Pig Zen

Downtown Palo Alto, CA, August 2008.

Amongst the recent uploads on Flickr, I (not surprisingly) found some guy’s vacation pictures.  He and his companion were touring the Swiss Alps.  While I liked the images, they weren’t all that inspired, just snapshots.  Mostly they made me homesick for the thin air and rocky horizons of my former home. I wish I could include one of the images here but he didn’t mark them as being available under Creative Commons.  So, let that be a lesson to you: if you want random bloggers that are perhaps overly IP sensitive to be able to effectively comment on your work, don’t check the “all rights reserved” box.

What was more interesting was that the guy listed his home as being Tokyo.  He was definitely of northern European, i.e. white, descent.  I would imagine that’s a pretty big change from where most northern Europeans usually hang out.  While the guy’s parents could have moved to Japan before he was born and the pachinko parlors and tea rooms of Tokyo could be all he’s ever known, that’s not what first popped into my head.  Is he there temporarily as a student or for work?  Or is he a full-fledged ex-pat?  I’d kind of love to know.

What makes someone eschew their homeland?  Persecution, famine, and pestilence are perfectly sensible things to run from, but most of Europe doesn’t really suffer from those anymore.  My boss is English and California is remarkably less gray and damp than England, so that makes sense to me.  Well, that, and what we do at my job they don’t do on quite the same scale back in his Old Country.  I guess Europeans don’t have the luxury of expansive geography that Americans have, although EU denizens have more options now.

It’s one thing for me to pick up and move within the U.S. since there’s much less hardship and risk involved — I don’t have to apply for difficult papers to get a job in California, and I can always go back.  While I’d love to make an extended visit, semi-permanently crossing an ocean, being forever immersed in a different language, dealing with a different tax system, and doing without shnitzel or pickled herring or proper lunch meat seems like more than a bridge too far.

My house in The Old Country, April 2002.  I have no idea why I parked the car on the street.

Still dependent on the writing prompts:

If you woke up ten years younger tomorrow, what would be the first thing you would do?

So this can be read a couple of different ways. I guess I’m thinking about waking up tomorrow and it’s ten years ago. The alternate interpretation, a sort of Big in reverse, would be way too weird. Herself would be scared shitless to wake up next to the 20-year-old me, and she’d die laughing at my hair. My boss would want a scientific explanation for what happened. At least I wouldn’t have to steal any clothes and stay in an by-the-hour motel.

It’s actually a disturbing coincidence, because 10 years ago, I was down in Los Angeles, working a contract job. It was my first time away from home on my own. That was a definite learning experience for me; yes, that’s code for “it didn’t turn out how I thought.” That adventure gave me some confidence in my grown-up skills, my abilities to handle the unexpected. Of course, that ability mostly consists of the same thing they teach little kids in Finding Nemo: “just keep swimming.”

These last ten years have been… well, what most people’s twenties are: learning how to been an independent adult. I can pay my own rent, I still have use of all my body parts, and I don’t have a serious criminal record; so I guess I was pretty successful in learning those lessons. I developed a reasonably useful professional skill set and had more of those learning experiences. I’ve met some wonderful people and been some fun places. I fell in love.

I’ve always said that I don’t regret the choices I’ve made over the years; I wouldn’t be who I am today without everything that came before it. All of the angst I have lately shows I no longer value this version of me as much as I used to, though.

Would I trade what I have now for the promise of something different? I’m glad I don’t have to decide because even with ten extra years under my belt, I still don’t have the tools to choose and believe I chose wisely. I do wish I could tell myself to put a few bucks into some well-placed stocks and to not make that illegal turn, though.

So, I did it.  I wrote something almost every day for a month.  Go me. To do a proper post-mortem, I’d need to re-read everything and see if there’s anything I really like.  In thinking back about it, I’m not sure I’ll find anything I think is great or even good.  I’m not going to lie, it was a quantity and consistency over quality exercise.

In my early days of writing online, I really did turn out more of a diary/journal sort of thing; I wrote about what I did and thought over the day.  When I re-read it those words now, I actually enjoy parts of it and find it worthwhile, but I don’t think I could write that way again. That was six, seven, eight years ago.  A good writer should be able to take any topic and make it worth reading and I don’t think I can do that with my life now.  Sadly, I barely have the will to trudge through the day, let alone having to re-live it, punch it up, and regurgitate it in an engaging fashion at night.  That sounds horrible and soul-sucking.  I imagine it’s true for most people, too.

Losing interest in the everyday is what drove me to the essay format I stick with now.  I’m proud of myself that I was able to stick with it for a whole month.  While there’s some truth in what I write, some real feeling, I suppose a lot of this comes across as forced and overwrought.  Maybe that’s the truest part of it.

The pictures were so much harder.  I was okay with writing whatever, proofing it a little, and publishing it, but I have a hell of a time picking out what photo to resize and post.  Herself often had to tell me, “yes, that picture’s fine, just put it up, geesh.”  I look at so many of the pictures I find on Flickr and it breaks my heart that I can’t figure out how to take them myself.

I desperately want to be a better photographer and I’m not sure why I hold my images to so much of a higher standard than my words, especially when there’s luck involved with photography: right place, right time, right light.  A writer is in complete control.  Maybe photography appeals to a different part of my brain than writing does.  Words have to be mapped into images and action but nothing gets lost in translation with a good photograph.

I think it’s important to keep going, although I won’t continue writing on a daily basis.  While the deadline is the only thing that got me writing again, the pressure makes me into a mass-producer rather than a craftsman.  Far more robots than humans ever see these words anyway.