9, 10

What do I have to say about 2009? I don’t know, man, it’s hard to go back to this time a year ago and see things the way I saw them, trace the trajectories through space and draw, with some acumen, anything notable or profound from the differences. It’s ridiculous to try and recall all of the things that shaped the moment I’m suspended in right now, do them the justice they so richly deserve, identify and thank them for delivering me here.

I rang in 2009 black-out smashed in Studio B, my point of recollection ending just before a long-line return to coat check but I have flashes of trying to remove my contact lenses in an abandoned upstairs bedroom of Dan’s Grandmother’s abandoned Staten Island home, fishing until my eyes bled only to realize I had already removed them. The next morning I was awoken by friends bearing a gallon of water and offering me half of their egg sandwich, which I graciously, and likely wordlessly, accepted. Friendship like you can’t put into words. Downstairs a Polish stranger was eating breakfast and drinking vodka at the stripped living room’s only table. We don’t know where he came from but no one seemed to mind. I drove us home and we recounted the night— peeing on some wall outside, expensive drinks, confusing rooms, crazy party people— listening to Abbey Road at a level barely audible.

The cold and white of winter saw me lower than I’d like to admit I go. I made a lot of mistakes and hurt a lot of feelings. I invented a lot of fictions and allowed myself a number of misunderstandings, spent a lot of time in paranoid semi-isolation. But it’s really not as dramatic as it sounds. I developed a bad jetskiing habit and wasn’t the most responsible with alcohol. But despite this, the friends that today I count among the finest anywhere (and I dare you to challenge me on it) provided a cushion of hands, pushing me back up, brushing me off, and shoving me back into the expanding chaos as if to whisper, “you are and will be better, friend.”

As the earth defrosted, I found my feet a cloud that would hold my weight. I did some of my best creative work and conducted some necessary distancing and re-proximation, an exercise, again, in realizing how wonderful the people around me are. It slowly became warm enough to uncocoon and, under a bed and in the morning springblue, tree bark or construction equipment underfoot, I met the most wonderful, beautiful girl by some inexact but, I’m convinced, divine circumstance. I spoke with less pretense and more humanity and began to understand some things.

Overseas, I moved in a surreal multiverse of literature and human interaction. I learned about philosophy and Mixed Martial Arts from intelligent, big-hearted artists and friends. I was cried on. I met a man who knows on Jesus Green and when he asked me who I am— I didn’t know. I had wine with distinguished scholars and waxed Ulysses with a Cambridge fellow whose favorite band is Talking Heads. James Joyce, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus manifested themselves a [new] Trinity within me and made me wonder, then, what constitutes soul. I watched sunrise from both the top of Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh, and on an exhausted hike through a sleeping London. I very foolishly climbed on buildings.

Fall 2009 was, without question, the most difficult and magnificent semester I have had the privilege of enjoying. Academics were tough. But my delightful, wonderful, ever-understanding and hilarious group of friends expanded incredibly— like gravity did some weird vacuum thing and allowed all the awesome in the available universe to collect in late night, bathroom floor conversations, balcony sessions, and beer pong standoffs. Beautiful friends shared their beautiful friends and we all danced under a paper lantern moon with smiles wide enough to sail across, into the alabaster ghostmorning.

So now here we are, I guess. Another year older each but aged so much more, chipped at and built up by the people we’ve bounced off of and into. We’ve moved like tokens on a game board but the stakes feel unimportant. We’ve come to share squares with different pieces and I sure feel all the better for it. We see the game from a perspective we couldn’t have previously and, as we continue into 2010, that much more revealed will, I’m confident, be wonderous and new and exciting. This is a thrilling beginning and a chance to take inventory of that, of those, we’ve been blessed by, carried by, relied on, needed, trusted, been unjustly hurt (because we love them so) by, surprised by, reduced to tears (the laughing ones) by, felt more intimately.

Thank you all, Happy New Year, and all that. Cool, whatever.

Things that are scary

1. My penultimate semester of college ends tomorrow.
2. My ultimate, final semester as an undergraduate begins shortly thereafter.
3. My graduate school applications have to be done by, like, Wednesday or something.
4. Graduate school applications.
4.5. Inevitable rejection.
5. The very idea of student teaching.
6. The future.
7. What am I doing?
8. That everything lately has been so so good lovely on lovely like peanut butter and jelly in a ziploc made personally, especially-- and I don't know if that I deal pretty well with change carries over into this space I've occupied, nestled into, hibernating.
9. Personal statements-- Who am I and why can't I manage two double-spaced pages on it?
10. The simultaneous inescapability and impossibility of being.
11. Bad habits.
12. Spiders.
13.