My brain is so cluttered, there are a multitudinous number of things I could blog about right now. Strictly speaking, I should probably not blog about any of them and go back to crunching numbers. But I hate crunching numbers with a passion and I want to have a brief pause where I need not look at them--because if I had actually wanted to crunch numbers as part of my profession, I would have followed the road all men in my family have taken and been an accounting major. Especially since I've already decided I'm the one sister in the family who will not, under any circumstances, marry an accountant. I refuse to help create a practically guaranteed environment of financial-business-related nepotism.
I've been thinking lately. Judith Thurman once said, "Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground." I'm homesick, but not for home. In fact, I'm not entirely sure where I'm homesick for, except to say that I know it's not here.
I want to live in a new place to re-create myself. Not that I would change my personality in any way, sell myself out, or doing anything drastically different from how I conduct myself now. Rather, I want to be re-created in the same way books are re-created when I read them for a second time, after I've allowed time to elapse. It isn't that the words have changed or that the plot runs any differently than before; the new experience is that the book has new thoughts and experiences to interact with--thoughts and experiences that hadn't come about when I read books the first time around.
One of my professors at Weber once said it was necessary to the study of literature to remember that everything you're reading now has slept with everything you've ever read--Dostoevsky is being influenced by Shel Silverstein, your interpretation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is being influenced by Miguel de Cervantes, Louis Sachar, and Maurice Sendak.
In a similar vein, I've always believed that the amalgam of people who drift into and out of my life--as well as those who have more permanence--go a long way toward helping me understand various facets of my personality. It isn't that those facets weren't present to begin with; people rubbing their lives against mine just brings new and interesting results, because their lives are sleeping with the lives of everyone else I've known and been friends with. Oh dear, this sounds dirtier than I'd intended.
Anyway, I hope you catch the point. I am longing for a new place so I can learn new things about myself, so I can be enlightened by new people, so I can have old experiences new and let new experiences be influenced by the old.
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3 comments:
Let me just say that this post, what you wrote is exactly how I've been feeling for about the past year.
and as a second note which I should have had in the first, because I can't up and move away, to quell or quench this feeling, I've been trying to get to know as many people as possible hoping that someone new might be able to help me feel that way.
And this is why I'm in graduate school. You expressed the feeling perfectly! :)
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