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jiggerhazzle
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Name: Ryan
Birthday: 4/9/1984
Interests: Tolkien, good music, poetry, living, breathing, midget acrobats, love
Expertise: illegal Ninja moves, traffic watching, fading into emotional shadows
Occupation: Consulting
Industry: Hospitality
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  jiggerhazzle
Member Since:
3/5/2004
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| The day's natural brilliance gently fades away in shades of purple and pink. Planes in the distance pay their respects to the setting sun, catching its dying light in their wings with a flash as they soar overhead; temporary residents in a limitless expanse. As the light dims, we wait for darkness, but it's never night here. The glow of the city over our shoulders reminds us that there dwells a beast of concrete and steel, a beast that never sleeps, it only consumes.
Boat after boat escapes the clutches of the harbor, as if they had never experienced the joys of the open waters before. I'm reminded of a child crossing the street for the first time.
As more and more people gather on the shores, I notice that we are not the only ones seeking the open skies tonight. The occassional glow of a lightning bug can be seen, each one maintaining a five second interval between flashes, speaking in a fluid dance of light and movement. A couple walks down the shoreline passing out glow sticks, that we might each achieve some luminescent significance. Soon the entire group is a mass of swirling shades of green, a vibrant yet sickly glow that waves the sailboats out to open waters. The lightning bugs send out their code more frequently, more frantically, searching for each other in a sea of false illumination. As I watch, the man in front of me reaches out with a closed fist and punches a lightning bug down to the ground, its light still glowing. The man goes on talking, a beer in his other hand and a glow stick lying on the ground in front of him. The lightning bug lies stunned on the ground, it's light slowly fading to black; a final cry to be noticed, a final goodbye to the mate it never found.
Then the fireworks begin. We see the light, we hear the air waves, and we remind ourselves of our permanence; explosion after explosion drowning out the fading light of the previous rocket. A continuous dance; imagined significance; each of us searching and reaching out, hoping to connect before our light slowly fades.
It's never night here. | | |
| Tonight I am doing my final reviews for my comprehensive Master's Exam.
Tomorrow I am taking my comprehensive Master's Exam, a four hour, four essay ordeal.
After that, life comes crashing down and I return to pondering the meaning of love, my plans for the future, and where to put my right foot...and then my left....and then my right....and then my left....and then..... | | |
| The weather's turning dangerously beautiful again, and I'm stuck inside writing these gorram* papers. The good news is that every time I travel to the library, I'm able to steal away for a few minutes and lay on the lakeshore. While everyone else around me is laid out on beach towels and whiling away the hours, I find that I have to be content with my ten minute breaths of fresh air. Oh, the guilty pleasures of life.
One paper down. One more to go, and then it's on to Comprehensives. I think I might actually be able to do this.
*for those of you hoping to find a note explaining the meaning of the word "gorram," all I can say is, watch the one series wonder Firefly. Sci-fi never felt so good. | | |
| Today was beautiful, and I almost wept to feel the grass beneath me as I laid outside the library, listening to the waves push against the rocks, creating a noise more akin to the sound of a running river than the usual rhthym of coastal waves. Seagulls cried above me, and yet something seemed amiss, something seemed wrong. There was no salt in the air. The breeze blew and carried with it the smell of land just unseen, a limited horizon. It was a freshwater facade of the ocean, and I almost fell for it. Though lakes have their own beauty, Lake Michigan's vast size creates an expectation of limitlessness, an expectation that is subtlely crushed. So, I turned my attention skyward, and the clouds did not fail to deliver on their promise of beauty.
In other news.
Another Safe Haven, another fight....almost. A couple came and left, and then came back, claiming that someone had stolen an envelope from their bag that contained their rent money. The man, Terrell, started accusing everyone, threatening physical harm, and digging through everone else's bags. We finally told them they had to wait outside, that they did not, in fact, have the right to frisk everyone and dig through their stuff. So guess who got to go outside and stand between them and the door? That's right. Yours truly. 137 pounds of skin and bones (and some leg muscles, yay squats and bike riding!). I'm pretty sure one of Terrell's biceps is as big as my head, and he had his belt wrapped around his fist, but I was able to talk him and Diamond, his girlfriend, out of beating the ever-living crap out of the the other people at the drop-in. I'm sure they're waiting for them somewhere else...or that they've already gotten so drunk that they forgot about it anyway. Either way, too much drama.
The good news is that, if only for a little while, I was reminded of things that are so much more important than writing a paper about the modern reception of Chaucer's Canterbury tales in a parallel translation into modern English. Serving people, listening to people and talking with them like they're actual human beings, and doing everything I can to maintain peace. For a little while I felt free of the narrow scope of graduate school, the loneliness that pervades my thoughts, and the distance I've put between myself and the people I love and was reminded of what it means to truly love, to give of oneself. For a moment, I felt a purpose for being that existed outside of myself.
The paper still waits to be written, the blank page staring at me in accusatory glances. Loneliness takes root once more. And yet, I continue to hunger for that purpose, to strive for love, and to hope to lay in the grass once more. | | |
| My heart is broken for what has transpired today. The loss of life at Virginia Tech has impacted me more than I imagined it could. I know we live in a fallen world, I know that this is nothing new, but there were so many times at work and in class today that I simply wanted to stop everything and weep for the loss, for the madness, for the pain that so many people are feeling right now. I almost didn't want to go to class tonight, not because I was afraid, but because I didn't want to look into my classmate's faces and wonder if I would ever have to watch them die. It was a pretty wretched evening. I've tried to distract myself with several things, video games, music, reading for Chaucer, but I cannot escape the fact that this has, and will continue to have a deep impact on me.
In compltetely trivial news, I'm only a few weeks away from being done with this semester and finding it difficult to care about my classes, and my car died Wednesday. Probably the alternator or starter, but haven't had the time to get it towed to a shop. Oh well, it's not like I use it all that often. My birthday is going fairly well. I speak in the present progressive because over the last week people are continuously offering to take me out to eat, or do some activity for my birthday. I went bowling and played pool at a 24 hour bowling alley and drank some wine at 3 in the morning with some friends last week to celebrate, had coffee with my classmates (one of which made me cookies!), went out to eat sushi with my cousin and his fiance on Friday (Unagi+Wasabi+Sake=a truly spiritual experience), and I'm going to a great ribs place with my coworkers this Friday. Ugh. That's a lot of eating. Either way, it's been great spending time with people, plus it gets me out of this hole I live in and reminds me that there are more important things than staring at a book or computer screen....which I'm doing right now and plan on doing for the next two weeks.
Bah.
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