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12.29.04 - 5:07 p.m.
inching towards a life inching: (v.) condensing the awkward mouthful compound verb "taking baby steps" into one verb, hopefully peeling away its overladened meaning in the process. inching towards a life means carefully, slowly, yet steadily moving the throttle forward of living...what i hope my life will be in the year 2005... and while inching in times past meant pulling myself upright out of bed or moving arthritically down the stairs out to the mailbox only to creep back upstairs again to crawl back into bed, i'd like inching to mean much more than that. nows the time, i tell myself over and over again. i can't just wait until jan. 1, 2005 to begin my life again...because waiting out the hours in between just takes too long, and i've done enough of that... i'm content that i stayed in my own house on christmas day this year...if nothing else, just to experience the quietness of my street, the stillness of my house, no radio, not dvds, no t.v., no stimuli...a day without sound or song but that of my own breathing and thinking, and later, my own concentration on reading a novel under one bedside lamp, with no other crinkling sound than me unwrapping unread page after another until i finished it..athomeattheendoftheworld. i made the right choice, i believe, to not impulsively or desperately board a 5 hour bus and 1 hour train ride to go to my parents house... why run away from my own house, only to deaden myself in another... unlike my opting out of thanksgiving, this time i told my mother directly that i wasn't coming home for christmas... i told her the truth, rather than some paltry lie about not feeling well enough to travel or spinning lies about a snowstorm making travel dangerous. i told her that i could not finish out the year without having looked at my thesis in weeks.. i told her that i owed myself to get my head in order before the new year began and if i went home i'd just be delaying and delaying the encounter with the research and writing and thinking that i'd neglected since october... and she understood, do what you have to do, she said... the unspoken portion of that doing is that, if i plan to graduate in may 2005 as i've assured her, and as she in turn has assured her relatives and friends, then i'd have to make sacrifices starting now... sacrifices like one-day holiday gatherings like thanksgiving, christmas, and new years... and still, i didn't do squat on my dissertation since then or the three days afterwards... i just wanted the holidays to go away, my current feelings don't match the world's schedule and i'm old enough to say, no, i don't have to feel 'it's looking a lot like christmas, and all its cheer' if i don't genuinely feel that cheer... mercifully, the weekend passed...just when i thought the inertia would continue... dwelling in my head hour after hour on the changes i must make in my life, keeping everyone at bay until i make that change, changing nothing... monday's news of the worst natural disaster ever ever ever i can recall living through occurred, and keeps occuring...sunday's 10,000 deathtoll has leapt up to wednesdya's 100,000 deathtoll...and this grief of other's loss of life...those who did not chose to die, and who had absolutely no sense that death approached reached through and slapped me. i've needed a good reality slap, that damnnit circling how the fuck do you continue to say "life is so hard", any life movement is so hard, when thousands haven't even had the choice to fight for their lives...here one moment, gone the next... i'm saving my longer more thoughtful logical rant on what i'm trying to say for my own journal...because no words i post adequately address and take into account how a tsunami's disastrous stealing unsuspecting lives - one-third of them children - relates to my own life...
life is precious. period. no moral of any story conclusion, here. this preciousness isn't a new realization. is as precious on december 25th as it was december 26th...natural disasters don't alter that fact... rather, they force my heart to wrap around that fact, because my head wouldn't. before i pledge money, support, donations, aid...i need to stop thinking and start *feeling* that preciousness of my own life. then, inch into action accordingly
MUSIC: philipglasssoundtrack, thehours
READING: thewaythecrowflies
FEELING:precious
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