Boys with Mutli-Stringed Instruments

This is Water

'There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete ...

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."'

-David Foster Wallace

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off to Work I Go

It's true, I'm employed.

Pros of jobs:
-paychecks
-free tea
-free air conditioning for 7-9 hours a day
-free pens
-generally just a lot of free office supplies
-ability to challenge myself/grow professionally

Cons of jobs:
-taxes
-commuting
-air conditioning so cold it hurts
-commuting
-my tan is fading
-can't spend a week watching Scrubs marathons in pajamas

Living After Living the Dream

Hello, faithful readers, ie: Serena and Aunt Marian and Uncle Barnett, and possibly up to five other people!

I've been back in the U S of A since June 4th.
It's nice to be back; it's weird to be back; things are so much bigger here.

Since my return, life has been uneventful to say the least.
I've seen some good old friends and met some good new ones, and that's always nice.
But I haven't gone on a beautiful hike through the wilds of New Zealand, or escaped the curiosity of an Australian Brown Snake in over 3 months, and that's terrible.

So the blog will continue as a means to continue highlighting the good stuff, and if nothing else, it's a good way to remember the other stuff.

So without further delay:

Upon my return, I slept for a week.
Then Serena and I had bagels at the Maven.
Then I went to Boston and surprised the pants off of my best friend in her favorite bookstore and we compared how tan I was and how incredibly cold this winter must have been in Boston.
We also watched the USA v. England game at a nice bar in Newton and were so boisterous that the other diners complained about us passive aggressively on a comment card.

Then it was mid-June and I decided it was really time to look for a job.
I spent a good amount of time looking on various websites and asking friends for leads and applying to everything that I was remotely qualified for, including one job requiring a master's degree in conversational Tagalog (oops).

Then I got a call from one of the jobs I applied to through the help and general hook up of a one Caite Burke, and scheduled an interview for that Friday.
That night I went to Serena's goodbye party. It was devastating, but so fun!
Then I went to Wendy's birthday party on Saturday night, which was both really fun and really culture shocking because I forgot how fancy some of New York seems to be/wants to be/actually really is.
That Sunday, I saw Grampa and my cousin Larry and we celebrated Grampa's 90th (!!!)

Then I saw Phish in Camden and realized that while I'm still a fan, some of those songs are just too damn long.
Maybe I've grown up, or maybe I've just outgrown it.
Maybe that's just two ways of saying the same thing?

Then I got a call from the job I interviewed for and I start work on July 19th.

[What recession?]

Aside from the job hunt and reunions with friends and family, I've been spending a lot of time in my room, going through a lot of my old stuff and getting rid of doubles of pictures of people and things I just don't need two of.

Being home feels weird; feels right; feels like summer without camp, which also feels weird and somehow right.

In short: wherever you go, there you are.

The Truth.