Brain Drain

So, I know that, realistically, it's normal for college grads to go through a period of, "oh fuck, what am I doing with my life??" But I'm having a sort of existential crisis right now...and I don't have any idea how to deal with it...and part of me wants to just sort of wander for a while...but I'm starting to really hate that.

Here I am, a graduate of the University of Oregon, winner of the "hat trick," as my friend called it, hard worker with great references and connections--and I'm working in a restaurant. A decent restaurant, I'll give it that, but still. And I gave up a well-paid, halfway decent job in politics because my boss was, to put it lightly, a wee bit incompetent. A friend of mine said she admired that I did that, but I'm starting to wonder. I mean, at least it had some sort of connection to my interests. I had these high hopes of finding a job in a planning firm or somehow getting to work on the planning side of the RailRunner. Oops...

I'm stuck in the cliché dilemma of not being able to find a job that I like because I don't have the experience and not being able to gain experience because no one will hire me--exacerbated by the fact that we are in the middle of a recession. I was overqualified for the job at Repower and I'm painfully overqualified to be carrying plates of overpriced food to people. I'm overqualified to get coffee for a planning office and file their paperwork and answer phones, but I can't seem to be able to get that...to wiggle my foot into that door. I know that I need to go to grad school, but I'd really like to spend some time getting to know the reality of the planning world and talking to people who do it to find out what works and what doesn't, which schools are good and which aren't, what programs are most useful. Maybe I want to get my degree in a different but related field. A friend and I were talking about maybe getting transportation engineering degrees...but how can I figure that out if I can't even talk to someone?

All of this not knowing what to do is kicking my restlessness into high gear.

Today, I was at my high school, where I'm going to be helping the environmental clubbers plan a conference. I was talking to one of my teachers about what I'm doing now and how hard it is to find a planning related job and he was like, "yes, because we don't plan here." It's frighteningly true. The West is the land of homesteaders, of sticking a stick in the ground and claiming it for your own and building whatever you want and not worrying about making a plan because, hey, look how much space we have! I have really been starting to get excited about staying in New Mexico for a number of reasons--feeling grounded is a major one. But, alas, welcome to my world, where restlessness begins at three weeks and makes me crazy by six or seven months.

A couple people have asked if I'm considering looking overseas. I think about it, but dismiss the idea because it seems outlandish to even consider spending two to three years in another country. Even though I really want to. But tonight, after a conversation with my best friend that ranged from herpetology to urban planning (as our conversations often go...we are so different it's scary), I took a look at the website for the school of urban planning in Lyon. They only have a masters program, which is why I didn't take classes there while I was in France, but it seems like a really interesting program. International students are eligible if they get a certain score on the french competency exam and have three or four years of college behind them. The program is three years long, because they have a year of pre-masters since there isn't a planning license (the equivalent of undergrad). I don't know if I would have to do that program or if my undergrad would suffice, but the more I looked at it, the more excited I got about the idea of doing it. It's terrifying to think about going to France without the help of the Centre Oregon helping with a lot of the paperwork and details, but at the very least, I bet the Babots would make room for me, at least for a while until I got my shit together.

My head is honestly spinning right now. I just keep thinking that, if I get my butt in gear, I could be getting a masters degree in France in a year. In Lyon, ville de mon coeur, of all places. It's funny because the thought of researching grad schools has held very little interest for me lately, even though I know I need to do it. But I spent ten minutes looking over the program for this program and I was sold...I'm literally sitting here looking around my room and mentally packing my bags and figuring out what I could sell to have just a little more money and a little less junk in storage somewhere.

The more I think about all this, the more I dread going back to the reality of my life, where I work at a job that I hate to admit to...especially to my high school teachers who, I know, had much higher hopes for me when I graduated cum laude from one of the best high schools in the country. Not to mention to college professors who sent me on my way from the University of Oregon with some high honors. God, how pretentious is that? But honestly, I've seen people be much more pretentious about a lot less...

Ok, this is just getting ranty and ridiculous. I'll try to sleep on it...if my brain will just stop running around in circles.

Bouge de là!

As usual, I'm pretty sure no one reads this anymore, but I've been having some homesickness for France and I feel like this is an appropriate place to put it.

I just finished a book called "We All Went to Paris," which is about all sorts of Americans who spent time in Paris between 1776 and 1971--from Benjamin Franklin to Gertrude Stein to Cole Porter...etc etc etc. It's taken me a while to finish it because the book itself isn't all that well written. Also, I sometimes had a hard time getting into it because it focuses on a lot of "classic" authors that I've never or hardly read, like Hemingway and Stein, or painters that I don't much care for, like Gertrude Stein. But there are some real gems in this book, some great stories, and some beautiful memories of Paris that brought on some crazy nostalgia.

In the epilogue of the book, there is a quote from Faulkner, who said,

"Maybe, Steve, Paris is the grab bag for us because it skirts the irrational, yet seems to find now and then the potential for genius in embryonic shape...All right, it also has for us a high falutin' esoteric reputation, and you can escape there getting entangled, sure, entangled, in moral alternatives. We're such black Calvinistic bastards at home. In the end you may get a belly-full of it, Paris...but you always want to go back. It leaves you spooked with a world of invisible presences. We go there hunting some damn evocative quality, maybe we come back and feel that only the unrealized parts of our lies seem perfect...That's what keeps Paris green for us. It's something we are sure is there only we ourselves never fully realize it."

This really touches how I feel about France...Lyon much more than Paris, but France in general. It's like this thing that exists forever inside me that, despite the fact that there were things that drove me crazy there, moments when all I wanted was to go home, I will always, somewhere within me, wish I were there. I will forever idealize France, and I know that it will never live up to my expectations, but it will always draw me back...with a strength I'm not sure I believe in. But there it is.

Almost daily, the urge strikes me to put aside everything and go back. Run away, go on an adventure, find myself, relive the beauty of a nigh-time walk across the bridge from Perrache to my apartment.

Sometimes I am trying to escape something. I'm living in this house, which my mom worked really hard in, and that I really like and am SO blessed to have. It needs some work, but it's cozy. It's very adult. Very settled. And sometimes I want to run screaming from it. Whenever I feel like I'm losing control of my life, which happens more than I'd like to admit, I think, "this wouldn't be happening if I were living in France," or "at least when I was there I had an excuse for feeling helpless."

Then, I live in house my grandparents lived in, the house my mom grew up in, the house I--in many ways--grew up in, the house my grandfather practically died in. It's unreal that my bedroom was his bedroom, I cook on the same stove he cooked in, I drink the wine he collected and knew so much about (and that I know so little about). I'm trying to make it mine, but the terrifying adult reality of that combined with the ghost of loss is sometimes too much for me to bear. I ran away to France once--it sheltered me, to a certain extent--why not try it again?

But at the same time, this house provides me with so many opportunities. lately I've gotten into this thing called CouchSurfing, where people can email you and stay at your house when visiting, and if you are traveling you can search for people to stay with. We've had a lot of different people stay at our house, all wonderfully unique experiences. Something I've noticed is that most of the people that have stayed with us seem to be on some crazy journey. There was Cesar, who is walking all over the world; the Finding Fiction guys, a band on tour playing out of their red van; Harris, a cool guy riding his motorcycle around the west; Ke, who is escaping his own ghosts by jumping out of planes in all the states he visits. When I meet them, I realize, why am I here? Why do I have a 3-bedroom house and a huge set of silverware and a bunch of furniture? Why aren't I living out of my car, seeing new things, jumping out of planes? Or living out of a backpack, riding trains to new places, buying fresh baguettes and fresh fruit along the way? Here are all these people with great stories about the places they've visited and the people that they've met...and my adventure stories are growing stale...pictures of me with short hair reminding me how long it's been since I've had an adventure, been somewhere new, gotten lost.

Other times, it's just nostalgia. I have so many memories of my life during those 10 months that I really cling to. Whenever I look at pictures, reread entries from this blog, think of a story that I feel like I've probably told too many times, or realize just how long I've been back, I just want to be there. I don't want to remember, fond as those memories are, I want to be there. I want to touch the old stone of the bridge while I look up the Rhône. I want to bite into a warm baguette from the bakery down the street from my apartment. I want to get drunk and dance at the Sirius and ride a Velo'v home at 2 in the morning. The things that were part of my everyday life that felt so special...a feeling I rarely have anymore.

Was life really SO different there? There was drama, there was homework, there were bills to pay, there were all the things we have to do all the time...things we can never really escape no matter how far we go, but I remember feeling a special kind of happiness that is lost on me now. Maybe it's that I appreciated it more because I knew it was fleeting. I knew I would have to pack up and leave, so every day was a new adventure, a memory to be made, a story to write home about.

But why isn't life like that all the time? I mean, really, it's all temporary. Maybe in a year I'll go back to school somewhere new and miss New Mexico again. Maybe I'll get an apartment and miss having a big living room that allows me to invite all my friends over to hang out. Lord knows that, no matter what, my life wont be the same in a year. So why don't I ever get that feeling anymore? That feeling of contentment, of loving the world around me just as it is, of appreciating the food that I'm eating like it's really something special...even when it's just a salad or pasta or a sandwich. The burst of excitement when someone stops to ask me directions or talks to me in class about really crappy pop music.

It seems really fatalistic to say things like this. I mean, it's not like there's no happiness in my life. I have great friends, I can see my grandma whenever I want, I just bought a bunch of paint for my house, I got a job working with high school students that I'm really excited about. But, it's always different, I have fresh roasted green chile in the fridge, I'm looking forward to making eggs benedict with wonderful people in the morning. But, as we do, I want more...I want those moments that I feel have been left far behind. And I can only just grasp at them, their residue left in a photo or a postcard or a memory. I suppose I'm haunted by Faulkner's "invisible presences."

Hah. It figures that, as I try to finish this up, Grand Corps Malade (whose song, "Vu de Ma Fenêtre," is the namesake of this blog) comes on my iTunes with a song called "Rétroviseur." The chorus goes like this:

J’ai le souvenir tenace, et la mémoire tonique.
De ces temps pas si lointains, de cette époque magique
J’sais pas si c’est normal, on peut trouver ça tragique

Putain j’ai pas 30 ans, et je suis déjà nostalgique.

Over the course of the song, he lists all these memories about his youth and how great everything was. In the chorus, he basically says that he has such strong memories of this time that really wasn't that long ago, but, shit, he's not even 30 and he's already all nostalgic.

Putain, j'ai pas 23 ans et je suis déjà nostalgique.

(messes up the rhythm, but putain, that's how I feel)

Springtime

I don't know that anyone even reads this anymore, but maybe some of you will be bored and decide to see if I have written anything and then you will be pleasantly surprised by this happy story: 

I saw pretty dancing girl-flowers today and it made me feel like spring time.

It's finals week and I've been absolutely buried in work.  I'm not technically done with things until Friday, but today I had a huge final project due and we had to do a presentation, and the whole thing has pretty much consumed my life the past week or so (except that, while being consumed by this, I was also being consumed by everything else, so that was problematic).  It was a HUGE weight off my shoulders to be done with it, and despite my stress and sense of defeat, I think we pulled together a pretty solid report and presentation.  

We spent pretty much all day finishing everything up, but it's been SO pretty out today that all I wanted to do was go play outside and enjoy the sunshine (which I did a little at lunch, but not enough).  So when we finished presentations, I was really conflicted between wanting to play outside, go to sleep, or go for a run.

This is where I come to my story.  I was riding my bike home, thinking about how great it was to be riding in the sun instead of the rain, and trying to decide which of my three options I liked best, and starting to think that realistically I should go home and do a bunch of work that I have to turn in tomorrow, when I saw it.  These two girls who looked like they might have been twins in bright orange tutus with hugely wide skirts that looked like flowers, and they were skipping up and down the sidewalk. 

It was an AMAZING thing to see and I really wish I had a picture.  I think that kids are such appropriate measures of the seasons.  It's like...as we grow up, we start to regulate ourselves so that we don't really respond to changes.  So many people dress more or less the same all the time, with a few changes when needed to fit the weather.  We do the same things, like I ride my bike to and from school whether it's snowing or sunny...it's all just fairly monotone (although I try not to be like that as much as possible).  But kids, they see that it's the first day in way too long that the sun is out, and they're out there being dancing flowers and announcing that it's spring time.  I love it.  It makes me SO happy!

Now I'm trying not to let it get me down that I missed most of the sunshine and that I have too much to do, and I'm sitting on my front stoop listening to some old timey music that my neighbors across the street are playing (I should know who it is because it's someone famous but I can't figure it out for the life of me...the first three songs I was pretty sure it was Jacques Brel but he was singing in english in a southern accent...silly) and it's actually really chilly but I want to enjoy the coming spring time as long as possible.  

I think I shall go for a run to stay outside but be kinda warm.  I hope that everyone else has beautiful "It's Spring!" moments soon!!