I am (or have been)...

- a daughter
- a UPCC kid (University Presbyterian Children’s Center)
- a Wilshire Wildcat (Wilshire Elementary)
- a two-time school spelling bee champion
- a TestBuster
- an ELP student (Extended Learning Program - also known as Gifted and Talented)
- a gymnast
- a 100-meter-dasher
- a long-jumper
- a Garner Brahma (Garner Middle School)
- a Heights Mule (Alamo Heights Junior and High Schools)
- a violist
- an All-Region violist for 7 straight years
- an All-State violist once
- a member of YOSA for 6 years (Youth Orchestras of San Antonio)
- a pianist
- a violinist
- a 300-meter-hurdler
- a 1-meter springboard diver
- a Reedie (Reed College)
- a member of the Honor Council for three and a half years
- an intern with the Portland Youth Philharmonic
- a history major
- a tour guide and admissions office intern
- a soloist
- a Portland Parks & Recreation Playground Director for two summers
- an assistant English teacher in France

Now what am I going to be?  With all this background in so many things, why can I not figure out what to do in the future?

My Linus moments

So, I’m trying to figure out which of my four instruments to take with me to Europe, and I’m really torn.  I just got a classical guitar, which I’m really keen to learn, but that would mean leaving my viola here.  I haven’t been without my viola for more than a few months in thirteen years.  It’s not that I practice it all that much, although I’ve been much better about it this summer, what with playing at Saturday Market.  It’s just that it feels wrong to consider myself not having it within reach.

I don’t think that I can take both, because they are both too large to pack, and while the airlines turn a blind eye to carrying on one musical instrument, I don’t think that I can argue that my viola’s case is my “personal item.”  A bit large for a purse.

I don’t know what to do.  Argh.

Olympics!

The Opening Ceremony of the Athens Olympics start in just a few minutes!  I’m so excited!
I know that it probably seems odd or stupid that I’m so excited about this, but…  Well, it’s hard to articulate exactly why the Olympics engage me so much.  I tear up a bit if I hear just the Olympic trumpet fanfare.  I’ll try to explain:

I was fairly athletic throughout my childhood and into the first couple of years of high school.  Gymnastics for six years, track for three, diving for one…  And although I was never even close to considering even trying to *begin* training for the Olympics, it still is an unfailingly inspiring thought.  Walking into a stadium filled to the brim with thousands upon thousands of people who are there to celebrate the hard work that you have done to become a member of the elite crowd marching along the track…  Knowing that for at least three weeks, the world sits up a bit straighter and pays attention to the more real athletes, the ones who are in it not because there are million-dollar paychecks, but because they are truly dedicated to their sport. 

I would dearly love, before I die, to attend an opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.  Even though I know that I’d have a better view from the television at home, the television can’t convey the sheer energy emanating from a stadium like that.  I miss that.  I know that there are many more dedicated athletes than me, but even I got caught up in the adrenaline of it all.  It’s almost meditative.

Oh, I don’t think that I can explain this.  But it is incredible.  And I’m very happy that the Olympics are on again.

Home…?

I have been fortunate enough in my life only to have called two (or three or five, depending on how you count it) places home.  It is that “depending on” clause that interests me and seems extremely relevant for me right now, however.  How do we - or, more pointedly, I - create “home?”

If you ask me where home is/has been for me, I am most likely to give you the answer, “San Antonio and Portland,” or possibly the even-more-general “Texas and Portland.”  But I have lived in more than one place in each of those cities - two addresses in SA, four dorm rooms, one apartment and one basement in Portland.  If you received the more general answer, that would suggest that I am including my granddad’s house and my aunt’s house in Texas in my estimation of “home,” even though I’ve never technically lived in either of those places.  And neither of my quick responses takes into account the seven months I spent living in France, which only ever became “the place where I live,” never “home.”

So my definition of home isn’t strictly physical.  That’s not too much of a surprise: “home” doesn’t necessarily equal “abode.”  What else do I include, then?  Relationships, of course, romantic, familial or platonic.  Home is a place where I feel known, accepted, comfortable… safe.  Home is an emotional thing for me, even though I must couch it in physical terms.

Yes, that seems right.  And that’s why naming either “Texas” or “San Antonio” as one of my homes is equally valid for me.  My safety net and my memories are connected to more than just a particular house or even a particular city in Texas.  This relates, as well, to the emotional conflicts that I was having earlier this summer.  I wasn’t secure enough in my relationship with Angus to be certain that I would have a home with him, were I to uproot, and because I have so many happy memories and securities tied to life in Portland, it was difficult to conceive of leaving it.  It had nothing to with my living quarters, although it has a great deal to do with how well I know the city. 

In many ways I feel that Portland is more of a home city than San Antonio is, because Portland is a home that I consciously chose and created.  I’ve worked to get to know this city; I’ve ranged more freely in it than I generally ever do in San Antonio.  I am utterly confident and at home here, even if I’m in an area that I’ve not explored before.  There is such comfort in being able to give directions to strangers!  (Perhaps that’s why I like being a tour guide so much; being able to impart little secrets of life in my school or my city to strangers reaffirms for me my belonging in the environment.)  I still couldn’t do that with San Antonio, not with the ease that I can here in Portland.  And whenever I go for a walk or a bike ride or a bus ride through this city, the sense of belonging whispers into me, and I’m glad for it. 

I’m sorry - this entry is meandering more than usual.  I don’t feel that I quite have a lock on this; that’s why I started writing.  It seems important for me to know how I create “home,” as I am about to leave the US for England/Europe in what I believe (and hope) will be my next life-defining change of place.  But since I have only changed homes voluntarily once before in my life, and I didn’t really think about it then, I would like to try to understand how I came to choose so well.  Reed/Portland has ended up being one of the best things in my life, but it was chosen - well, I chose to apply to Reed - because “it felt right.”  Seems like a flimsy way of going about things.

Then again, perhaps not.  If home is such an emotionally-fraught (in a good sense) idea for me, why shouldn’t going with my instincts, which are reactions to subconscious emotional or intellectual cues, be a viable way of choosing?

::sigh:: This could keep going forever.  You can probably expect sequels later on.  I just wanted to get some of my thoughts out while I could.

Back online…

Hmmm - I’ve started and deleted this posting four time already; I can’t seem to strike the right balance of style and substance.  Then again, beginnings have always been the hardest part of writing for me.  That’s why I tended to write the introductions to my academic papers last.

I will be leaving for Europe in mid-September, after spending a week in Boston with Mom and Graham.  Graham will be heading off to his sophomore year of college (good grief!), and Mom is going to drive him up there.  We’re all going to go to the Lord of the Rings exhibit that will be showing there - I’m really excited!  It will also be really good for me to go to Boston again, as I have spent the last five years thinking that it’s a city that I’d like to live in at some point in my life.  This will give me a chance to reassess my feelings about the city, taking into account the person I am now, who is quite different (in some ways) than the person I was when I went looking for colleges in the fall of 1998.

After Boston, I will fly directly to England, to spend at least a couple of weeks with Angus.  I’ll get to help him celebrate his birthday, and basically just get to enjoy being around him.  He and I both agree that I should take the job in France if it’s offered to me, but neither of us really wants me to do so.  I’ll have to figure that out once I get there, I suppose.  What we really both want is to live together, but given that I can’t get a work permit in the UK, it would be difficult to do so.  ::shrug::  Again, we’ll see.

Other than that, I will be wrapping up my summer job on the 18th of this month, photographing a wedding on the 22nd, and going through all my stuff and paring it down for the rest of the month.  The Delps have been kind enough to say that I can store my stuff in their garage, but even still, I need to get it into fewer boxes.  A lot of the stuff I had is stuff that I haven’t used or even looked at in ages, but have been hanging onto in the “maybe I’ll use it someday” frame of mind.  I need to just get rid of it.  Then perhaps someone else actually will use it!  ::grin::

All in all, I am very content, which is a welcome change from how I felt before Angus came.  Myriad worries that I had before he arrived have been laid to rest, as have many of my emotion conflicts.  I’m even okay with the idea of saying goodbye to people.  Partially this is because I had to say goodbye to Jonathan as he headed off to Indiana for grad school a week ago, and while I’m going to miss him, I know that we’ll keep in touch.  It’s the same way for everybody else.  I know that my good friends and I will keep in touch, so I’m not really worried about saying goodbye.

Okay, I’ve babbled for long enough.  Time for lunch.

P.S.

Expect a moratorium on postings for the next two weeks.  I don’t expect that I’ll be getting to my email/blog too frequently.

(I know, I know - those of you who yearn to comment “so what else is new” need not.  I’m a bad blogger…)

Whoop!

I’ve just finished e-filing my first ever tax return!  Go me!  And thanks much to Paul for helping me out, telling me what all the big, fancy words meant, and for putting up with my tension-induced temper tantrum.  ::grateful smile::

Woo hoo!  ::happy taxes-finished dance::

Better still, I’m supposedly due for refunds!  ::happy money-coming-in dance::

Even better still, Angus arrives tomorrow evening!  ::happy boyfriend-in-town dance::

... And I’m spent.  ::thud of Julia crashing into her bed::

Well, argh.

Conflicting emotions.  Joy, sadness, reluctance, enthusiasm, confusion…

Mom found this…

... and I find it very scary.

http://www.aclu.org/pizza/

Evening musings (from July 13)

I’ve had another of my semi-frequent out-of-body experiences.  I don’t mean this in the “paranormal, Sybil Trelawny” sort of way.  It is simply, and scarily, this:

It’s 11:45 p.m. on Tuesday night.  I’m sitting in my apartment, chastising Debbie for having had caffeine earlier this evening.  Suddenly, I am acutely aware that I am 23, living on my own (with one of my best friends), and yet that I still feel like a 12 year old girl with grandiose dreams about what she might want to do when she grows up and no real idea of how to accomplish those dreams.  I’m living Life, but somehow it doesn’t seem real.  Or perhaps it’s too real, too mundane.  I’m enjoying just being able to relax and do exactly what I want each evening, and getting to see my friends without the stress of school.  However, it’s scary just how easily I could slip into doing this for a very long time. 

That’s not what I want; at least, not if I have a job like the one that I currently have.  If I had a job where I felt I was accomplishing something towards my larger life-goal (whatever that may be), it might be different.  Then I could take each evening off without this nagging sense that I’m just acting as a metronome, counting off the unchanging beats of my life.  This may seem silly, given that I’ve just gotten back from seven months in Europe, but even those seven months seemed merely a way of marking time, for a large part.  I felt alive when I was traveling, meeting new people, falling in love.  Here is a very different way of feeling.  I am comfortable, so comfortable that it’s difficult to contemplate uprooting myself again.  And I’m really happy to be with my friends.  But I don’t have a purpose here.  My job is perforce short-lived, and as I said above, I don’t have any real sense of where I’m going from here.  I realize now that I’m the type of person who needs on some level to have a larger goal. 

So I sit here, with my life happening almost by happenstance, unsure of what exactly I should change and how I should go about changing it.  And, added into the mix, a reluctance to change, because changing will mean leaving my comfort zone.

My results for a link found on a friend’s website

You are water. You’re not really organic; you’re
neither acidic nor basic, yet you’re an acid
and a base at the same time. You’re strong
willed and opinionated, but relaxed and ready
to flow. So while you often seem worthless,
without you, everything would just not work.
People should definitely drink more of you
every day.

Not sure how I feel about that “while you often seem worthless” bit, but the rest of it pleases me.  ::smile::

Cue the Twilight Zone music…

I have been pondering what I am going to do as a career, and graphic design has kept popping back into my mind.  Just a few days ago, I was thinking how much fun it would be to help design the covers for the Willamette Week, a cool local newspaper. They generally have eye-catching covers, even if you don’t really understand what the cover is supposed to be.

Lo and behold, what should appear on a nifty website that I frequently browse but this ad?  Sadly, I do not have the experience necessary to get this kind of job.  But it would be fun…

Walking disaster area

There is a cute kid who comes regularly to the park where I work.  He’s really sweet, enthusiastic and energetic.  He is also really, really klutzy.  He walks into the poles for stop signs - one pole has twice been given the opportunity to imprint itself on his forehead!  He trips over his own feet.  Today was his crowning glory, however; oh, that I had had a video camera with me!

He was playing four-square with a number of other park kids, when the ball was hit out of the four-square court (the unfilled wading pool) and into the nearby playground area.  He went chasing after the ball, only to turn around and start back towards the court when somebody on the playground kicked the ball back.  I called out “thank you” to the person on the playground.  Our hero turned his head around to say thank you as well, forgetting (as he frequently does) that he was still moving forwards.  Without any visual references to guide them, his feet took him full-tilt into the side of one of the aluminum garbage cans that we have around the area.  Bang - into the side!  Whoop - over the edge!  Crash - headfirst into the can!

That’s right: like something out of a “Three Stooges” movie, our plucky adventurer ended up head-down inside a garbage can, his little legs sticking straight out of the top for the few moments before the can tumbled onto its side, with him in it!

Torn between concern and side-splitting laughter, I alleviated the first by assuring myself that he was intact and none the worse for the wear.  (This kid is made of rubber, I swear!)  I then indulged in a long bout of the second, as did pretty much everyone else within view of the incident.  How could we not?  The kid was good-natured about it, as his is about all of his various scrapes, thumps and bumps.

His later comment: “For a moment there, I had banana on my face!”

Happy happy… oh wait…

So, for those of you who didn’t know me in high school, I was pretty obsessed with the musical “The Phantom of the Opera” for a couple of years.  The obsession wore off some, although it still ranks among the top three of my favorite stage musicals, and I would love to go see it again.

Imagine my joy, then, on discovering that a movie version of it is coming out in December.  Imagine my further joy upon watching the teaser and seeing a wonderful level of visual opulence.  Imagine my surprise and apprehension to discover that the director of the movie version of my beloved musical is… Joel Schumacher.  The man who gave the world films such as “Batman and Robin.”  Danger, Will Robinson!

::shrug::  I’ll still go and see it, opening night if I can (depends on what continent I’m on - it opens on Christmas Eve in America, but in the first week of December in the UK).  It will have fantastic music, at least, even if they messed with the orchestrations, as several articles have mentioned.  Still, pretty costumes, right?...

Movies, part 1

Two movies that I have watched in the past two nights:

1.) “Empire of the Sun.”  A very good movie, touching, nicely understated, superb acting by a very young Christian Bale.  Several spine-tinglingly beautiful images, a plot with no noticeable holes, and an ending that leaves you satisfied.  One of Spielberg’s best, and that’s saying a lot.

2.) “Kill Bill: Vol. 1.”  In the end, a boring and fairly laughable movie.  Paul tells me that the second volume is better, and I will probably go ahead and watch it, but I can sum up Volume 1 in three points:
    - Uma Thurman’s rear end in tight pants
    - blood fountains
    - ... oh, no, wait, there are only two points.