March 27, 2005

• Topic: new thoughts

  
  

  So…I just went for this 30min. run/walk, and really enjoyed the time to be alone and think.  But, as I’ve come to accept, my mind thought and thought in circles, aimless, leading to nothing in particular.  At points, this brought memories and smiles to mind, at other times, the wandering of my mind led me to less than smiles.  The thought that hit me was how my memory often fails me.  After 30min. of thinking and pondering and remembering, I returned to my home, and the intensity of those 30min. simply vanished, and faded away.

  
  

  The temporariness of so much of life tugs at me.  When old friends and places seem like strangers, life tugs at me.  But that tugging, too, is only temporary.

  
  

  I am back home on Long Island, and I haven’t felt so happy at home in a while.  After a long day of travelling, driving about 2-3 hrs. to Trenton, NJ., another 80min. train ride to Penn Station, and 40min. to my town on Long Island, my mom was there to pick me up.  If a list existed for everytime my mom picked me up, it would be a long long list.

  
  

  When I got home, we headed straight for the kitchen.  My mom decided to cook up a storm this past week.  Fresh blueberry muffins, the recipe clipping from the newspaper by its side.  For dinner, meat loaf, baked potatoes, and asparagus cooked on olives oil, with some salt and pepper.  “It’s better than boiling them,” my mom explained.  I then helped my mom make some meatballs for later in the week, adding soy sauce and rice in place of the cornflakes as she normally does.  For the sauce, she heated up a can of cranberry sauce, a bottle of chili sauce, and some brown sugar.  Once that was ready, she put the meatballs in the sauce.  Later, she would pour the sauce into its own container and freeze it.  The fat would then rise to the top and be skimmed off.

  
  

  Today, my mom went to the city to see a show, leaving me to hang out with the pops today.  My dad has been fixing up parts of the house, and today he was working on painting the kitchen and tv room, and left me to sand and re-finish the kitchen table.  He showed me the various sand papers he had, which aren’t actually made of sand anymore “except for the really cheap kinds.”  We took turns scrubbing off the dirt that had soaked into the wood.  To be honest, I thought the wood color was completely natural and couldn’t detect that it was in fact “dirty,” but after sanding, I saw the natural oak color come out.  After vacuuming the table and myself, we added a thin coat of polyurethene, an enamel that will seal in the wood.  Right now, the first layer is drying.  Soon…we’ll sand it, and add a second coat, and perhaps later, a 3rd.  My dad explained how true carpenters would repeat the process as many as 10 times, which he’s done before when finishing the stocks of his rifles (my dad is a target shooter).  All the while, we had some classical music playing.  One song brought back a memory of when I played the french horn in high school.  The horn still sits in the basement…it tugs at me a bit that I played that instrument for so long, and now that part of my life is virtually forgotten, except when I pick out the horn sound from a classical song.

  
  

  My parents are simple people, and so am I.  Perhaps my experiences over the past 3-weeks of having my days filled from rise till sleep, has made me appreciate their lifestyles.  Cooking, cleaning, reading, taking in a movie on tv (we watched O Brother where art thou? last night).  As I’ve recently fallen into a state of psuedo-happiness, where I’ve been living in the past and thinking of the future, while feeling like the present wan’t 100% right, I realized that the same lifestyle that has at times tormented me, is now a welcoming one.

  
  

  At Outward Bound, one of the things we teach and pracitce is giving feedback to others.  It’s an uplifting experience to hear others say positive things about you, and to give you constructive feedback as well.  It’s also a strange feeling to really hear what people observe and think about you.

  
  

  Now that I’ve finished staff training, I’m going to start focussing on personal and professional goals.  I’ve put my personal goals on hold for a while, mostly because I’ve been uncertain about what sort of goals were appropriate.  It turned out, getting back to work was priority #1, and now that I feel like a person again, and now that I’m back within an organization that is aligned w/ my personal mission, I think it’s a good time to start thinking about my goals.

  
  

  Ultimately…I need to start to figure out what I can do as a career.  This doesn’t mean figuring out what I’m going ot be doing for the rest of my life, and it doesn’t mean giving up on the idea of living abroad, travelling, being adventurous, and having extended periods of personal explorations.  It does mean coming up w/ a plan for how I can bring in a comfortable amount of income, and a plan for finding the type of work that will be most aligned to my unique talents and interests. 

  
  

  I have two sisters.  One loves to travel.  The other is very into fitness, health, and cooking.  I’d love to blend all our interests and create a company one day…that’d be interesting. 

  
  

  I’ve become good friends w/ a staff member who is also a ”Dead Head.”  I don’t think I’ve met a person who has more life stories, about hitching, festivals, and some past experiences involving drugs.  One story I love involves him hitching to the Bonaroo music festival in Tn., w/out a ticket.  He arrived, and while cars were in traffic, walked around handing out free watermelon, and holding up his index finger.  “The miracle finger,” he called it, letting me into the Dead Head world of praying for a miracle ticket.  After a while, one car took some watermelon, and said, “We drove from Seattle, and our friend couldn’t make it, but said to give their extra ticket to someone who had the finger up.” 

  
  

  Another staff member is a pop culture encyclopedia, and introduced me to the term, “post-modernism.”  I’ve come across lots of ideas in books and the internet, but it’s a whole other world when you come across a person one-on-one to share ideas with.  I’ve never used or heard the word post-modern, although I feel as though it’s something I should have learned in college.  Anyways…my friend mostly discussed it in terms of art and thought, and I was struck by two things.  First…how artists actually get together to define what is post-modern art, and will then use that subjective standard in an objective god-like way to scorn and ridicule those who try to pass off their art as post-modern.  The second is how my personal philosopy of all things being relative, being a big part of post-modern thought.  I think that reminded me of why I never heard of post-modernism in college, because it’s mostly a subjective term created by intellectuals/academics, that could be related to me personally, but is mostly withheld for the academic realm. 

  
  

  Here’s a list of things I hope to learn/gain exposure to:

  
  

  post-modernism
  the art of Salvador Dali (featured at the Philly art museum)
  new recipes (to use on the trail)

  
  

  Time to finish off the table and eat some more blueberry muffins….home is good.
  

  
  

   

  • 4:36 pm
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