Brief Update for the New Year, and some pictures of waves

There isn't much to say, actually, but there might be soon. I have a second job interview tomorrow, to become an assistant manager for two apartment/townhouse complexes owned by a small company. I like the idea of helping people become at home. I drank green juice today and lifted weights. I have sore muscles from getting back into the gym routine, which is nice. There is someone in my life who makes me laugh so hard I tremble, someone whose smile reminds me of the sun at high noon, and that's even nicer.

I think it's been half a year since I posted here. My summer was a whirlwind. There was a lot of love there, a lot of earth, sky, and water. The fruit festival was overwhelming but glorious. Costa Rica was strange and normal at the same time. I really got lost in it. I let myself get sucked into the ocean by massive waves over and over so that I could take pictures of the water towering over me with the waterproof camera I bought right before I left. It's so wonderfully bizarre that you can step into a body of water and risk your breath at the hands of the moon. The earth's daughter reached down and tumbled me like a dice. It was spectacular.

I got sunburned on a twelve mile bike ride up and down steep hills through the jungle on a rusty single-speed beach cruiser. I wasn't really dry for a week because of the humidity and rain. I woke up sticky every morning, and usually sandy, too. My mom once asked me if I ever wake up wondering where I am when I travel, if it takes a few minutes to remember where I've ended up. No, never, because I don't ultimately care where I wake up. Every place feels normal to me. Anywhere could be home. Impermanence has won itself a permanent seat at the table of my psyche. Wherever I am, I just am. Isn't that the only way it can be?

In the spirit of impermanence (and needing an income while looking for a "real" job), I've been temporarily working for Instacart as a personal grocery shopper for about four months now. It was fun for a while, and then it got really old really fast. But it gives me flexibility, time for myself, time for job applications, time for the holidays, and it gives me as few as two or as many as twelve hours of work every day that I want it. And the while endless aisles of soda and dead animals and highly-processed former food are slightly depressing, I do get to spend a lot time listening to audiobooks and NPR in the car, touring the Peninsula and seeing the outsides and insides of some of it's prettiest houses.

I'm still reading a lot. I just finished This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald), which I really enjoyed. I also recently finished The Bell Jar (Plath), The Prophet (Gibran--so wonderful, will read it again very soon), Whole (Campbell--a great book about nutrition), Northanger Abbey (Austen--pretty ridiculous), and a half to most of a handful other other books, mostly non-fiction, the kind where you feel like you've gotten the gist of it halfway through and have no motivation to continue. (One of these was called "Excellent Sheep," about the problems with higher education in America. It would have been interesting if I hadn't gone to college, but I did, so it was all old news to me.) Tomorrow I am going to a Louise Glück poetry reading and reception at Stanford, which I've been looking forward to for months.

Today I started memorizing this fantastic poem:

The Song of the Mouth-Organ
by Robert W. Service

(With apologies to the singer of the "Song of the Banjo".)

I'm a homely little bit of tin and bone;
I'm beloved by the Legion of the Lost;
I haven't got a "vox humana" tone,
And a dime or two will satisfy my cost.
I don't attempt your high-falutin' flights;
I am more or less uncertain on the key;
But I tell you, boys, there's lots and lots of nights
When you've taken mighty comfort out of me.

I weigh an ounce or two, and I'm so small
You can pack me in the pocket of your vest;
And when at night so wearily you crawl
Into your bunk and stretch your limbs to rest,
You take me out and play me soft and low,
The simple songs that trouble your heartstrings;
The tunes you used to fancy long ago,
Before you made a rotten mess of things.

Then a dreamy look will come into your eyes,
And you break off in the middle of a note;
And then, with just the dreariest of sighs,
You drop me in the pocket of your coat.
But somehow I have bucked you up a bit;
And, as you turn around and face the wall,
You don't feel quite so spineless and unfit--
You're not so bad a fellow after all.

Do you recollect the bitter Arctic night;
Your camp beside the canyon on the trail;
Your tent a tiny square of orange light;
The moon above consumptive-like and pale;
Your supper cooked, your little stove aglow;
You tired, but snug and happy as a child?
Then 'twas "Turkey in the Straw" till your lips were nearly raw,
And you hurled your bold defiance at the Wild.

Do you recollect the flashing, lashing pain;
The gulf of humid blackness overhead;
The lightning making rapiers of the rain;
The cattle-horns like candles of the dead
You sitting on your bronco there alone,
In your slicker, saddle-sore and sick with cold?
Do you think the silent herd did not hear "The Mocking Bird",
Or relish "Silver Threads among the Gold"?

Do you recollect the wild Magellan coast;
The head-winds and the icy, roaring seas;
The nights you thought that everything was lost;
The days you toiled in water to your knees;
The frozen ratlines shrieking in the gale;
The hissing steeps and gulfs of livid foam:
When you cheered your messmates nine with "Ben Bolt" and "Clementine",
And "Dixie Land" and "Seeing Nellie Home"?

Let the jammy banjo voice the Younger Son,
Who waits for his remittance to arrive;
I represent the grimy, gritty one,
Who sweats his bones to keep himself alive;
Who's up against the real thing from his birth;
Whose heritage is hard and bitter toil;
I voice the weary, smeary ones of earth,
The helots of the sea and of the soil.

I'm the Steinway of strange mischief and mischance;
I'm the Stradivarius of blank defeat;
In the down-world, when the devil leads the dance,
I am simply and symbolically meet;
I'm the irrepressive spirit of mankind;
I'm the small boy playing knuckle down with Death;
At the end of all things known, where God's rubbish-heap is thrown,
I shrill impudent triumph at a breath.

I'm a humble little bit of tin and horn;
I'm a byword, I'm a plaything, I'm a jest;
The virtuoso looks on me with scorn;
But there's times when I am better than the best.
Ask the stoker and the sailor of the sea;
Ask the mucker and the hewer of the pine;
Ask the herder of the plain, ask the gleaner of the grain--
There's a lowly, loving kingdom--and it's mine.

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I think I'll leave it at that. I hope to report on my new career soon.