10 years?!

updates...well, I'm not working...I mean I AM, but just for me right now. So far it's not as freeing as I'd hoped. turns out i have lots and lots of patterns and habits and hangups and not all of them are good. Turns out it's really hard to get me out of the house, for one. But there are moments of joy and clarity and bliss...and lots of worry and stress and feeling of gaping discontent... and then it all starts over again. So, par for the course, I guess. I realized I've been in CA over 2 years now, and I can definitely feel it in my itchy feet. I haven't lived anywhere consecutively for more than 2 years since I got out of high school, and it's become a habit of its own. The first year is mostly figuring my shit out...meeting people, building a group of friends, figuring out where to get groceries, get my hair cut, exercise, etc...where's the DAMN GROCERY STORE? Then the second year is sort of hitting my stride, getting comfortable, getting a routine, settling in, then...I guess I start to get bored. Strangely, I often want to leave for places I've been before; I often want to go home to Boulder. I STILL want that, but I feel like I can't do it until I have enough money or career or plan to do it, lest I end up in the same pattern--subsistence day-job and roomates. Guh.

Growing up there, you are always seeing these ridiculous houses people have, right out in the open spaces. Architecturally beautiful beasts of glass and A-frame majesty; hand-carved doors and river-rock fountains... I always wanted to live in one, imagining some fictitious fantasy life where I'd wake up at sunrise and have a quiet morning of, I don't know. Something Bouldery. Coffee and Yoga and Running and Meditation and Generally Being At Peace With It All. Nights of cooking in my gorgeous granite kitchen and sitting on the porch watching the sun set with a glass of wine, listening to the hummingbirds and mourning doves and crickets, being a part of things somehow. I know that's completely fantastical, but it doesn't stop me from wanting it. Sometimes I think I am made up entirely of polar opposites and my major driving force is fantasy, and a sense of longing, a sense of incompletion, but not knowing what for. This is all besides the point, and in this day and age of self-indulgent bloggery I feel ashamed of allowing myself such angsty and self-involved diatribes, but there you are. It's too late now.

I'm missing my 10 year high school reunion tonight and it's got me feeling low. Nostalgic, sad, frustrated and profoundly human. Reprise sad and frustrated. I talked online to a high school friend tonight that I'd lost touch with for 4+ years. He's married, has a kid, is getting a divorce. His dad, a much loved history teacher of ours, died this year, and he's a medic in Iraq, bored and waiting to go home. This is the kid who passed cartooned notes with me on notebook paper during geometry. The kid that I met because I liked his Cure shirt, who listened to Morphine and Patti Smith and REM with me, speeding through Colorado suburbian nights in somebody's parents' SUV. The kid who wore beat up army pants and funny white undershirts with his own sayings printed on them in sharpie. My favorite was his halloween edition: same outfit as always, but the shirt: "i am madonna." He gave it to me on my 17th birthday. This kid who wrote beat poetry on the back of gum wrappers and slipped them into my notebooks.
We seemed so brilliant then, so flaming, astrally bright. Everything was the knife's edge, and we were all waiting for greatness. It's cliche to say I'm disappointed, and ungrateful to insinuate that my life isn't wonderful, but I admit I was still living in that childhood mindset that magic is going to just happen to you. That you will be beset with wonders without having to lift a finger; that you are a rising star just waiting for the chains to be thrown off; that your life will suddenly feel like...not your life I suppose. Fuck, I'm still waiting for my letter from Hogwarts!

I find it so hard to sit still. I know that if you uproot and change direction every 2 years, nothing big will ever get built, and I'll be feeling pretty "square one"-like forever, but at the same time... I just want to GO. I don't even know what that MEANS, or what I'd DO, but I want SO much. I'm so full of love and fear and life that it seems tragic to be sitting still in repetition.

In high school, we'd go driving. On lunch break, or after school, with Randy or Scott or Brice... we'd go get ice cream, or go to the mall on some made-up mission, or just... drive. Once we drove to Kansas on a Saturday. I remember I had an assignment due in English, so I read "Two Gentlemen of Verona" while we drove, bare feet up on the dash of Randy's huge boat of an Audi. We drove to Kansas, took pictures at the border, bought $2 truck stop T-shirts that we'd made our holy grail and went home. We didn't really care about Kansas, we just needed a destination. We just wanted to drive, to feel free.

I'd like to be able to get back to that sort of profound sense of freedom in the simplest things.

Anyway, that was hardly an update, but it is what's occupying my head. Nostalgia and memories and missing home and trying to decide what to do next and hoping I'm not screwing it all up.