I've Been 30 For A While Now
I don't think I realized how much it would take to clean your scent off of me. It was foolish. A decade doused in your perfume, I should not have assumed it could be undone so easily. I wonder if it's healthy for me to want to remove so much of you. If I could, I would remove more than what is on me. It's an obsession so pervasive that it breeds other obsessions to try to take its place. I don't know if there will ever be another moment so critical to my growth. You're the thing that would induce me to cannibalism. I feel as though I am cannibalizing my life to eat you out of it. It's not the first time, and I wonder how damaging this will be. More people should watch Hannibal. I don't think I'll ever let that go.
It's the greatest love story I've ever bore witness to. It feels so consuming that it is hard to imagine that you are not a direct witness of a cursed love blossoming. It's the kind of love that everyone says they want, but I don't think anyone really does. A love where one is seen, completely. Such a love, the show insists, is redefining. When someone can see you for who you are, it makes it harder for you to deny yourself. It makes a painful and codependent bond. Will insists at one point that he has never seen himself as clearly as when he is with Hannibal, and so even after Hannibal's brutal escalation of betrayal he seeks him. This is the kind of love people wish for, but secretly couldn't bear, because they don't know the depth of what they're wishing. We'd rather have a surface level attraction. Or just under. Where people can wade into the shores of our truth, the part that is just beyond the beach that we leave most people on, but not so far as the ocean where we're all likely to get lost.
I turned 30. And I did so as drunkenly belligerent as I had envisioned, although with far more tears. I was hoping for an evening of snarky chucking at my own conceits about the people around me. Something that would be revealing, off-putting, and it was, but not in the way I designed. "These violent delights have violent ends". I can never project the mask of aloofness as well as I would like. I think it's hard to say that I do so successfully at all. There are clearly bonds that I am unable to survive without. In this quiet blue house, I wonder, daily, what I will do when The Kitten is gone. She's been my most direct socialization for a little over a month. Will I survive her? Will I throw her brick of ashes through a window in Scott's house? The possibilities are endless, but they trend toward weeks of kind of tired one experiences when a part of them is dying. The only comfort is our dreams.
I have a professor now that is a bit of a grammar fiend. I worry about how he'd pick apart my writing. I try to avoid speaking in class, although I know it's better to make bonds with your professors.
More than anything I've spent the last moth overwhelmed by fear. It's too quiet in my part of the city, and I am not used to it, having lived in apartments for over 10 years in a college town where no one sleeps at the same time. It's too quiet, so I spend much of the night awake, waiting for day break, when it is safe to shut my eyes. At 30 I feel my most childish. I am afraid of betrayal. Not just the outward betrayal of an individual who might attack me, or a society that seems to be abandoning me, but of myself. I like to linger on campus on the days that I am there. I enjoy going early and having breakfast at the round concrete tables that lay beneath the trees near the business school. When it's not overtaken by the wet heat of the city, when there's a cool morning breeze, it's delightful in its simplicity. I've never felt such calm. The campus is quiet and inviting, which may just be because it is summer and most of the students are away. I hope not. I think it's more likely that I feel at home because there are more people who look like me. It's easy to imagine that there are more people who are from the same economic background. This was somewhat rare at UT. I remember in one of my first language classes, Swedish, the rest of my class would discuss the last time they visited Europe as we waited for the teacher to arrive. Everything in Austin feels rich and unwelcoming. Even within the poorer parts there is a feeling that the wealth is always at the edges, waiting to move in when the bloat of the city becomes too much. And worse, there are the incredibly small, incredibly rich, suburbs within the city, where celebrities own hills they can look down at the groves and the water from. Austin is a world of privilege that likes to undercut its history of segregation. It likes to pretend it is a friendly blueberry in a bowl of tomato soup, but it tastes just the same when you put it in your mouth. I have never loved Houston, but I enjoy the campus I travel to by train. I enjoy the feeling of urban cosmopolitan that blends everyone into its folds. I'll never be seen here. I fear acknowledgement.
Although, I am beginning to fear the lack of it. The Trump administration has been in power for a little over a year and a half. It's been quietly, and not so quietly, erasing pieces of the country that might protect the disenfranchised. I fear that in two and half years this president will no longer be a president, but a coup that no one was willing to stop. Or that couldn't be stopped. Because the people who saw it, the people who voiced their concerns, were not the people of power, money or influence. The majority fears becoming the minority. It's not hard to imagine why when you consider the way minorities have been treated. They've been enslaved, they've been murdered, they've been imprisoned, vilified, forced to give up their own culture to live in peace. They've had their children stolen from them. Not just the immigrants who rick their lives to seek asylum, but people who were citizens. People who should have been considered citizens. Africans and Native Americans. Families were separated and Japanese orphans were put into internment camps. It is not ironic that to "Make America Great Again" means to return to atrocities that America had largely disavowed. It is deliberate. It is a final revelation of a country that hid behind an illusion of acceptance. That's not to say it's all of the country, or even all of the people in power or people with wealth in the country are conspirators in this movement. Some, I'm sure, are good people. However, for every Bill Gates or Warren Buffet there is a Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg who does not work as hard to hide his greed. Donald Trump is doing nothing to hide his greed, and in doing so is exposing the a common goal within the Republican party, one that they are no longer as concerned with disguising either. This knowledge has, perhaps, become a much larger obsession and is definitely a much greater fear than all others. If my mother does survive her next surgery, if my father is not developing dementia, if I don't fail my classes and find a source of income that allows me to focus on finally completing my degree- will we even have a home? Will we be safe in this country? Will electing more Democrats in the midterms be enough to mitigate the damage that has been done? I can't hope for a reversal any time soon, but I think we all hope that the heel coming down on our necks for the impertinence of believing the American Dream exists for everyone will ease off a bit. So that we might forget that it is there- for just a little while longer.
It's the greatest love story I've ever bore witness to. It feels so consuming that it is hard to imagine that you are not a direct witness of a cursed love blossoming. It's the kind of love that everyone says they want, but I don't think anyone really does. A love where one is seen, completely. Such a love, the show insists, is redefining. When someone can see you for who you are, it makes it harder for you to deny yourself. It makes a painful and codependent bond. Will insists at one point that he has never seen himself as clearly as when he is with Hannibal, and so even after Hannibal's brutal escalation of betrayal he seeks him. This is the kind of love people wish for, but secretly couldn't bear, because they don't know the depth of what they're wishing. We'd rather have a surface level attraction. Or just under. Where people can wade into the shores of our truth, the part that is just beyond the beach that we leave most people on, but not so far as the ocean where we're all likely to get lost.
I turned 30. And I did so as drunkenly belligerent as I had envisioned, although with far more tears. I was hoping for an evening of snarky chucking at my own conceits about the people around me. Something that would be revealing, off-putting, and it was, but not in the way I designed. "These violent delights have violent ends". I can never project the mask of aloofness as well as I would like. I think it's hard to say that I do so successfully at all. There are clearly bonds that I am unable to survive without. In this quiet blue house, I wonder, daily, what I will do when The Kitten is gone. She's been my most direct socialization for a little over a month. Will I survive her? Will I throw her brick of ashes through a window in Scott's house? The possibilities are endless, but they trend toward weeks of kind of tired one experiences when a part of them is dying. The only comfort is our dreams.
I have a professor now that is a bit of a grammar fiend. I worry about how he'd pick apart my writing. I try to avoid speaking in class, although I know it's better to make bonds with your professors.
More than anything I've spent the last moth overwhelmed by fear. It's too quiet in my part of the city, and I am not used to it, having lived in apartments for over 10 years in a college town where no one sleeps at the same time. It's too quiet, so I spend much of the night awake, waiting for day break, when it is safe to shut my eyes. At 30 I feel my most childish. I am afraid of betrayal. Not just the outward betrayal of an individual who might attack me, or a society that seems to be abandoning me, but of myself. I like to linger on campus on the days that I am there. I enjoy going early and having breakfast at the round concrete tables that lay beneath the trees near the business school. When it's not overtaken by the wet heat of the city, when there's a cool morning breeze, it's delightful in its simplicity. I've never felt such calm. The campus is quiet and inviting, which may just be because it is summer and most of the students are away. I hope not. I think it's more likely that I feel at home because there are more people who look like me. It's easy to imagine that there are more people who are from the same economic background. This was somewhat rare at UT. I remember in one of my first language classes, Swedish, the rest of my class would discuss the last time they visited Europe as we waited for the teacher to arrive. Everything in Austin feels rich and unwelcoming. Even within the poorer parts there is a feeling that the wealth is always at the edges, waiting to move in when the bloat of the city becomes too much. And worse, there are the incredibly small, incredibly rich, suburbs within the city, where celebrities own hills they can look down at the groves and the water from. Austin is a world of privilege that likes to undercut its history of segregation. It likes to pretend it is a friendly blueberry in a bowl of tomato soup, but it tastes just the same when you put it in your mouth. I have never loved Houston, but I enjoy the campus I travel to by train. I enjoy the feeling of urban cosmopolitan that blends everyone into its folds. I'll never be seen here. I fear acknowledgement.
Although, I am beginning to fear the lack of it. The Trump administration has been in power for a little over a year and a half. It's been quietly, and not so quietly, erasing pieces of the country that might protect the disenfranchised. I fear that in two and half years this president will no longer be a president, but a coup that no one was willing to stop. Or that couldn't be stopped. Because the people who saw it, the people who voiced their concerns, were not the people of power, money or influence. The majority fears becoming the minority. It's not hard to imagine why when you consider the way minorities have been treated. They've been enslaved, they've been murdered, they've been imprisoned, vilified, forced to give up their own culture to live in peace. They've had their children stolen from them. Not just the immigrants who rick their lives to seek asylum, but people who were citizens. People who should have been considered citizens. Africans and Native Americans. Families were separated and Japanese orphans were put into internment camps. It is not ironic that to "Make America Great Again" means to return to atrocities that America had largely disavowed. It is deliberate. It is a final revelation of a country that hid behind an illusion of acceptance. That's not to say it's all of the country, or even all of the people in power or people with wealth in the country are conspirators in this movement. Some, I'm sure, are good people. However, for every Bill Gates or Warren Buffet there is a Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg who does not work as hard to hide his greed. Donald Trump is doing nothing to hide his greed, and in doing so is exposing the a common goal within the Republican party, one that they are no longer as concerned with disguising either. This knowledge has, perhaps, become a much larger obsession and is definitely a much greater fear than all others. If my mother does survive her next surgery, if my father is not developing dementia, if I don't fail my classes and find a source of income that allows me to focus on finally completing my degree- will we even have a home? Will we be safe in this country? Will electing more Democrats in the midterms be enough to mitigate the damage that has been done? I can't hope for a reversal any time soon, but I think we all hope that the heel coming down on our necks for the impertinence of believing the American Dream exists for everyone will ease off a bit. So that we might forget that it is there- for just a little while longer.
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