Life is too short for people behind desks and people behind masks...

I've been looking back a lot lately, and discovering the phenomenal differences between looking back fondly, and looking over your shoulder, paranoid that life might be going to catch up with you. I can't describe how strange and surreal it is, to have woken up in a new world. Like my life of easily the past 4 years was this beautiful and horrifying dream, that as hard as I tried, I couldn't quite wake completely from. I look back on my own desperation, intrigue, even curiosity, and it seems like I'm sifting through a sitcom I'd watched loyally in high school. I can't describe how totally bizarre it is, and completely disconcerting to be...OK. Good even. The sheer euphoria of being alive and engaged and interested, still is a little novel. I cant keep from questioning the boundaries around me, and how I'd managed to dupe everyone for so long. The thing I keep coming back to though, in mulling over everything that's happened to me and with me and around me, is that in some sense I feel like I've traded in my poet's eye.

I know, geez Peggy, here we go again.

But really, hear me out.

In regaining some realistic emotional stamina, it seems as if life somehow means differently. I was going to say less, which is kind of true, but definitely not all encompassing. What I mean to say is everything I do, every minute interaction, every small relationship I stumble on in passing, is weighed differently. I think in the past while being so wrapped up in my mind, every experience I found myself in was somehow the end of the world. I've kind of always felt like life effected me differently, like in some ways everything just meant more to me, like I had the world on my shoulders. Then again, I am the girl who would will herself to stay awake because she thought those who needed her would some how know, and be comforted, by her presence. I look back to the days before life swallowed me whole, and I envy that Peggy a little bit, for living so fully and loving so freely. The trade off for gaining a new perspective is exactly that--a new perspective. I miss (and I can't believe I'm even writing this) everything meaning so much. I miss drama, because that meant that life was happening with me in hand. I love it that I've finally learned to look in the right directions for my strengths and salvations, but in a small way I feel like I'm missing a lot, just by giving up the right to feel and experience everything. I miss being possessed so fully and completely. I miss having passionate crushes on boys. I miss having secrets, and hidden dreams. In coming into myself, I've learned to spread all my cards in front of me, and look the dealer in the eye. I miss having a poker face.

The thing they don't tell you about listening so intently to the winds back when the world was new is that eventually you get tired, and then you go deaf. And then maybe, if you're lucky, you remember that you have been gifted with smell, sight, touch, and taste. I think thats what happened to me, that life got so overwhelming and blew so hard that eventually I just couldn't hear anymore. And only now can I really look around again, and hopefully with time, trust enough to open my ears.

I'm ok, really. For the first time in a while, I'm not saying that just to put people of my trail. I am so, intrigued by the world right now, that I really just don't know what to do with myself. Thats it, really. I don't know how to not be depressed and exhausted and confused and trapped. I have never learned the skill of being just human. I don't know how to not be so effected by life that it tears me apart. But I am doing my damnedest, and having a damn good time learning.

Life tonight, almost makes sense. School is hellish, but the change is radical now that I'm totally hooked on Sociology. Everything fits together so miraculously, I confuse which paper goes for which class, because they're all so interrelated. I was asked lately what made staying this year, not heading to Chile and living blissfully as a perpetual exchangee, worth it. I don't have the words to explain how I betrayed myself when I decided to stick it out here in Portland. The best I could say was that traveling lets me be the best parts of myself, and in staying here, even though leaving would have been much easier and fulfilling in mind and body, I wanted to learn how to be that girl regardless of situation. I want to harness the freedom and lucidity and adventurousness and confidence and gregariousness that I so revel in when I am abroad, and be that person regardless of passport stamp. I'm...getting there, slowly.

I accept things falling into place, however warily (theres that looking over my shoulder again). I somehow managed to con the LC registrar into paying me to take Russian at PSU next semester, which is so more than sweet. I've missed it, I really have. I'm so sickly looking forward to spending a good deal of winter break reverting back to Zen grammar workshop, the act of beating grammar patterns to death. I love the exhilaration of properly placing my thoughts into the mold of the Russian linguistic frame. Spanish has never come so freely to me, its always seemed a good deal more nebulous, without the grounding of the case system. That and I hate myself a little bit everytime spanish comes out of my mouth, just because I know I have never devoted enough of myself to mastering the language, and that the words spilling from my mouth in a thick russian accent are thus inferior. Dork? Yes. Next semester I am totally stoked, in addition to the Russian I'm hoping to do some volunteer work for the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Portland. This will hopefully involve doing more of my home visits from the summer, hanging out with some crazy foreign kids, and throwing my weight around where it really matters. I haven't really planned the project all the way through yet, still working on finding a So/An prof to back me up for practicuum credit in the department. I'm applying this summer for student/faculty research money, to work with my Russian advisor on an ethnographic survey of the ruskogovorjashix of Portland. She wants to investigate the Russian-ish community of Portland, and how they've faired in the past fifteen years since the raspad of the USSR. All of the information on the subject (albeit quite sparse) is pretty ancient, or totally irrelevant, so the work that we could be doing is really exciting. That is, contingent on me applying and getting funding from the college, otherwise all is for naught.

Overall, if I could sum up everything that I've learned about life (Thank you Frost) in three words or less of course, it would be this. It goes on. I'd say that you owe it to yourself to be comfortable, and to keep fighting until you get there.

So color me...pensive.