Mumbler

melancholy - the state of not being sure if you’re sad

i keep being told to write more. not me specifically, just like, as general life advice. feeling pretty listless, so why not. i get terribly annoyed at my own voice whenever i try, but i think i’ll also try to push past that a bit. 

was walking with jana yesterday around evening. the air’s been a bit like water but less refreshing. the holiday was ending in a few hours - we’d been without electricity etcetera  for three days, and feeling that specific internal strife that occurs after 72 hours of doing not much but thinking, eating, and a bit of socializing (with no internet, phone, music, etc to distract you). some day maybe i’ll write about the usual emotional pattern that occurs weekly as i go through this. we’d just left my old house, where her roommate had called after us asking where we were going. the door being heavy, it slammed in his face as we were leaving before we could respond. we obviously reopened the door and told him we were going to hear the ny phil play at st. john the divine down the street, but the feeling of having been on the other side of a door that had so harshly silenced his entreaty stayed with both of us as we left. 

“i can’t watch things that are pathetic,” jana started. “like in movies or on tv, you know?” she was wearing a sleeveless summer dress, light yellow on the top with delicate white embroidered down a v-neckline, the paleness playing with the same colors in her skin and hair. “ben calls it ‘watching animals fall down.’ i can’t stand to see it.” we stop at a streetlight. “like forrest gump. such a hard movie to watch.”

“but forrest gump isn’t pathetic - that’s the whole point,” i say, feeling the beginning of sweat behind my ears already. “i mean he is, but the movie is about you learning that he’s not, partly because he doesn’t think he is and partly because the people who love him either know that he isn’t or learn that he isn’t.”

this is kind of what i said. it’s a little pieced together. i remember what jana said better than what i did. but this is kind of it. 

and the thing is - i mostly live my life this way. it’s why i became religious and it’s why i go for walks when i’m melancholy. if i can convince myself for long periods of time that i am and that life is something i’m not sure i am or that it is, maybe that’s good enough. 

i wish it would just rain already. 

the philharmonic was lovely, by the way. almost as good as the church. 

I have about a month of yeshiva left with the currently enrolled students. Then I’ll be continuing studying through the summer with a new crop. Treasuring treasuring treasuring where I live - five-minute walk east or west and I’m in a beautiful park. Weather’s impressive every day. Sunwarm but the air is light you barely feel it. Then in late August I get a new job and home. Working at an organization that provides educational, vocational, and social support to people who have chosen to leave ultra-insular religious communities. Will be living in a “community house” with about 15 people. Now you know ;-)

why is the sound of my neighbor’s music coming in through my opened window superior to the sound of similar music from my own player?

the only trick i’ve found is to zoom out as little as possible. to concentrate on the deliciousness of lamp light flirting with the colors in the room bold enough to declare themselves while the others stand back, little laughs behind fingers. to revel in the tiny spot on the face of your friend as his cheek pulls his lip tight to itself in a moment of unguarded intimacy. etc. don’t leave the room, not for a second, because you know you’ll never come back. certainly not the same and certainly not able to enjoy intimations of love through paying attention. okay so maybe you can leave for a second, but only if leaving helps you see everything better and with even deeper love. like, oh yes I am a child of God. that’s helpful. but anything else, and the day’s doomed. 

You know after it rains down here when the light turns eerie yellow like a picture from the seventies and wet dirt gets smeared on your legs above your socks, and you feel like the earth is catching its breath? So it was like that, and I was sitting on a bench in the playground, feeling the water I couldn’t brush off seeping into my shorts and underwear. We’d just had this conversation that we called a conversation but it was really Tom and me telling the kids to just please stop being so damn mean. And well, I started thinking about people I know and used to know and can’t know anymore and about them as kids. And this one person in particular because there was that day that his mom and I sat on her new couch for hours while she showed me these pictures of him growing up. And I was just thinking, what if someone was mean to him? Well of course they were, but like, what if people were mean to him in all these small ugly ways all the time until he was old enough to figure out the rules about how to be mean back enough that people cut it out a bit. But it stayed with him forever in ways he didn’t know and I didn’t know because we don’t remember this happening. That’s what I’ve watched this summer. Kids learning to defend themselves by making the other ones feel worse or more humiliated. Just because they’re hurting, and we tend to hurt when we’re hurting. Read last night about how we should never confuse our essential nature for bad though it can look that way if you observe children, like I’m describing. Our essential nature is just so fucking soft and tender, that’s all. And that sounds pretty true to me. And I don’t know if it was the weather I was telling you about, but I just sat there in my slowly soaking shorts and cried under my big dark sunglasses and sun hat the kids are always pulling off and thrusting on their giggly heads. I love them with this huge part of me, and I just want them to feel that and maybe be a little kinder because of it. The whole thing was embarrassing from a few points of view, but from my own, it felt okay.