Everything Is All Around You.

A cowboy hat hangs upside-down from the end of a curtain rod, holding countless, unparalleled memories of the teenage adventure of a lifetime. 

The outline of a vintage picture frame draped in pearls houses a string of moments frozen in time. 

A waterfall of twinkling white lights laces the windows and runs down the wall, emanating the beauty of Christmas on a still summer night. 

Tassels from high school graduation; flowers from an unsought love shriveled by the power of time; maps of wandering destinations near and far; greeting cards from birthdays, holidays, and just because days; pages torn out of coloring books brought to life by childhood friends; ticket stubs from concerts and movies and fairs and sporting events stuffed like sardines in a mason jar—the memories they hold running together like watercolor paints; empty tomato soup cans housing paint brushes, writing utensils, scissors, and rulers; license plates from various states and decades; half-finished crafty Christmas presents; a patchwork quilt hand-sewn by my beautiful mother; an eclectic assortment of novels, biographies, poetry, and picture books; hundreds of pennies multiplying like bunnies in a mason jar; timeless photographs of Marilyn, and one very iconic kiss. 

The things that cover my walls and stock my shelves tell the story of my existence. I am five years old and I wear the size seven and a half shoes of a twenty year old; I read classic novels and children’s books; I have been as far as Cancun without even leaving my bedroom. I am both old and new, borrowed and blue. I now own more hoodies that used to live in the closets of my closest friends than those that belonged to me to begin with.  

If I never complain about anything ever again, it will be one time too many.

The World Will Keep Turning

“One always begins to forgive a place once it’s left behind.” –Charles Dickens

Why have we not yet invented a way to be in two places at once? Why can’t I have the security of my steady job where I learn and excel and everybody knows my name and I can show up and clock out whenever I please, and the listless adventure of spending a summer—my last, before this whole “real world” thing takes over my life—in Tampa with my dad (who’s already missed out on more than half of my life,) and my best friend, all at the same time?

I’ve always been a homebody. Friends want to hang out? Sure, come to my place! Long day at school or work or stuck in traffic? I just want my kitchen, my shower, my bed: Mine. Home has never been a mere convenience to me, but a highly valued possession. Simultaneously—and however ironically—I’ve never hesitated to leave home for the sake of adventure, spontaneity, escape.

So doesn’t it make all the sense in the world to pack up my life and move south for the summer, taking advantage of my last opportunity to spend time with my dad and (possibly) the last time I’ll live with my best friend for any extended period of time? Hint: That was rhetorical. The undisclosed answer is yes; absolutely; without a doubt; what are you waiting for?; get the heck out of here.

I’m not afraid to leave home—in a sense I’m actually going home, leaving one home for another. There is something, though, that I can’t deny, can’t smother into the back of my mind with happier thoughts: I’m scared to death of missing something. Buffalo is—and always has been, and will be—Home. Home is where my friends are (some of them, still, anyway) and my family is (most of it, anyway) and my job and my school and my church is. Home is where I built my entire life–from the ground up. In a way that is equally as vain as it is humbling, I hate that the world will keep on turning without me. I don’t want to miss the laughs, the opportunities, the beautiful summer nights in Buffalo, the Thursdays at the Harbor, my nephew’s 8th grade graduation, the birthdays, the bonfires, the drive-in movie nights, and the midnight adventures with the same old people in the same old places.

Except this year, nothing would’ve been the same anyways. I’m just another thing that’s changing, evolving, leaving, moving on. I’m moving on. This is my dry-run at life after college. I’m leaving home, I’m taking off, I’m giving myself another chance to discover who I am, what I want, and where I’m going, but in order to discover something new, you have to go somewhere new, do something new, and be something new. I’m taking refuge in the fact that in three months, home will still be home, and it will always welcome me back.

Stop that clock–it’s stealing all my time.

Less Robot, More Human

Write write write write write write write; why can’t I just write something? All I want to do is write. It’s not like I don’t have anything to write about. I mean, my best friend just told me my life should be a reality show what with what goes on on a daily basis. I just; it all feels so trivial.

I think someone told me—or rather I read in a book or on a blog or heard on television or the radio or some other vague impersonal source—that if you can’t think of anything to do, do anything. And I fully admit to the fact that this was probably a criminal case of butchering a wildly philosophical and/or deeply meaningful statement by someone far more philosophical and meaningful than I, but I think it gets the main point across. So here I am, writing.

And maybe I’m getting somewhere, too. I feel things opening up, crawling out of their life-induced boxes and stretching their arms and coming back to life. I’m starting to feel more like myself and less like a robot, bleep-blooping through the tragic monotony of everyday life. Suddenly, I am human again; there is a person hibernating deep inside of these too-high fiberglass walls.

And maybe that was all I needed: not to hastily compose a philosophical and/or meaningful piece of writing, but to rediscover and arouse the sleeping dragon inside of me—to reclaim its existence.

I feel better.

School vs. Education

I was obsessed with the idea of “tomorrow,” in high school. Then, it meant graduation: Long white gowns and flying square caps and swinging blue tassels. It meant that I wouldn’t be confined, if you will, to a series of classrooms–many of them dauntingly disengaging–for nine long months of the year, temporarily absorbing what I usually deemed as “useless information that can be found with a bit of research if I ever really needed it, anyways.” Tomorrow was college, and pursuing an education that might not come as easily, but was at least something I was interested in and maybe even passionate about. And the ticket to tomorrow? Skimming universally boring textbooks and half-memorizing what other people defined as “important” (read: stuff that will be on the final exam). And so my high school education–in it’s most basic form–was doing whatever I needed to get by. And I was good at it. I had most of my teachers thinking I put in hours of effort when really, I was just putting in a little more than the people that didn’t bother to put in any. In a sense, I have them to thank for making me look good.

And then tomorrow came. I enrolled in a liberal arts college close to home, I started pursuing a degree I knew I was interested in (and even had the potential to be good at), and was again herded into classes about a bunch of things I still didn’t care about. In those select classes, I showed up and absorbed more “useless information that can be found with a bit of research if I ever really needed it, anyways.” I worked to get decent grades so my GPA wouldn’t cease to be a money tree during my college career. Sometimes, I was surprised and got something out of them; others, I was glad to never walk into again after Finals Week.

On a scale of Today-to-Tomorrow, it’s about 4:26pm in my college education era. I’ve picked up another major for the sake of practicality. I think I might actually be on my way to becoming something. The thing is, though, that I wish I could just keep learning. Not just things that will get me a job in my field, but the really interesting things that I just don’t have time for. I want to know how to pick out constellations in the sky and I want to read about previous missions to the moon. I’ve always been enamored by the view above when I step outside at night after my sleepy town has gone to bed. There aren’t enough lights to drown out the majesty of the night sky, and I still get up in the middle of the night and step onto my roof to revel in its beauty. It makes me want to know more about it; I want to know how to get there. I want to know more about physics and chemistry and architecture. Sometimes, I even want to learn about that more than things I’m learning in my self-chosen majors. Sometimes, I even find a refuge from endless hours of papers and projects when I simply take a break to find out what else is going on in the world. Today, I spent an hour watching a live stream of the NASA Open House Mars Panel at the Inauguration. I couldn’t think of another thing I’d rather be doing.

Graphic designer Jessica Hische makes a good point:

“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”

I have 16 years of school under my belt and I feel like I haven’t learned a thing. If I could do nothing but learn for the rest of my life–if the thought of it didn’t make my bank account cry and thrash and spontaneously combust–I would. But I can’t. Someday I have to enter into the “real world” and do real things and start a real family and I fear I won’t have time to listen to incredible people talk about how there might be life-sustaining potential on Mars or read for hours about social revolutions and the robots of the future as designed by Dunne & Raby.

Now, tomorrow is the real world. Tomorrow is where and when the life I’ve always dreamed of might actually begin. And don’t get me wrong, I have dreams very relevant to what I love doing and can see myself doing for the rest of my life, and I’m excited about them. Yesterday, all I wanted to be was finished with school. And today, I still want to be finished with school, as an institution. But I’ve made a vow to myself to never stop learning, never stop stepping outside of my comfort zone to learn something new, never stop discovering what the world has to offer. And never, ever stop living in Today.

“One of the reasons we as humans are so successful is that we have this driving curiosity, the need to explore.” -John Grunsfeld

Here and There, and Now.

In the past, I’ve visited far distant cities and towns and traveled for hours on open roads–all for the purpose of being anywhere but here. You could almost argue that it didn’t matter where “here” even was, that it was merely an idea that encompassed a burning restlessness and an unquenchable desire to be “not here,” a.k.a. “there.”

Where is this “there,” exactly? I never knew. Sometimes, it was a left turn when I should have gone right; a deviance–great or small–from the expected route, the way home. Sometimes, it was a destination with a purpose, sometimes an unplanned adventure. Today, it has a name, it is real, it is “there”. Suddenly I realized that “there” isn’t so much a place as it is a way of life. It was never about this city, or that one. It was never the place, at all, that left me in want. It was the “here,” and the “now.” It was the life I’ve grown all too comfortable with; the life that I’m simply…growing out of.

But then there’s the lingering question of “How can you grow out of a life?” You are a life. You have a life. Life doesn’t grow out of life. Quit being ridiculous.

Maybe somewhere in the mix lives a valid argument, but here is mine:

A woman named Ellen Johnson Sirleaf wrote,

“If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.”

And so once upon a restless night I decided right then and there to turn my dreams into a horror story; just like that. Little did I know, I am an expert in the field. My first thought was something along the lines of, “What is my biggest fear?” My second thought was, “Failure.” My third was, “So I’m supposed to dream of failure?” My fourth was “I would never make it as a Producer in New York.” My last was, “Well, there you have it.”

And then all of that skin crawling fear ate itself alive and all that remained was the flesh and bones of determination, of excitement, of a passionate desire to prove myself wrong.

So here we are. Hunger, desire, gnashing of teeth. This is where “there” begins.