Here's the thing. I love coffee shops in Portland. Every few blocks or so there is a perfect little spot nestled in to a city block. The coffee is good, and the atmosphere is great. I just hate listening to other people talk. No, it's more than that. I really cannot stand when a person is squawking away, and their voice resonates at the specific frequency that sets off a series of natural reactions in me. First, I glance in the squawker's general direction. Then I glance again, my face slack but still managing to convey just how annoyed I am. Naturally, these loud-talkers are impervious to my meaningful glances. (Impervious! It's a GRE word.) So I have to turn up the volume on my ipod until it almost hurts me. I guess if I want silence I should go to a library, not a community gathering spot. Ha. I'm such a grump sometimes.
Maybe the grumpiness has something to do with the fact that I didn't sleep a single, solitary, miniscule wink last night. It started with me getting all worked up by the houseguest we had, who is a very good friend of all of my housemates. He is beautiful. He also moved to Montana this morning. But he bummed around our house all day yesterday, and I spent all day trying to be cool in the face of this tall, blonde, scruffy boy. "So... are you moving to Montana for good?" Yeah, I'm subtle like that. And let me tell you, it's tough sharing a house with three couples. They are all lovely, to be sure. But put a newly single blue-eyed hippie boy in front of me after weeks of watching 6 people in love and I'm pretty much not going to be able to help myself. That' s just how it is.
After trying to shoot meaningful glances of another kind at him - specifically the 'don't move to Montana, stay here and fall madly in love with me' kind - I went to bed. But instead of sleeping, I ended up lying awake and have some sort of epiphany about my life. Basically my head suddenly became all abuzz with little bugs of ideas flitting about, knocking in to my skull and making it impossible for me to settle in to sleep. I tossed in my bed until dawn, daydreaming in the dark and realizing that with no ties to any place, I can do anything at all. While that is fairly obvious, when that thought passed over me a sense of freedom followed and is still enveloping me like a big fuzzy sweater or something.
Part of it, actually, came from having this fantastic conversation with the beautiful Montana-bound boy. We sat on the porch and talked about nothing in particular. He told me about some of the jobs he has held, and I thought 'yeah, I want to do that, too.' And it's that easy out here. People talk about doing something, changing their lives or moving away, getting some job abroad or going on an adventure, and they do it. It seems that everyone I talk to here has these great experiences and they plan to have more. Wilderness firefighting, working on fishing boats in Alaska, teaching English in Japan, going to Mexico for 3 weeks to take pictures of the border fence. And it's not that any of those things are necessarily things I want to do (althought I'm reading Moby Dick right now, and it's making fishery work sound pretty appealing). But I could do those things, or I could think of something totally different and try that out for a little bit.
I guess it just comes down to the fact that I am in an almost constant state of rethinking everything about myself and my life. I'm trying to keep my ears and my mind open. But I feel closer in this moment to a sort of greatness than ever before, and I know that this feeling is exactly why I moved away from everything that was familiar to me. Maybe I'm getting a little loopy due to the lack of sleep, a little drunk on my own drowsiness and too easily moved to getting overly emotional. But I feel really happy and really excited, so I'm going to enjoy it.
Um. GRE time. This may call for another cup of coffee. $.50 refill, and perhaps a day old pastry? I must remember that even though I am giddy and hopped up on my own sleep deprivation right now, I'm still unemployed and can't go splurging on fresh pastries.
Also, I got the first of what I'm sure will be many uses out of my rain jacket today! I'm sure my excitement about the rain will fade quickly.
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