Week 4 is like a melting popsicle—you know you are supposed to be enjoying it, but all you can think about while it drips is how sickly sweet it is and how stifling the air is and how sticky your hands are and how sad you are going to be when it is gone. And you just can’t bring yourself to lick away the oozing juice to get to the still frozen core, which is what you wanted at the start.
I came up with this simile as I was walking across the parking lot just having closed the arts and crafts room for extended day. I'm not sure it really makes sense, but I kind of like it.
As humans, we are constantly dealing with the passing of time and how that passing brings the closure and beginnings of events and times in our lives. It seems like most of our lives we view this passing in a binary—either wishing it would speed up or dragging out the seconds. But lately I've been feeling a little more ambivalent than these two views would accurately describe. I love camp, but I also cannot wait for it to end. But when it ends, I'm forced to reckon with the fact that I am going back to undergrad for the last time in my life (and that I have spent the summer reading YA instead of articles on college freshman’s understanding of genre).
It reminds me of the “already not yet” eschatology that I learned about in 10th grade in my religion class. Jesus has already come, inducting in the new earth, but he hasn't come again to complete this transformation. We're in this kind of limbo where we have this amazing hope confirmed but not yet completed. Time feels like this kind of limbo state too. When I look at my life, I'm filled with excitement and dread concurrently for things that I have done, things that I am doing, and things that are meant to come.
Often times this limbo makes me miss things before they are done simply because I know they will be done. I feel this to an extent with camp, but I really felt it a week ago when I finally went to the Kingdom Hearts World Tour Orchestra concert in Boston. I had heard the orchestra was coming to Boston in February, bought tickets in March, and now was finally getting to exist in a room with people who love my favorite game as much as I do. It became real as Lars and I shared a smile after we spotted a guy wearing Kingdom Hearts (KH) shirt walking the opposite direction. As we turned the corner to get to the theatre, all I could see were people lining up to get inside. Some of them were cosplayers and the kind of people you would imagine at a concert like this, but most were people who I would pass on a street without a second glance.
The point is, the moment I sat down and looked at the video screen and the empty chairs awaiting musicians, all I could think was, “This'll be over in 2 and a half hours.” I had waited and anticipated all this time, and now I could hardly enjoy it. I put it out of my head for the most or the concert, but the sadness hit me again when we stood up, collected our things, and made our way home (which was a comedy of errors).
One of the details that stuck out to me on my last read through of M.T. Anderson's Feed, probably one of the most important books I've read, was his treatment of nostalgia. In the book, the trends that the characters are into are always based on ironic misunderstandings of the past. Towards the end when everything is falling apart, people start getting nostalgic of times that are closer and closer to them until they are nostalgic for the present moment and become frozen in this nostalgia feedback loop. I felt like those characters in the midst of other KH nerds—nostalgic for the very moment I was in.
Being in the moment is cliché, and I'm not sure if it's the answer I'm looking for in these musings. Knowing that the moment is going to end helps me focus on the important things while I am still experiencing it, but focusing too much on the grains of sand slipping through my fingers makes me lose those important things altogether.
Seeing this event for what it was—passing—allowed me to see something more—the beauty of the impermanence of live music. I liked hearing live music because its imperfections reminded me that actual humans were behind these pieces of art, both in composing and performing them. Every note that passed was a moment in time that couldn't be exactly captured again, and they reignited the life of pieces that in some ways had become a part of the soundtrack of my life.
Is that too cheesy?
Poetry: “I saw Emmett Till at the grocery store this week” by Eve L. Ewing
I saw this poem a lot this week, commemorating what would have been Emmett Hill’s 77th birthday on July 25th. I don't think I quite understand it, but it mourns the lynchings that were so present in America less than a hundred years ago.
Books: Out on the Wire by Jessica Abel
This graphic novel is all about the art of narrative radio storytelling, which seems like an odd medium choice. It is very dense and hard to follow at times due to the meta nature of it (a graphic novel made up of interviews of radio people talking about how to conduct good interviews and cut down hours of time into seconds or minutes). It overwhelmed me, but in a way that made me want to buy the book. As a lover of story podcasts, it paradoxically made me want to never even think about making a podcast of my own and want to make one right now. Even if you aren't into radio, it has some great insights into how to do stories well.
I came up with this simile as I was walking across the parking lot just having closed the arts and crafts room for extended day. I'm not sure it really makes sense, but I kind of like it.
As humans, we are constantly dealing with the passing of time and how that passing brings the closure and beginnings of events and times in our lives. It seems like most of our lives we view this passing in a binary—either wishing it would speed up or dragging out the seconds. But lately I've been feeling a little more ambivalent than these two views would accurately describe. I love camp, but I also cannot wait for it to end. But when it ends, I'm forced to reckon with the fact that I am going back to undergrad for the last time in my life (and that I have spent the summer reading YA instead of articles on college freshman’s understanding of genre).
It reminds me of the “already not yet” eschatology that I learned about in 10th grade in my religion class. Jesus has already come, inducting in the new earth, but he hasn't come again to complete this transformation. We're in this kind of limbo where we have this amazing hope confirmed but not yet completed. Time feels like this kind of limbo state too. When I look at my life, I'm filled with excitement and dread concurrently for things that I have done, things that I am doing, and things that are meant to come.
Often times this limbo makes me miss things before they are done simply because I know they will be done. I feel this to an extent with camp, but I really felt it a week ago when I finally went to the Kingdom Hearts World Tour Orchestra concert in Boston. I had heard the orchestra was coming to Boston in February, bought tickets in March, and now was finally getting to exist in a room with people who love my favorite game as much as I do. It became real as Lars and I shared a smile after we spotted a guy wearing Kingdom Hearts (KH) shirt walking the opposite direction. As we turned the corner to get to the theatre, all I could see were people lining up to get inside. Some of them were cosplayers and the kind of people you would imagine at a concert like this, but most were people who I would pass on a street without a second glance.
The point is, the moment I sat down and looked at the video screen and the empty chairs awaiting musicians, all I could think was, “This'll be over in 2 and a half hours.” I had waited and anticipated all this time, and now I could hardly enjoy it. I put it out of my head for the most or the concert, but the sadness hit me again when we stood up, collected our things, and made our way home (which was a comedy of errors).
One of the details that stuck out to me on my last read through of M.T. Anderson's Feed, probably one of the most important books I've read, was his treatment of nostalgia. In the book, the trends that the characters are into are always based on ironic misunderstandings of the past. Towards the end when everything is falling apart, people start getting nostalgic of times that are closer and closer to them until they are nostalgic for the present moment and become frozen in this nostalgia feedback loop. I felt like those characters in the midst of other KH nerds—nostalgic for the very moment I was in.
Being in the moment is cliché, and I'm not sure if it's the answer I'm looking for in these musings. Knowing that the moment is going to end helps me focus on the important things while I am still experiencing it, but focusing too much on the grains of sand slipping through my fingers makes me lose those important things altogether.
Seeing this event for what it was—passing—allowed me to see something more—the beauty of the impermanence of live music. I liked hearing live music because its imperfections reminded me that actual humans were behind these pieces of art, both in composing and performing them. Every note that passed was a moment in time that couldn't be exactly captured again, and they reignited the life of pieces that in some ways had become a part of the soundtrack of my life.
Is that too cheesy?
Poetry: “I saw Emmett Till at the grocery store this week” by Eve L. Ewing
I saw this poem a lot this week, commemorating what would have been Emmett Hill’s 77th birthday on July 25th. I don't think I quite understand it, but it mourns the lynchings that were so present in America less than a hundred years ago.
Books: Out on the Wire by Jessica Abel
This graphic novel is all about the art of narrative radio storytelling, which seems like an odd medium choice. It is very dense and hard to follow at times due to the meta nature of it (a graphic novel made up of interviews of radio people talking about how to conduct good interviews and cut down hours of time into seconds or minutes). It overwhelmed me, but in a way that made me want to buy the book. As a lover of story podcasts, it paradoxically made me want to never even think about making a podcast of my own and want to make one right now. Even if you aren't into radio, it has some great insights into how to do stories well.