New Year

Periodically I get unhappy with the direction my life is going. Read: I get jealous of other people I know who are doing things I wish I were doing. New year seems like a good time to explore these feelings. The new year always comes with a sense of possibility and change. I realize this is largely a construct, because what makes December 31st different from January 1st is about 30 seconds of sunlight, but it's good to look back and look forward at a significant time.

I never really want to go out and party for new year. Or any other time, really. I'd much rather have a private party with my friends. But this year, Andrew and I are in Phoenix essentially alone. So, the only option besides staying in alone with the cat is going out with strangers and feeling connected to the world at large instead of basking in the glow of friendship. But I imagine the hassle of getting there and back, the MONEY OMG it's not cheap to go to the Fiesta Bowl block party, and the boredom that comes from standing in a loud crowd for several hours doing nothing, and I don't really want to go. But I don't really want to stay at home alone. I feel like to make my life worth living I should be out doing interesting and unusual things to mark the passage of time.

Which of course brings me to my thoughts on the direction my life is headed in general. I love traveling. When I hear about friends who get to travel all over the place for their school or their jobs, or get to meet interesting people in the course of their work... I think about how I mostly watch Star Trek and surf the internet and wonder how I can make that into a jet-setting career path. I get so jealous. And what better time of the year than new year to think about changes I can make to have the life I want? Yet, it doesn't seem likely that getting my degree in rhetoric and composition will further those goals.

Not that I don't love my master's program! I do. But I wish I could make it more amazing. I wish I knew what I wanted.

American Bed

My dad’s life is simultaneously representative of the iconic American journey and a life of unusual stories. When I think of the stories he tells that stick with me, I think of the ones where he was sleeping somewhere unconventional. From his youth sleeping on a cot on the screened-in porch during the Wyoming summers (there wasn't room anywhere else in the tiny Wyoming homestead) to his feather-soft queen sized bed in Moses Lake on which he sleeps next to my stepmother these days (his back pains him after years of wrestling and flying, and two consequent surgeries), where my dad has spent his nights highlights the path his life has taken. 

The cryptic reference to the hotel bathtub he used as a bed in Hong Kong from his navy bachelor days represents a time in his life that remains largely hidden from me. The night my mom died, his bed was empty. He had rushed her to the hospital, and that’s where she died. That night, he didn’t sleep at all. And the next time he did get to sleep, she wasn’t there. Tonight he is about to go to sleep on my air mattress in my guest bedroom in Phoenix, Arizona. He and my stepmom are visiting me, and we’ve had a lot of time to just talk because I’m currently getting my Master’s degree and it’s finals week, so I can’t go out and do anything interesting with them.

It seems to me like where and how you sleep can say a lot about what you’ve been doing during the day. That’s why I think it’s interesting to imagine all the nights my dad has had in his life. Everyone shares the night, but my dad’s nights symbolize the stories that make up one unique American story—one of many American stories that make up this American life.