old enough to toddle up to the prickly bushes and pluck berries from them. This summer, we went twice during my week-long vacation in Maine.

Sarah on Powderhorn, August 2004

And something about the weather patterns or the pollination or something must have been working in these berries’ favor this year, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen them so luscious and plentiful. One day, we picked so many that (and you don’t know how it pains me to admit this) some of them actually rotted in the fridge before we could finish eating them. And there were many of us. And we love us some wild raspberries. It’s just that we had picked, like, seriously, close to a gallon of them.

Anyway, what I realized, out there on Powderhorn, with the sun on my hair and the smell of bayberry and salt air and sunscreen in my nose and my ankles scratched up by brambles and my eyes and fingers darting from cluster to cluster of dark pink and juicy blood-purple berries was: If no one called me back to the beach to go home, I would just stay here picking berries for hours.

Someone always does call me back. “Sarah! Tide’s going out. We’ve gotta get home!”

“Okay,” I yell, but my hand is deep in a thicket finding more berries, and I begin moving slowly back in the direction of the beach, dawdling here to pick just that perfect one, or there – oh, how could I let that one go? – until, “Sarah! You coming or what?” And I get back to the beach to find everyone already on the boat, ready to shove away from shore.

There are very few things in my life that I have to be cajoled and dragged away from anymore. Sometimes reading a good book will do it. Once in a great while, when I get in some sort of zone, writing can be hard to break with. Maybe sometimes painting, though I think that’s partly logistical – if I have a palette full of paints, I don’t want to go to the trouble of cleaning them up or covering them with plastic wrap or whatever unless I seriously have to.

But it’s rare these days for me to be so mentally consumed by any activity that dislodging my attention from that thing and moving it to something else is actually difficult for me. And that’s an experience I remember having daily, sometimes hourly as a child. The phrase, “Five more minutes? Please?” was one I made heavy use of.

And I guess that’s what I mean about perspective changing. On one hand, it’s nice to be able to transition between the various commitments and activities of my day without much trouble. To multitask, as it were. But it’s also really great to find those things that can still suck me in, focus me, pull me down so deep into concentration that clawing myself back out again takes a little time.

I’ve often thought and spoken about my sense that art, and fiction writing in particular, comes from a sort of dreamstate – a different level of consciousness than that on which we live our day-to-day, must-remember-to-buy-dish-soap lives. And I feel like what I’m describing here is part of that.

The nice thing about getting to be an adult, I suppose, if you can figure out how to pull it off, is that you can get to have both. You can read theory and history, and think about trends and context and broad patterns, and you can understand the world around you much better for it. But hopefully you can also find ways of getting into that place where you can focus on a story or a painting or a song or a dance and it can open up into a universe, the same way a two-minute dream can contain an epic. That’s the balance beam I’m trying to walk, at least.

Posted by sarah at 02:07 PM | Comments (3)

November 17, 2004

The shy exhibitionist rambles

As I’m walking home down 13th street tonight, Guy Chillin’ Outside Pizza Place* checks me out (in my oh-so-provocative outfit of loose black suit pants, puffy down jacket and wool scarf, no less) and says, “Hell-Oh – Aaand I’m not gonna say anything else, ‘cause I see that engagement ring on your finger, baby.”

I didn’t turn around or anything, just kept walking, which is my standard response to catcalls and other street attention – though I always wish I had some snappy, Lorelai-like witty response with which to disarm the fellow, and usually spend the next block crafting the perfect retort and replaying the incident in my head, only to then be further annoyed that I’ve wasted more time even thinking about it at all. But this time, instead of mulling over my missed comeback opportunity, I found myself thinking about this whole engagement thing.

For one thing, it’s kind of funny that this dude on 13th street spotted my ring straight away, when some of my close coworkers haven’t noticed it yet. I’ve been shy about bringing it to people’s attention, because these are people who already know I’m engaged (the engagement came a couple months before the ring), so it’s not like I have actual news to share – just a shiny (and gorgeous) new Symbol. Because of that, telling people feels less like spreading interesting information and more like… bragging, or something.

I’m never sure how much of myself to divulge to people, and I think I err on the shy side of keeping most things private. Which is another thing I was thinking about on the walk home tonight. Because a web site is by its very nature public, and I’m not sure I’ve worked out the pros and cons of how much personal stuff to post.

Back at my first web site, I jumped right in and, assuming that only a few people at my college would be reading it, put up whatever I felt like. I was also in a sort of experimental exhibitionistic phase in college, like I think a lot of people are around that time. You know, I did things like get naked on the playground with my boyfriend, and perform poems about fucking at a poetry slam, and hold a spontaneous kiss-in with a bunch of friends while standing on top of a table in the dining hall. Sigh. I have pictures of myself from those days wearing an outfit that consisted of little more than red fishnets and some strategically places shreds of red fabric. Rest assured I will never post them here.

Even then, it’s not like I wasn’t ambivalent about some of my web-related sharing. But I was more willing to go ahead and do it anyway. Now I tend to talk myself out of everything. Even things that aren’t at all personal or embarrassing: just things that I worry are somehow self-indulgent or self-important.

Because, like, isn’t the whole concept of having your own web site making this awful assumption that you have something super important and unique to add to the world? It’s intimidating, especially given the way the world of blogs has evolved since I had an active web site in 1999 and 2000. Like, what do I have to say that hasn't already been said 40 times earlier today, and better, by somebody with better design capabilities, to boot?

But the point, I think, is that each of us does have something unique to say, if we’re willing to do the work of figuring out what it is and saying it. I’ve been reading a lot of Studs Terkel recently, and what I find amazing about his work is the way it showcases the wisdom and intelligence and thought processes of so many “regular” people. What I learn, again and again, reading his books, is that we are all “regular.” Growing up, as most children and adolescents do, I always felt somehow special. Like fame and fortune were mine by rights, and the Universe would any second swoop down and bestow them upon me. You know, earnestly performing commercials in the mirror, writing my angst-ridden poetry. All the standards.

And it has only been as a function of becoming an adult that I’ve realized on a sort of gut level – because I think I’ve theoretically known it for longer – that I’m no more special than the next guy. But the thing is, that’s not a bad thing. Because the next guy, just by virtue of being an individual, is pretty damn special. Just not in the fame-and-fortune way. More in the nobody-will-ever-see-through-my-eyes way.

So that’s the point of this whole ramble, I guess. It’s the explication, the justification, the pre-emptive apology to the people I know who think blogs are kinda silly and self indulgent (which I’m not necessarily disputing).

And now? It’s time to go. Patrick needs his computer back. Mine’s ill – that’s a whole other privacy dilemma. If you pay someone to recover the files on your computer, and there are some… er… embarrassing files on it (like, say, from your college days, perhaps)… there’s just no getting around that, is there? Thoughts?

* I’m not sure why I felt the need to capitalize that little title, though the acronym it would make, G-COPP, comes out sorta nice. Sadly his acronym was not needed again in the brief story, so my acronymtastic powers are moot for the time being.

Posted by sarah at 11:46 PM | Comments (0)

November 07, 2004

Sometimes a picture

really is worth far more than words. Maybe that's why, of all the responses I've seen to Tuesday's Bush win, "Sorry, Everybody" seems to be the most captivating.

I'm thinking of sending in a photo to them.

In the days that follow, maybe I'll get some thoughts together enough to post here. Meanwhile, I'm posting lots of photos over on the art page. That seems to be more my speed right about now.

Posted by sarah at 02:20 AM | Comments (0)