hide and seek.

I am currently into listening to memoirs on tape--it's an interesting approach to literature as you can hear the tiny nuances simple written words and syntax cannot always convey as they are originally written.

I am in the last chapter of the first part of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. I know this seems grossly romantic and highly unconventional for my seemingly macabre tastes in Modernism, Gothic Romance, and cruel non-fiction. However, I find this travelogue to be a nice preparation for my next journey...it allows me moments of introspection as it poses thoughts and questions that I keep concealed within the insecurities that often plague my existence.

People think I am heading to China for various reasons: to learn Chinese, to teach, to enjoy my favorite culture, to be with my family, to invest in my life. These are the very things I have verbally vomited to others during the moments of unconscious, simple conversation.

But none of these express my true reasons for running away from an ideal job, beautiful love, and life of comfort.

In the last chapter of the first part of Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert discusses how every city has a word that defines it...Rome=Sex; New York=Achievement; Chicago=Success. More importantly, every person has a word. She thinks her word is seek, but it could also be hide.

I think her analysis is a bit naive. No person's existence is defined by a single word, and no city can truly be encapsulated in a single adjective.

I believe our lives are an amalgamation of stages. Each stage is unique and can be represented by particular diction; however, all words should in the end--when we sit in the moment before death--reveal a single word: a word that needs to define every human existence. Content.

Be careful. Contentment is not happiness...it is much harder to achieve and it can be unsettling when one knows his goal is to arrive at such an enigmatic state of existence.

My goal as of right now is to find the word that will my frame my life for the next few years. I am seeking and I am hiding. I am fleeing and I am finding.

My new word for the next year is understand. I want to understand what I want. I want to understand what I need. I want to understand what brings me happiness. I want to understand what roots me in sadness.

I need to know myself as others think they know me.

Shanghai is not my city; I know this. Like Rome does not belong to Gilbert, Shanghai will never be mine. Shanghai's word--in my context--falls into a strange lexical category: the gerund. Becoming. In becoming. At becoming. To becoming. Add any adverbial marker (or simple preposition) and the word becomes what I believe Shanghai to be for me: A place of becoming.

personal.

I found this poem in the July/August 2009 Poetry publication.

It sings my graces and reveals every nefarious beauty that makes me existentially neurotic.

It is why I am perfect at teaching and loving--and why I so achingly and ordinarily fail at both.

Personal, by Tony Hoagland

Don't take it personal, they said;
but I did, I took it all quite personal--

the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,

the wet hair of women in the rain--
And I cursed what hurt me

and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.

The government reminded me of my father,
with its deafness and laws,

and the weather reminded me of my mom,
with her tropical squalls.

Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness
Think first, they said of Talk

Get over it, they said
at the School of Broken Hearts

but I couldn't and I didn't and I don't
believe in the clean break;

I believe in the compound fracture
served with a sauce of dirty regret,

I believe in saying it all
and taking it back

and saying it again for good measure
while the air fills up with I'm-Sorries

like wheeling birds
and the trees look seasick in the wind.

Oh life! Can you blame me
for making a scene?

You were that yellow caboose, the moon
disappearing over a ridge of cloud.

I was the dog, chained in some fool's backyard;
barking and barking:

trying to convince everything else
to take it personal too.

two years.

It has been two years since I have written anything on this blog. When I returned from China, my writing ceased; a lot of good things quietly and quickly dissolved.

I took a job; I taught 10th graders; I was quickly consumed by depression and anxiety; Summer of '08 came; I traveled to Africa, worked in an orphanage, and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro; I returned to my job and taught the IB curriculum; I fell back into the depths of depression; I quit.

Now I will venture back to China...back to the life I always saw myself living.