moving

Like most people, I hate moving. Boxing stuff, getting nostalgic, deciding what to get rid of, having to get rid of stuff because it doesn’t fit in your car or suitcase…it always sucks. I’m not sure how many trips back and forth I will have to make to get all of my things there, but I’m exhausted thinking about it. I won’t miss San Jose, as most of you could guess (perhaps because I have already said so), but I just moved six months ago. I’ve moved so many times.

When I was little, we moved every two years because my father was in the military. The last time we moved was from northern to southern San Diego when I was eleven when he retired. Even after that, I changed schools almost every year until high school. Unlike my siblings, I always liked moving. The thought of new people and places was always thrilling, as was the opportunity to start anew and be different and better than before. I was always quiet, mainly because I was shy, but I would be determined that somehow, in the next new place, that my natural reticence would come off as cool and mysterious. Once in a while I would fantasize that I would be the outgoing, popular sort, but really, I knew I didn’t have it in me and I probably would have come to find that life something of a curse. Dreams of being someone else never really come to fruition…even then I knew that…at best, it is like a person’s personality is a prism. I know better now than to make a conscious effort to be different, but the funny thing is, you always are slightly different in each place because you react to everyone and everything else, which are different from wherever you were. Inevitably, you are older than the last time too.

it was just like a high school dance, but with mild nudity

Paddy and I went to a party at the po.rn palace in San Francisco on Saturday. It isn’t a clever name; it’s a po.rn studio with various theme rooms (dungeon, jail, stables, etc.) and it can be rented out for private parties. Paddy’s friend invited us. It wasn’t too special as a night club, but there were a couple things that were odd when you thought about them–like the fact that all the floors had drains so that the place could be hosed down. Kinda gross, really.

I guess this was some kind of fund-raiser for burning man. It was seriously like a high school dance. Bad music (most of it was at least from the time I was in high school) and terrible dancing. There were some truly embarrassing costumes–it was an Armageddon theme. For example, there was a large, older lady dressed as mother earth. She had a stick with a prism on the end of it that she tried to use to refract the light from the lasers on the dance floor. What is it with burning man people? I know they think that they are so weird or kinky or free-spirited or some fuzzy-minded crap like that, but really, they are just gigantic geeks that never outgrew the eleventh grade. It was like a grad school party in its lameness. I did see the most awkward spanking on this chain web thingy on the wall in the main dance floor. The guy getting spanked sort of waggled his naked butt around, like that scene in Braveheart before the Scots go into battle. Not sexy, needless to say.

In the end, I had fun, mainly because we got wasted. The second DJ was better, played actual dance music, although by that time my judgment may have been impaired, so she could have played anything and I would have danced right along. What else do you do at a party like that? We left at a respectable 1:30, but the liquor was cheap (no brand, just GIN in big letters on the bottle), so Sunday was rough. I made pancakes at noon then went back to bed until three.

lessons

I realized the other night while talking to Di that one of the reasons I feel bad about going back to grad school because I kinda think it makes me a loser. Like grad school is full of a bunch of pretentious phonies who can’t get real jobs because they are too weird and annoying. And I am one of them. If I am honest with myself, I find my current employment humiliating and beneath me, which makes me wince even to admit. Am I really such a snob? Yes. I can’t help but feel that the past year and a half has been an utter waste of my talents (accuse me of narcissism if you will). Maybe I am useless. Not in a bad way…like a ruby or an orchid? Maybe?

I was thinking how glad I was not to be moving to LA. How afraid I would be. I told Paddy that and he told me that had the department been better or made me a decent offer, I would feel differently, excited and happy. I’m not sure. My priorities are a bit different this time. I recognize that going there would be a risk, which I don’t think I realized when I moved to Montreal for my master’s degree. College Town was the better choice, but at the same time, it seems so safe that I wonder what happened to my sense of adventure. Or am I extrapolating too much?

Hopefully it will all become clearer once I get back in grad school, because it all made more sense when I was doing that than anything I have tried since. I remember one of the things that I hated about grad school was how it made so many smart, interesting people feel small and inadequate. So many people are unhappy, which puts a damper on things. It never really made me feel inadequate–annoyed, frustrated and occasionally mistreated, yes, but I always felt like I would be able to do whatever was required. I hated Montreal and my university, but I didn’t hate the work that I was doing. Except maybe the darkest days of my thesis, but, now that I have distance from it, I can see that that didn’t even matter very much. Not being able to finish it in time, that extra semester, the horrible stress of it, makes no difference at all; I don’t even think it mattered when I was reapplying to school. In the grand scheme of things, it was not a big deal. That in itself is an important lesson. Anyways, we’ll see how much of this is bullshit in the coming months, won’t we?

I’ve had too much time to think since I haven’t been working very much. I talked to my recruiter yesterday and she said that it has been slow. At least I only am going to be trying for a couple more weeks; I have little patience left. I had been able to ignore my feelings, more like depersonalize the whole experience, but since it is coming towards the end, I am having more and more difficulty not actively hating the whole thing.