I spend an awful lot of time thinking about the past.\u00a0 I mean, let’s face it, this site wouldn’t exist if not for an overdeveloped sense of nostalgia.\u00a0 I see that faces of people I’ll never speak to again in every crowd, and I imagine bumping into the people I used to know and love.\u00a0 For some reason, my life has never really been about looking forward.\u00a0 At least, it hasn’t generally been so.\u00a0 In high school, my general disinclination to plan for the future meant that I graduated middle of my class, and without any plans beyond “avoiding lame stuff.” { Clearly, I was also born without a keenly honed sense of irony.} And so, instead of following my friends to college, or doing meaningful work, I waited for my life to begin.<\/p>\n
While waiting, I decided to try college for two months in the Fall of 1997.\u00a0 I knew a few people at my local, state school, and I thought it would be like Senior-Year Plus.\u00a0 You know,\u00a0 a haze of Rodney Dangerfield-esque antics and Animal House-style parties. { Just look them up, young people.} It was not.\u00a0 Now, I should point out that I had more-or-less been an underachiever by choice.\u00a0 I felt isolated, and different, and like the only people that really understood me were mopey, middle-aged English pop singers.\u00a0 It was, all things considered, a fairly typical suburban experience.\u00a0 I had a band<\/a>, and a few romantic interests (all disastrous – but I think that’s mostly on me, if we’re being honest), and the usual trappings of a proto-emo existence.\u00a0 In general, these forces conspired to create a willful child that would do no schoolwork for anyone he did not personally respect.\u00a0 The result?\u00a0 High AP scores, and terrible grades.\u00a0 I was an academic enigma – or so I was often told by concerned schoolteachers.\u00a0 And so, middle of my class, I had “state school” or “nothing” to choose from.\u00a0 So, I went.<\/p>\n Mercifully, a history professor kept me after class and asked me why I was there.\u00a0 I thought, naturally, that he meant “in his class.”\u00a0 For some reason, however, he meant “at that school.”\u00a0 He told me that I was far too bright to be in his class, and that I should really consider transferring.\u00a0 I explained my grade situation, and he still offered to write me letters.\u00a0 In the end, I came to the realization that I would be no good for anyone unless I wanted to be, and so I decided to withdraw from school.\u00a0 And so, at age 18, I was a dropout from state school with no plans.\u00a0 For the next three years, I spent many wonderful hours visiting friends at a small liberal arts college in New York.\u00a0 I got to know the place, and to love the people and their fascinating subjects.\u00a0 I had never been uninterested in learning, you see… Just willful.<\/p>\n I learned about Anthropology, and Geology, and Morphology, and finally: Middle English.\u00a0 Sitting on my friend Julie’s bed, I read my first words of The Canterbury Tales <\/em>in Middle English.\u00a0 Aloud (she taught me).\u00a0 It was strange, and wonderful, and it was a puzzle that instantly made sense.\u00a0 My father bought me a copy of the Riverside Chaucer<\/a>, and I spent many long hours poring over it.\u00a0 Something had finally turned on inside me, and I needed to learn again.\u00a0 I needed to grow, and to move out beyond the walls I had built for myself.\u00a0 The giant pillow fort that was my room had become more and more empty, as friends and lovers went further and further down the paths of their own lives.\u00a0 It didn’t seem apparent, at first, that learning was what I had been missing.\u00a0 I was jealous of my friends’ opportunities, maybe, and I had begun to feel inferior thanks to my girlfriend’s parents and their steady stream of smug remarks about my “career path.” { You have no idea how hard it was not to send them a postcard from Cambridge…on the day I met the Queen. Yeah, the Queen<\/em>.} I knew that something had to change, but I couldn’t tell just what.\u00a0 That is, until I had just the right migraine.<\/p>\n By this, I mean, the sort of migraine that says: “I am here because your brain is overwrought.\u00a0 Figure out my riddle, and I will leave.”\u00a0 I paced around in my room.\u00a0 I talked to my mirror, and, finally, I called Julie again.\u00a0 I said – though I still don’t know why – that I thought I needed to go back to college.\u00a0 I felt that I needed to learn.\u00a0 I had become so bored with my path that it was beginning to drive me mad.\u00a0 It was hard to feel joy in anything, because I felt that I needed something that I was missing.\u00a0 And the moment I finished saying those words, my headache scattered like fog in the morning Sun.\u00a0 My enemy was Boredom, and now I knew it.<\/p>\n The only problem, of course, was the bridge I had burned before.\u00a0 I still had no academic record, and my spectacular withdrawal had not helped matters much.\u00a0 But with a little help from a certain History professor, and a lot of persuasion of a provost, I was re-enrolled in college in Fall 2000.\u00a0 I pursued my studies with a vengeance, and graduated with a rather remarkable GPA (though just .2 off what I really wanted).\u00a0 I went to Oxford for a year, and met beautiful, brilliant people.\u00a0 I found that I actually belonged in their club.\u00a0 Not as a star, of course, but they did let me talk to them when I brought drinks and such.\u00a0 I graduated after winning all the awards my department had to offer, and I went on to do an M.Phil. at Cambridge University.\u00a0 It was Oxford all over again, and the happiest year of my academic life.<\/p>\n There were, of course, sacrifices.\u00a0 I lost friends and loved ones to my zeal.\u00a0 To other things, too, but my flexibility was greatly reduced.\u00a0 I became a little older, and a little more selfish… even if I also became a bit more self-assured and a little less confused. { The details are probably all in here<\/a>.} I lost time with my father, who died not long after I returned.\u00a0 I’ll always regret that.\u00a0 But for the most part, the transformation my life had undergone was astounding.\u00a0 The only thing that remained was the Ph.D.\u00a0 I was determined to make it to the top of the heap, and so I began to cast about for a degree program.\u00a0 In Fall 2006, I came here to York to begin my Ph.D. in English.<\/p>\n It has not been easy.<\/p>\n But for all the heartache and headache… for all the things I have lost, I have begun to win.\u00a0 I am in the final month of drafting, which, as anyone who reads Piled Higher and Deeper<\/a> knows, is the worst time of your life.\u00a0 But I have met someone beautiful, and she makes me happy.\u00a0 And the hope of a job… and the ability to live alone, and to not worry about what the drunken housemate will be up to… oh, Heaven.\u00a0 And yet…<\/p>\n There’s that boredom again.\u00a0 The boredom that was here a decade ago, and that I tried so hard to run from.<\/p>\n And this is what finally brings us to “Untitled.”<\/p>\n I used to have these nights, when I was about 15 or 16, when I would lay in bed and listen to the vinyl version of The Cure’s Disintegration<\/em> over and over.\u00a0 It was breathtaking.\u00a0 Full of space and texture… I mean, sure, it reminded me of my first girlfriend’s perfume, and her crushed velvet skirt… but I really did love it for its own sake. { True confession: Despite her goth cred, and the considerable mopey cast of her music collection, my first kiss was to U2’s “Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World<\/a>.” For serious.\u00a0 And yes, it was my record.\u00a0 And yes, Mr.\/Ms. Smartypants, I remember the song and not the day.} Most nights, the showstopper was “The Same Deep Water as You<\/a>.”\u00a0 That line – “The shallow drowned lose less than we.” – used to touch some deep, mysterious place in me and echo for hours.\u00a0 Even now, shivers when I think about it.\u00a0 But other nights, the bed would feel slanted, and the walls too tall, and it would be “Untitled” that would hold me.<\/p>\n Sometimes, it was the loss of some dear friend or other that led me to that place.\u00a0 Or my poor, sad band.\u00a0 (Even now, there are two of you that linger behind my eyelids and cling… ) Maybe it’s that this song so perfectly articulates the two things that permeate the existence of a mopey, awkward child.\u00a0 The first: “Never know how I wanted to feel\u00a0 \/ Never quite said what I wanted to say to you \/ Never quite managed the words to explain to you \/ Never quite knew how to make them believable \/ And now the time has gone \/ Another time undone…”\u00a0 When you’re that awkward child – more or less – life is a string of losses.\u00a0 Everything hits your oversensitive heart hard, and with a fury and moment that makes the world feel permanently at the edge of combustion. { It also leads to the most ridiculously melodramatic self-examination. Ahem.} But it’s the last two lines of the song that really make it so hard to swallow: “I’ll never lose this pain \/ Never dream of you again…”<\/p>\n Moving sideways for a moment (I knew I’d work Lost<\/a> in here somehow), I’ve come to realize that I have a very unusual way of dealing with the world.\u00a0 Maybe it’s “obsessive,” or “eidetic,” but I remember everything.\u00a0 Colors, sounds, the positions of objects in a room.\u00a0 All of it.\u00a0 When I look for things in books, the process is something like this: “Find two sentence block of text, left-hand side, about 1\/3 through…” And there it will be.\u00a0 When I see my friends, I remember the whole index of things we’ve done, and it makes it hard to keep track of whether we’re now or then.\u00a0 Not that I actually forget where <\/em>or when <\/em>I am, but I have been known to gloss over serious life changes in my interactions as they’re not part of my current composite of an individual or situation.\u00a0 This can be weird.\u00a0 “Oh, you’re married… right, of course you are… sorry, for some reason, I was thinking we were still ten years ago.\u00a0 Never mind.\u00a0 So, how are the two kids…” (Exit, pursued by a bear<\/a>.)<\/p>\n The point of all that is this: I have to come to a place where I am profoundly bored, and also exceptionally encumbered by these years of experiences.\u00a0 There are lots of people that I have known, loved, hated, and lost that I can no longer reach to resolve things.\u00a0 They are broken records.\u00a0 (What would have happened if I’d said “yes?” ” No?”\u00a0 “I wonder if they…”)\u00a0 And then there are the ones that don’t write, and don’t call, and that I also don’t write or call.\u00a0 And I watch them move away, and I’m stuck with the unpleasant task of reconciling what was with what’s left. And… “Hopelessly adrift in the eyes of the ghost again…”<\/p>\n Nostalgia is wonderful when it carries you back to where you once lived and loved, but it’s poison when it just leads you in circles.\u00a0 And no, I’m not giving up this website, but I do think it’s time I start making some hard choices about my life.\u00a0 I have to build on those friendships that are here, bury the ghosts I carry around, and learn to live and love in the days I have left.\u00a0 “Untitled” is a funny song to save a life with, but I’ve come to realize that I always want to be able to feel it, even if I definitely don’t want to keep living it.<\/p>\n So, here I am.\u00a0 And here you are.<\/p>\n And here’s this…<\/p>\n [youtube YqPGN4J-ras nolink]<\/p>\n Thanks for sticking around.\u00a0 It means the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I spend an awful lot of time thinking about the past.\u00a0 I mean, let’s face it, this site wouldn’t exist if not for an overdeveloped sense of nostalgia.\u00a0 I see that faces of people I’ll never speak to again in … Continue reading