It's November 12th, 2013 today. That's 11/12/13, which is a date that I really like because I like dates like 11/11/11 and 01/23/45 and like 3/8/38 etc. etc. because I am a selective sucker for certain superstitious things like making wishes at aesthetically pleasing time stamps (11111111111111111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and the wearing of pajamas inside-out in hopes that it will somehow make the cold sky precipitate snow.
But today's specialness feels different and unfortunately uncelebrated, cause the only reason that made me really pause and take in its 111213-ness is the Christmas wreath I saw hanging, all smug and sparkly, on the sign at the entrance to the mall that I pass by on the drive home.
Christmas?! On... 11/12/13? That's way more than a month of Christmas season, Fashion Square. I'm no opponent of making the world go around via healthy economic transactions but at moments like these it's hard not to cringe judgily at the monetary greed that drives decisions like these - decisions that are distorting our conception of how long a holiday season should be, how much of what things we
need to have, the immediacy of what Truly Important Things are.
This is depressing in more ways than just the one described in the paragraph above (get ready for the m e t a paragraphial of this post) - the even more pathetic thing, the compounded sadness of this whole realization is the fact that all
this was my train of thought at the reflection upon a Christmas wreath + the reminder of a special date, this almost mid-November day of 2013. Yeah, I feel effectively...old.
This feeling certainly isn't an unfounded one, for I am older on this day, at this moment, than I ever have been before. heheh
But beyond the obviousness of the oldness, it's something I've been feeling a lot in daily life lately. That I feel old and worn-out sometimes these days, and just not as sparklyshiny as before. There could be many reasons for this. The fact that it's fourth year, and it's a regular fourth year thing to do to be generally confused/lost/worried cause I'm living the last year of my institutionally pre-planned life. The fact that there are some huge homelife adjustments this year that are revealing huge sinfulnesses in me that are all ugly and hard to look at and deal with and live in. The fact that school feels manageable and good and enriching right now but grades are pathetically not reflecting this inner truth. Maybe even the fact that I'm back in Charlottesville from a whirlwind year of being all over the place and I'm secretly going through reverse culture shock (though...I doubt this last one. Who knows, though. I did get lost on the buses again today. Hm).
The fact that I just went through this
"There could be many reasons for this" thing as opposed to waxing poetic in a wordy, nerdy, adjectiveful paragraph about the state of the sparklyshiny, which, honestly, is what I feel like firstyear me would have done.
The fact that I feel like I can't write those kinds of first year blogposts anymore, full of feely swirls and late-night droopy eyeballs soaked in high-pitched Ingrid music because frankly, it's not even midnight yet and it's been a few hours already since sleepiness started setting in. And because frankly, even as I read my own old posts, I have little moments of shameshivering (just in tiny bits like after you pee and you suddenly feel cold cause of all that body-temperature liquid having left your body), at my own foolishness and self-consciousness that I can see firstyear me shivering with, as if she (I?) could feel me (she?!), fourthyear me, looking back and judging.
hehehe @_@ indeed.
I recently had an insightful conversation with a fellow same brainwave rider that was challenging and helpful. Challenging cause it messed up one of my stock Life-Defining Phrases; helpful because it messed up one of my stock Life-Defining Phrases. Which
is was "full-circle experiences/stories/______", usually in the context of how wonderful they are and how much I love them and how grand and useful they are in narration.
But this friend kinda furrowed his brow at this and wondered at the validity of this whole thought. He asked if a
truly full-circle story/experience/whatever is really worth anything, if you're coming back exactly to the same place as before, and I couldn't do more than defend the aesthetically pleasing shape of a perfect circle. Blah blah. So I offered up the solution of a spiral - a swirl? :) - eloquently put by another friend,
Christy.
So okay. So we grow up and grow around and grow spiraly-swirly and feel like we keep coming back to the same rut of things (sometimes even yearn for the sparklyshiny familiarity of those things, and of ourselves) but it is not such a tragic thing to grow up and around. Around and up.
Like going back to Skyline for the fourth time, to stargaze with a consistently chaotic and random group of people for the fourth time, watching the unfolding of midnight skies and forever friendships, as it unfailingly happens, every year. For the fourth time.
But realizing that this time it's our class kids driving up that mountain, younger ones in tow, that now we make gentlemanly gestures in search of keys on top of those mountains cause we are able and we are willing, that we don't pretend to be sparklyshiny when we don't feel it and we share woes about feeling blog-blocked because we're just too old and tired to keep pretending to be things we do not feel. Just honestly and unabashedly enjoying the fact that we loiter in lots after late-night movies "just like in high school!" and delight in God's creation of plant leaves that feel soft like lambs' ears, standing around and sharing these happinesses and woes all together.
And of course, acknowledging the continuation of things in ways that aren't necessarily bad - like the cliched sign-off to the old blogpost by meta-talking about its beginning at the end.
