Wine-Inspired, Tryptophan-Influenced Philosophy
Sometimes I need to write like I need to run, and my mind puts on its shoes and I stare at the screen the same way I stare at the hills, and wait to take flight. Maybe it's the evening stupor of early winter, or the leftover indulgence of Thanksgiving at home, but I'm overcome with an overwhelming need to document something. A feeling, a sensation, a snapshot, a song, a gesture, a lingering look between strangers. I want so honestly to feel something real, and to record it meaningfully. What does that even mean? What will I ever publish if all I write are rhetorical questions? Is it just a phase? Am I an adultescent?
Last week I went on a blind date that took me to the Savannah Jazz club. We paid entrance, which included a beginner's swing lesson. My partner was a lumbering 6'6", and so we cleared the floor not by skill, but by sheer distance. The air was ripe with possibility and adults seeking something. There's an almost embarrassing honesty to blind dates, because both people are stripped to their most blank canvases. It reminds me of when I used to go on intercambios when I was living in Spain, and would spend a few hours a week meeting up with young Europeans looking to practice their English. It's so easy to idealize a period of time when you were busy idealizing something else.
I started this blog with the intention of keeping it impersonal and professional. Maybe this is where my style of writing departs from the mainstream; because, like a nagging younger sibling, I can't seem to keep my feelings out of what I write. I want to report but it's so unnatural for me to be objective. I want to be a camera that adds no extraneous colors or outlines, just records. I want to be untapped. I'd rather not start every sentence with "I." San Francisco has too much to offer, and so does this world.
My father dropped me off at the Amtrak station this afternoon just as the sunset patterned across the cloudy sky. When I say goodbye to my parents, I always feel the need to repeat "I love you" at least six or ten times, as if the more I say it, the more they'll realize they mean to me. I don't say that to be trite, or even sentimental, but I'm always astonished by how weighty those three words appear when addressing them to anyone but my family. It's automatic, and yet honest. I don't say things I don't mean, and my family has taught me that you work for what you mean.
So what does this have to do with blind dates, and writing, and adultescence? That at some to-be-determined moment, the perfect job or graduate school will slide out of the sky for me, like a life-size Golden Ticket? That somehow all the Venn diagrams of my social and professional life will eventually overlap? That rhetorical questions will one day go out of style?
All I can do now is simply write it all down, whatever pieces that fall, and whichever ones that scatter.
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