Almost without exception, hats are truly ridiculous. Sure, any hat will cover the top of your head and perhaps keep some warmth in your body on a cold night, or shield your eyes from the glaring sun. Yet real hats, the kind you find at Sacred Feather, a hat store in Madison, possess no real practicality, no real usefulness. They are an accessory of the highest degree, in part because they’re so obvious (where earrings or a necklace might go unnoticed).

I have mostly one hat, a newsies, scottish cap type cap that found me one day on a trip to L.L. Bean, when I had no intention of getting a hat. It’s got fur or wool or something on the inside, making it a warm weather hat, so I only end up wearing it in the winter. As much as I don’t want to wear brown all the time just to spite my mother, the fact is that brown probably looks better on me than black, and this hat, and the jackets it goes with, are no exception.

The thing is, it actually takes a bit of brazen, bravado, or balls to wear a hat out in public. There’s something just totally ridiculous about it, something so impractical and inexplicable. Shoes, pants, shirts, jackets, most other articles of clothing that you can wear can also look good, but that doesn’t negate their primary function of allowing you to walk in the outdoors and protect your feet, or not be naked, or maintain some warmth, or whatever it may be. (Leggings controvert everything I have just said.) Hat simply don’t fit any of those requirements.

Why do I bring this up? Because it feels important to be brazenly ridiculous every once in a while. There’s something succulent about making a show of things simply because on can. It adds character and pizzazz and makes the edges of life that much more interesting. If you take the hat too seriously, you just feel silly. And that, for me at least, is what it’s a reminder of; to not take things too seriously. It gives me license to riposte with my vocabulary, or send innocuous emails around to my office every week riffing about some literary character that strikes my fancy (I’m serious about this one). It gives me permission to banter with friends about ridiculous rules or situations we create and lets me generally try and do something different with the day in and day out. It’s hats.

It’s the cherry on top.

None of this is a particular deep or insightful theory, I just wanted the world to know that I think it should wear more hats, because why not? Everybody looks good in one hat or another. And even if you don’t…so what?

In the last three weeks, I’ve moved from Capitol Hill to Columbia Heights, spent a week at home with my family, drove to Indiana, and generally had a crazy time at work doing a big report (which we released today, and was somewhere on the NYT website, if you can find it…) All of this is to say, I’ve been doing a lot of moving around.

I’ve observed several things about myself over these last three weeks, which I would like to share.

1) I really like driving around in cars. This feels like an odd and stupid admission, in part because I pride myself on being without (in this case a car) and also sensitive to the materials I use.

The former is rather straightforward. I have positive associations with the knowledge that there are things that I want and could have which I deny myself. When I write it like that, it sounds painfully Catholic, but I don’t mean it in a way that denies myself happiness. I like being able to do without extraneous things which will not necessarily yield greater happiness. I’d love a flat screen TV, and if I wanted to drain my savings, I could probably afford one. But I gain satisfaction is instead having a TV handed down by a friend from college that works just fine and does not increase my waste or decrease my wallet. It’s an ascetic aesthetic.

The latter, being sensitive to the materials I use, would be perhaps less complicatedly described as awareness. While I have no love of the using the metro to get to work, it gives me satisfaction that I’m using public transportation and decreasing the amount of waste and pollution I am creating accordingly. This is sort of an environmental pleasure but not really. It’s the same feeling I get when I cook a big meal in the kitchen and then clean it up afterwards. I don’t particularly like cleaning the kitchen, but I do like the lack of trace I have left upon the world. Since I view dirty dishes and strewn food containers to be an evil, especially to my nice roommates, I enjoy doing things that make those realities exist for only a short period of time. In the same way, while I don’t like the metro, I like that my imprint is smaller and my inconvenience to the resources around me is closer to the ideal, which is negligible.

All of that said…I really like driving around in cars. Family friends lent me a car so they could move to Indiana in a single car (and I would bring their second one afterwards), and I really enjoyed the cross country drive through the mountains and towns I’d never visited. But what I enjoyed most was when I got to their town. They were off at dinner with some new friends, and I so drove around their small town, checked out the college campus they’re working at, looked for a local eatery to get dinner at, etc. I just self-propelled myself all over the place.

I never experienced this in college, this desire to move around more efficiently. Perhaps it was because college was a series of sprints between breaks and summers and so the feeling of commuting to work every day by foot or public transportation never had an opportunity to sink in. But now, after being in DC for a year, a small tic inside of me is looking to just move.

2) I’m seriously impressed with how much I identify as being from Wisconsin these days. In college, I was from Wisconsin, but it was more a fact of life rather than something I regarded as part of my heritage (largely because I didn’t spend a lot of time regarding my heritage). I think this was helped by the fact that college was full of people from all over who were equally fish out of water, and our respective places of origin were more guiding factors to our cultural experiences rather than indicative realities of who we were in college.

While it’s true that most of the people in DC I know are also from all the fuck over the place, it’s not quite the same. We are all here to live, to claim space, and to make anew our adult identities. And so, perhaps quite reasonably, I have reached for Wisconsin as my cultural home and identity.

What is more interesting than me adopting Wisconsin as my rhetorical Mecca though is how odd (in a good way) it felt to be in Wisconsin when I visited my family this month. I would like to believe that the positive experience was not merely one of nostalgia or familiarity. I certainly enjoyed doing things I’ve done before and draw comfort from familiarity, but it was, I think, somewhat different than that.

(This is the tricky part to describe.) Perhaps it’s the intangibles, like pace of life or the amount of personal body space allowed in public. Maybe it’s something to do with number one on my list, and in DC I just don’t have the freedom of movement that I do in Wisconsin. I’m inclined to think that those issues are involved, but that it’s more than that.

As I’ve adjusted to this new post college world where goals are not as obvious and outcomes are less explicit, I’ve identified two motivating goals which are in many cases, at least for me right now, at odds with each other. There is Success and there is Personal Happiness. I largely mean Success in the professional sense, but really just in the sense of overcoming a challenge, making an imprint upon the world, or positively affecting the lives of others. Doing something that has results which might make me happy in the long term but whose day to day effort is hard and challenging in all the best ways.

Personal Happiness, on the other hand, is the sort of thing that is fulfilled by drowning myself in the people I love and spending all my time and resources to maximize my exposure to those people (and finding new ones). Forming a commune with my best friends from college would be one extreme form of this. The two are intertwined in some way, but in fundamental ways are separated by location in my life.

Because my interest right now is largely in policy and politics, in understanding the laws and attitudes that govern my country, and in attempting to engage in what I consider to be an important national dialogue, my Success goal is fulfilled by being in DC. I am fortunate enough to be around friends here that I love and cherish, and am slowly working up the nerve to expand that social circle even further. However, my family that I love, my wonderful niece and nephew who are growing up and learning all about the world, my siblings that I would love to have dinner with every week so that they could know me better and I them, these people are all in Wisconsin and I believe them to be a significant part of my Personal Happiness.

A serious portion of me wants to make a life tomorrow in Wisconsin because I want to fulfill more of my Personal Happiness. I don’t think I would be entirely fulfilled by just my family and going to my niece and nephew’s swimming lessons every day (although it’d be a good start), since I have friends that I care deeply about that aren’t in Wisconsin and maintaining autonomy from my family is important to my emotional well-being. That said, I think it was a longing to focus on this Personal Happiness goal that left me feeling differently than I have about Wisconsin since high school. Because I’m perpetually feeling this tug between these two important and meaningful values, being so close to one that I feel far away from makes it all the more attractive.

So that’s that. My movement, between places, values, goals, and states of mind, has consumed me as of late. I think I have a long way to go before I’ll be able to reconcile the balance between Success and Personal Happiness, but I’m content to give myself the space to figure what Success means to me for the time being. It is entirely possible that Success could become as small a world as improving the Personal Happiness of those who improve my Personal Happiness. At the end of life, when you’re retired and slower to stand up, when you have a lot more to look back at over your shoulder than to look ahead to, I think Personal Happiness is what’s going to matter, and the people you cared about and cared for through life is what will be meaningful.

But I’m not old yet, and if you learn a lesson before that lesson is due, I think you’re liable to have missed the point entirely.

Leah: So what’d you do this evening?
Joe: I watched Toy Story 3.
Leah: Isn’t it sad!?
Joe: Yeah. It was really sad at the end when he goes off to college.
Leah: I know!
Joe: But then I was thinking, that’s not really that sad, because he’ll go to college and meet cool people and have a lot of fun. He’ll learn and laugh and it’ll be great. What’s really sad is how he’s going to lull himself into this false sense of security about how great life is and then he’ll leave college in four years. He won’t be near any of his friends and he’ll be all alone in a big scary world. That’s what’s really sad.
Leah: Joe…I think you’re projecting.

***********

Whether or not it’s true, I’ve always thought I took a much longer view of my life than the average person. When making decisions of any consequence, I routinely jump to the five or ten year window to consider what my best choice might be, the sort of world that is much more easily considered thanks to the past participle. “Will I want to have seen this place?” “Will I want to have done this activity?” “Will I be embarrassed to explain this activity to someone in the future?” It is not, by any means, the only perspective worth considering. In fact, I often find myself laden with too much perspective–sometimes you just need to skip class and go to the ocean or do what feels right rather than what will seem to have felt right.

This is related, at least emotionally, to thinking about my past and future. I wonder whether I took advantage of everything I could in high school or college, or if I really appreciated X person at Y event. I also use those thoughts, those possible regrets or warm, perfect memories, to think about my life right now as though I were five years hence. What sort of warm fuzzy spot in my heart will I have for my first apartment and my first job? Though life doesn’t feel what I would call perfect, will time erase some of that away and I’ll long to be in my younger twenties again?

I took a picture on my phone of my roommates on the metro on the way back home after celebrating one of their birthdays. I knew when I was taking it that I would look back and think, “Gosh, I felt young then. The $70 I just spent on a super nice dinner was really special and really unusual; I don’t spend money like that. I felt more like I was playing a part than being my age and it was fun. These two will look really young in this picture one day.”

Every week and a half or so I try and remind myself to spend five minutes to think about how empty my life is of commitment right now. The only person I have to take care of is myself. I have no dog, no child, no car, no ailing parent, no significant other, no yard, no nothing. I shop for food for myself, I clothe myself, I pay rent for myself. The only real obligation I have is to my roommates, and that’s simply to do my fair share of house work. I know a day will come when I long for this amount of freedom; this lack of extracurricular activity; this daily knowledge that life after 5:30 and on the weekends is by and large mine.

It’s really hard though to live in the moment. I thought time flew by in college, but that’s when every week was different. It flew by, sure, but it was also packed to the brim with activity. Not College (for lack of a better term) goes by even more quickly. I’ve had a fortunate string of guests and NYC visits the last three months, but most weeks are comparable to each other. Work ebbs and flows, but it doesn’t quite have the same crescendo and climax that a 14-week college course did. There is a lot to it that stays the same every day. And this sameness makes feeling a strong sense of purpose difficult. I have a broad sense of purpose but…hmmm.

Imagine a row of thimbles, each large enough to hold 1 milliliter of purpose. Over any given six month period, I have, let’s say, 100 milliliters of purpose. So when my college semester is 98 days long, I’ve got plenty of purpose to go around. In practice, some thimbles, or days, were only 1/2 a milliliter and others were overflowing with purpose, but there was plenty of purpose to go around.

Now think about the considerably less structured Not College. I have hundreds and hundreds of thimbles laying before me, but still about the same amount of purpose (and perhaps even a little less since I’m not surrounded by similarly purposed peers). Every weekday requires a certain amount of purpose, enough to get up on time, wear clean clothes to work, pack a lunch, and be at least moderately productive so that I continue to be employed. Then, ideally, I put some more purpose into every weekday so that I go above expectations and succeed at work, for the benefit of myself and my place of employment (who’s efforts I strongly believe in). Some purpose will also go to special events, like going home or perhaps Saturday night when my friends and I go out.

What’s left though is a lot of 6 PM-10 PM time periods and weekends whose thimbles are fairly dry of purpose. I want to read more and take advantage of all the extra time I have. I have desires. I have a prototypical world that I’m far from matching. But it requires a greater sense of urgency than I’ve found as of late. I’m looking at so, so many thimbles and it’s hard to know for sure where they’re going or where to best put my efforts. My age no longer connotes it’s own purpose (23 doesn’t mean anything). I am floating in a nebulous void of self-determination, but it’s hard to self-determine when theirs nothing much to grab on to. I know, I’m simply begging the question. (Look it up if it’s not immediately obvious what that last sentence meant.)

To go back to the beginning, this is all to say that I’m not sure how to feel about this time period in my life. I have a lot of feelings and a lot of thoughts about how I could feel (or maybe thoughts about the thoughts that I might have about how I feel?–that was a joke), but I’m not sure how I do feel. And that’s okay only so long as it’s not permanent. These are just late night musings though–I get to research and write for a living. I have a great thing going, it’s just a little less clear than I’d like it to be at the moment.

Looks like Obama’s about to make a statement that Osama Bin Laden has been killed. I’m going to go watch that–have a good night.

I really avoid having an opinion. Hard, immovable opinions are to me like spiders are to Miss Muffet, cliffs are to lemmings, and polio is to those sugar cubes they handed out in the 60s. I just don’t like them. I hate the thought that I could be unswayed by a compelling argument because I was so immovable. Sure, I’ll fight to the death anyone who thinks there’s a root beer out there better than Sprecher’s, but I still have tons of questions about even the policy work I am paid to do every day.

This is part a reflection because of the intractability of those I see around me. When I butt heads with someone that can’t stop and say, “Hmmm, you might have a point,” (especially when the point they might be acknowledging is my own) I go a little crazy. Just as I want desperately to be respected for my thoughts, I respect others. I offer my own opinions sparingly precisely because I want people to think that I care about the opinions that I do share. When the world is full of everyone with their own opinion, I think we all suffer a bit. For instance, we all think we know what the best way to teach a class is and are very quick to judge the techniques of others, especially if our own children are involved. We are not raised to loudly and firmly proclaim, “I don’t know much about this and have an uninformed opinion on the subject!” That’s seen as lazy. “Hurry up! Have an opinion! Be passionate or those that do will beat you to it.”

I remember interning in the Senate and lamenting that each Senator *had* to have an opinion on every policy matter because they had constituents that cared about every issue. As a Senator, you feel the need to be equally outspoken on all issues to leave no voter unsatisfied; postal reform, the department of defense, and water rights should have clearly defined positions and motivations. How exhausting to be so opinionated. I find it difficult enough to pick something to cook any given night, let alone be totally consumed by both postal reform *and* water rights. To loosely riff on Oscar Wilde, Only dull people are care about everything [at breakfast].

Let’s take such well-trodden ground as, I lament to bring up, abortion. Is there any person who can see no logic or coherence to the side they disagree with? No one can understand someone wanting to be in control of their own body, or the desire to protect those that have no advocate? Almost every issue is gray and circumstantial.

I have often joked that what I wanted to be when I grew up (especially with my Philosophy degree) was a man with a long white robe and a long white beard who sat on a rock and thought Deep Thoughts. This is of course a joke because the health benefits are shit, but also because the Wise Man is unproductive. If he were really wise, he would have found a better way to spread that around than by sitting on a rock and giving obscure answers to simple questions. (“Only when the Sparrow flies after the Sun has descended will the Moon truly understand its importance.”) And he’d have found a good way to make bank while doing it, rather than getting paid in chickens.

Part of the reason I’ve longed to be that bearded figure is because I loath having an opinion and discounting others whom I sincerely believe have thoroughly thought through their opinion. Of course, that last sentence crumbles in the face of slavery defenders and Hitler sympathizers. There are, at least as far as I’m concerned, rights and wrongs, truths and falsehoods.

There are protests right now in Wisconsin over a bill that will basically end public employee unions. On the Left, I understand how awful and draconian such a step seems. A group of people should be able to legally come together and say, “I feel like you and I are being treated poorly. Our power is greater when we work together. Let’s work together!” I also understand that on the Right, public employee unions vote and organize around the candidates that will raise their wages and increase their benefits; the State never has a profit wall they’re pushed against in negotiations, they simply have a public opinion that can kick them out of their job.

Of course, elected officials can’t present a face of, “Well, of course we have a disagreement over this issue” because they, well, have an opinion. Said elected official does understand that there’s a disagreement and could probably do very well in articulating the other side’s point. They just don’t feel as much of a compunction about making sure that everyone knows that, like I do.

Writing for Bowdoin’s paper was good for me because I had to advocate for something and come down somewhere. Almost every article sounded like Fiddler on the Roof’s Reb Tevye (“On the one hand…but on the other hand…”), but the last paragraph of every article laid out clearly (or at least I hoped) what the point was of my bringing all this up.

I’m twenty-two now, almost twenty-three, and I’m past the age of endless pondering. I’m suppose to start realizing my desires and my beliefs and helping the rest of the world realize them too (or at least that’s what my liberal arts degree would have me believe). When I was writing in a public forum, that was easy enough to work on. But as an underling with an organization that has its own set of beliefs, I find myself relying very faithfully on the crutch everyone else’s standards.

But that’s not enough. I need to read more, so I get smarter, so I understand more, so I can…be right. My beliefs can’t have conviction if I don’t have them and I can’t go around forever willing to push around the edges of certainty. I need a grand theory, an overarching framework. It doesn’t need to be perfect and I’m sure it will change, but there needs to be something to grasp on to.

I came up with a test today for opinions. I haven’t tried it out in areas that aren’t related to quantity, so it might not work as I’m framing it now for everything. But I think there’s something to it.

Imagine I scoop out some ice cream into a bowl for you. I hand you the bowl of ice cream. You look down at the bowl. Is the ice cream in the bowl:

A) Too much?
B) Not enough?
or C) Fine as is.

If you answered A or B, you’ve got an opinion. If you answered C, in the majority of cases I think you probably don’t have an opinion. Got the idea?

Another example. You’ve been dating someone for 6 months now. Things are going reasonably well. Do you:

A) Want to see more of them?
B) Want to see less of them?
or C) Want to see them about as much as your seeing them now?

If you answered A, it’s because things are going great and if they’re going great and you like it, wouldn’t more be a good thing? Opinion! If you answered B, it’s because it’s not quite what you’re looking for or isn’t working out like you’d like it to after 6 months of investment. Opinion! If you answered C…it’s possible that things are perfect as is. Maybe you asked yourself this question every day and it is perfect as is because you’ve been working on it so hard. But it’s more likely that you’re not terribly invested in the question. The someone your dating is not of huge importance to you. You don’t feel pulled in one direction or the other. Not an opinion.

There are likely variations on this: either/or, action/nonaction, etc. But I think it generally works. The focus is on movement. On most days, we don’t stand still; we go somewhere. And those times when you stop to look around and take everything in are unusual and often absolutely perfect when they happen.

I refuse to be the Man on the Rock with the Beard, but I’m sure I’ll also never forget about the virtues that he has. There’s room to be opinionated without being an asshole. Well, that’s what I’ve heard at least; I don’t really have an opinion on the matter.

I bring this up because I need a mattress. The Lerners have very kindly lent me their futon for the last several months because, when I moved out from their basement, I didn’t quite have the funds or job security to throw a couple of hundred dollars at a sleeping device. But a guest that stays too long is the worst guest of all, and accordingly someone who borrows something without demonstrated intention of giving it back is really, really annoying. To give them their futon back, I need something to replace it. The fact is though that I don’t particularly want to think about replacing it, I just want something good to appear.

As stated, I pride myself on having really nice things. To do that, I just don’t buy stuff as often. But it also means that, when I do buy things, I’m not really all that interested in shopping around for the best deal. I was contemplating saving up for a new computer a year or so from now. I went to the Apple website, found the price range I was considering, and plugged in how much I would need to save each month to make that happen. A week or two later, I was walking through Best Buy with my brother and noticed that other laptops were half or a third of what I was considering paying. What I really want is an Apple that makes me feel good, rather than a PC that I’m convinced will be dead in two years. But even if the PC will be more cost effective over the long haul (that is to say, I won’t need to replace it from breaking and that, over 5 years, my computer budget will be less buying a PC or two rather than an Apple), I don’t really care. I don’t want to think about the specifications of my system and the intricate details of what I need vs. what I can afford. I want nice, beautiful, aesthetically pleasing things that work well without me having to learn the shape and size of the entire computer industry.

Accordingly, I want a good mattress, one that I can sleep on comfortably that will last about as long as a mattress should last. I don’t want to scrape the bottom of the IKEA barrel to buy one, but I also don’t want to pay $500, a significant percentage of my monthly income, at this point in my life. I just want good and inexpensive. I want the bottom of the good quality heap. And I don’t want to become an expert in mattresses and their prices to make that happen.

I read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell the other month and he talked at length about people who shop and gather knowledge. (Shopping was a useful metaphor for the issues he was raising.) He would speak of these people that knew all about cars, what models were safest given their price and specifications, when they would be on sale and where, and what was a good deal and what wasn’t. I like having money and I like the purchasing power it gives me, but I don’t want to spend a whole weekend (or month or year) figuring out the market. It just doesn’t interest me. I’d rather read or spend time with friends. I would rather pay 10% more, in general, with 50% less knowledge and effort.

This makes me feel a little lazy, but mostly defensive. I realize that capitalism is the greatest thing since feudalism (and sliced bread) and I should be excited about the opportunity that Ebay and Craigslist give me in finding what I want at an amazing price. But I just…don’t care.

Instead of talking in generalities, here’s an example. Penzey’s spices are amazing. As a brand, I put full faith and stock in their quality. A 16 oz. bottle of double strength vanilla costs $46.95. Comparatively, I can buy a 16 oz. bottle of real (not synthetic) vanilla at other stores for probably…$20? Something like that?

The thing is, Penzey’s spices smell absolutely amazing and, whether or not they actually make my cookies taste better, buying, owning, and using their vanilla makes me think it tests better. I gain value from simply knowing how great my vanilla is. (I don’t actually have Penzey’s vanilla yet but…just you wait.) I’m sure I could find equally or nearly as good vanilla at other places for less money. But I don’t care. I like strong brands that do the work for me so I don’t have to think about shopping around. And if they want to charge me a little bit more in the process, that’s fine, so long as I can depend on them to maintain the quality of their product.

To buy a mattress, I can look online or try my hand at some of the stores in the area. I know about what I want to spend, but don’t have any idea what makes for quality in a mattress. I’ve never had problems sleeping and rarely find my body aching from anything but the worst mattresses (as in the one’s at band camp). The futon I sleep on now actually has springs in it, but I slept on a springless futon at my brother’s for a least a summer (if memory serves) and never had any problems. So I’m really not that picky. What I want is a person or brand who has my best interests at heart to produce an inexpensive but comfortable mattress and then tell me where it is. But no one is forthcoming and places with names like “Discount Mattress Store” don’t give me much confidence. And places without names like “Discount Mattress Store” are selling things at twice my budget but, I would guess, without twice the quality.

Ah conundrum. Such is life. At the very least, I’m glad to know I can deny most of my desires for the sake of buying really good things. Now I just need to find out what those things are…

I’ve always been a lot more adept at good intentions than good actions. For a long time I berated myself heavily for this. I still do, as I should, but I’ve also worked at acknowledging that when I don’t accomplish something in the time frame I set out for myself, it’s for a halfway decent reason a lot of the time. Either I don’t have any real interest in the activity in question, or I had other things to do, or whatever. And I’ve made a point at mentioning my good intentions a lot more often, especially when those intentions involve other people.

“Hey, I’m sorry we haven’t talked sooner, but I’ve thought about calling you several times and have all these things I want to tell you about.”

“Roommate, I’m sorry I didn’t get that thing done when I said I would, but I’m doing it now and I’ll try and be better about it in the future.” And then I make an effort to clean up one of their messes when I’m cleaning up something of my own, or empty the dishwasher a few times in a row before anyone else can get to it.

This week in particular, I never felt like I had a moment down (even though I had friends over twice this week and watched a movie one other night with my roommate). But I didn’t feel like I had a moment down in a good way. I came home and immediately started cooking twice this week. (Falafel one night with a friend I invited over, and a second batch of falafel along with over a quart of hummus the next night.)

Every night, I walked in the door, and went to town. Whether that was cooking, emptying the dishwasher, engaging my roommate, reading something I intended to read, etc. When I went to bed every night this week, my lamentation was, “I wish I had another hour so that I could read that book I’m working on,” rather than, “What did I even spend tonight doing?”

Throughout my life, I’ve been cursed with a propensity to believe that true relaxation comes from something edging on boredom. After work sometimes, all I want to do is check out. What I’d really prefer is that I get to a place where I’m always moving, always working towards something, but that I have different tiers of difficulty. Telling myself that I’m going to work all day and then come home and figure out where I can see an eye doctor or how I can find a comfortable yet inexpensive bed is poor planning. Those things aren’t particularly fun for me and I avoid them. However, telling myself that instead of watching some TV show online after work, I’ll cook or read or complete the long profile in the New Yorker I liked is a lot more likely to happen.

I can’t say I’ve felt entirely great about effort and work. I’ve been getting better, trying to buckle down and give myself deadlines, but my work atmosphere isn’t quite as, well, stressful I guess as I’d like it to be. Maybe it’s just feeling young and energetic, but I sort of want a perpetual amount of work asked from me while I juggle difficult deadlines and eek projects in just at the last moment. But there just aren’t enough moving parts in my job for the kind of race to the finish line atmosphere I’m thinking of. This is fine, because I’m getting to work on other skills and improve myself in other ways, but it’s simply not ideal. (Luckily, I have more than a couple of years to figure out how to make work ideal.)

I rarely wrote papers that far in advance in college and high school because I just couldn’t work up a long slog work ethic. Adrenaline makes my creative juices flow. Pressure honestly makes me write better and gives me substantially more focus. I don’t doubt that my product suffers sometimes from this, but I also don’t doubt that those products that I work on carefully and slowly over several weeks suffer from ingenuity. It is, to say the least, a delicate balance.

The reason I bring this all up is because effort seems to be my biggest obstacle these days. Where my reality is now composed of an indefinite time at my current job (you know, assuming they don’t fire me, which I don’t think they will, but I try to remind myself they can now again to keep myself motivated) and my own ambition to create my future, the only thing standing in the way between me and what I want to do is…me. What I need to be doing is juggling more than I currently have to create pressure for myself.

Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure how to do that. The problem with working on political things for your job is that it means you need to be more careful how you work on political things outside your job. I reflect on my employer just as they reflect on me. This can be overcome but…I’m not quite sure how yet.

Mostly what I want to do is write more. I loved writing for Bowdoin’s weekly paper. I thrived on the agonizing over words and sentences, topics and arguments. I liked the little, but honest and real feedback my friends gave me about my work. And I routinely have similar ideas that I want to write about, argue about, frame, and publish, but don’t because I feel strapped by my current employment.

Which is fine. I get paid to follow the news and learn about tax reform and esoteric energy things and its great. It’s fantastic in many ways. I’m working for people that know a lot more than I do and they are eager to explain over and over again so that I can learn to. They are giving me opportunity and, especially with the new Congress, I appreciate it more each passing day. No complaints here. I just want to be engaging more of my passion in different ways than I am.

This, in turn, has given me romantic notions about working on a campaign, in large part to submerse myself with other passionate people who have big ideas and want to talk about them. For a long time I’ve disdained politics (rather than policy) as petty and campaigns as only the worst example of that. But I’m starting to think a bit more, though not completely by any means, that framing matters and broad themes are important. At its worst, a presidential campaign is about feeding soundbites to an uninterested populace and deals in no substance and all flash. But at its best, presidential candidates really are emboldened to shape debates and broad themes of history into a cogent and exciting future. The slog of the news cycle maybe isn’t all slog and is, several months after any given news story and after all the pettiness has been forgotten, a least in small part genuine conversation.

So here’s a first step towards effort and intention. I spent most of the morning reading rather than doing something that I wouldn’t be able to remember four hours later. I’ll keep doing that this afternoon, and then finally work on understanding my health care enough to schedule some appointments. And then read some more. I’ll also try to write here more, because I like writing and it helps me think and coalesce my thoughts into something tangible.

Descartes supposedly figured out something new and exciting when he wrote “cogito ergo sum” or “I think therefore I am”. Nietzsche, like most things that had any innovation or interest in them, didn’t care for this all that much. As far as my understanding goes (which I admit does not go very far with Nietzsche), he found there to be something horribly contradictory in the utterance of the word “I”. As though Descartes had simply created the concept out of thin air, thus making the whole “I think therefore I am” a bunch of malarkey. Because if “I” is fabricated well then…I’m not.

I raise this only to bring you into the fact that the concept of the self has been a hot topic for quite some time now. There is an endless pull in life between being totally self-absorbed in the total singularity of our experience from behind our own eyes and in remembering that the rest of the world feels the same way about themselves. I often found myself tugged between these two contradictory poles, but I think I have given up. I am totally and completely self-involved.

In fact, I think I’ve found that a lot of my happiness comes entirely from the comfort I find in knowing that, in some crucial way, I’m the most important thing going on in my world. (This is one of those sentences that is going to translate horribly through text and the interwebs. Ah well, such is the digital age.)

To be more specific, I often imagine myself as the star of my own film, a film all about me. But, and if you follow me to the end, I hope you might agree and think this is perfectly justified and perhaps a good thing.

I always wonder how an actor feels when the camera is really close up to their face. The actor will just be sitting there, pondering and acting away, and the camera just gets closer and closer. Film is the most masturbatory activity I can think of.

Who wouldn’t want to start in a film? I’m not talking about fame here. I’m talking about the complete and total validation of knowing that for those few split seconds, the viewer’s attention is totally and entirely devoted to you and your life. The camera, the eye, the observer, is making you real and justifying your actions.

You can see this in the smallest details. Imagine a scene where someone wakes up in a movie. We see the actor rise and sit on the side of their bed. They ruffle their hair and sigh, squinting into the morning sun. They grab a shirt off the floor and pull it over their head. Then they leave the room.

The specific actions they chose, the specific muscles they used and timing they had for each action is in probably all important ways totally arbitrary. Perhaps there was emotional subtext to the scene which the actor conveyed through their eyes and facial expressions. But that shirt on the ground could have sat their in a thousand different iterations and been pulled over the actor’s head in a hundred different ways and the scene would have been identical.

Yet, it only happened one way. And we all watched the actor do it.

Such is with life. Someone dropped a chapstick at some point during the day on the metro that I was riding home tonight. As the car lumbered down the tunnel, the bumps and shakes were just right to slowly make the chapstick careen over to me where I stopped it, every so smoothly I might say, with my foot. It would have looked great in a movie where a character was riding a metro.

The point is, I felt good about the moment because I felt a sense of peace and merriment in knowing that I was the star of that scene and all the world, which is to say me, watched it roll across the metro car. The same camera watched me walk swiftly home in my patchwork vest. It saw me trip slightly as a stranger on the street asked for a cigarette I didn’t have and as I asked the dog in my apartment, upon my arrival back, if he had brought home any lady dogs while I was gone.

It’s these gritty and completely arbitrary details that make any scene interesting. And they’re what makes life interesting too. I watch and I listen to these bubbles and hiccups in the stream of life that slightly disorder the expected and give character to everything.

I search for this character in my own life. It inclines me to be conscious of how I reach across the room to my phone alarm in the morning and the way I hold myself in an interview. It’s what makes me scan the faces of the people on the metro, or extras if we’re sticking with the theme, to read a bit about their life, their mood, and their direction. This character to things is what quickens my pace and makes me push my head forward. Because life is so much more worth living when life is making a story. Perhaps it’s unreal at times but…if I don’t conceive of my life and the things I’m doing now as climbing action to a great climax down the road, what have I got to live for?

This is all horribly selfish. As I sit here alone in my apartment, I forget all of the other people on the block, in the city, in the world who are doing more things than I can imagine. I forget their joys and pains. My movie is at a quiet part, where a man types thoughtfully on his computer at the end of the day, trying to process the things he has thought in hopes that recording them will in some way clarify them. Soon enough the movie will fade to a late night stroll with a dog, and then the routine of a man going to bed. He’ll lock the door and refill the brita pitcher. He’ll turn the lights off and plug his phone in, setting an alarm to awake the next morning. And then the scene will go dark.

It gives me a sense of objectivity and otherness to imagine it this way. To broaden my world only to a camera man and his ever curious camera. Sometimes I turn off the camera and look at things a different way. But I often don’t feel quite as special then, quite like the unique snowflake I (and we all) want to be. But that’s the pun. The snowflake might look unique close up, but if you pull the camera out it’s just a copy of everything else in the snow fall. It’s uniqueness, however accurate, is completely irrelevant given the scale of the storm.

That just doesn’t feel as comforting, as egotistical as that is and sounds. So I keep the camera zoomed in.

I feel as though there is another shoe to drop with this post, but I can’t quite put my finger on it right now. So I’ll leave it be. G’night.

Anyway, the point is that a number of dishes were already dirty before I started and I made a lot more dishes dirty but it was all worth it. The food turned out really well (though with definite room for improvement). I’m mostly reveling in this cooking fiesta because one of my greatest [domestic] fears is that I’ll always take the easy way out when it comes to what I eat.

Not only do I want to eat healthily, but I also want to eat interestingly. I want others to enjoy my cooking and I want it to be a way for me to share some creativity with others. I went to the grocery store for the first time on foot today, and I had to walk quickly through the frozen pizza aisle not to tempt myself. Frozen pizza isn’t tempting because it’s tasty or even cheap, it’s just easy. I can unwrap one quickly, throw some spices and extra cheese on it to make it taste better, and go back to whatever I was doing. As it is, I came back from the grocery store tonight at 5 and didn’t leave the kitchen until 7:30, and that was before any of the dishes got done (which my wonderful roommates did most of). But the cooking process was a group effort and the eating process was equally communal. And it was fun.

Now I’ve got leftovers for at least two meals and a dish I am comfortable making. I’ll probably pick something with fewer steps next week (my roommates and I are each cooking one night a week for the whole apartment), but I’m really glad with what I produced.

Just wanted to share.

I had an evening where I could tell that things were different, and that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. To contort Shakespeare beyond recognition, “Some are adults, some achieve adulthood, and some have adulthood thrust upon ‘em.” Two Sundays ago now, over Labor Day weekend, my roommates and I invited what friends we have here in D.C. over for dinner. Leah made risotto and Dan took the lead on lentil soup while I played support. We all sat on the only thing there was for sitting in the living room at that time: the rug. We made a circle, had our meal, and marveled at our arrival in a city. It was my first full day in the new apartment and this was my first cooked meal.

To recount the evening in any more depth would leave you bored. It was not a particularly spectacular night, though both the food and company were delicious (if I can use such a word to describe company without you charging me with cannibalism). It was only unordinary because it was a first and because we were sitting on a rug rather than the standard fare of a couch or a table. But this meal was the straw that broke adolescent’s back.

The broader context of the evening includes so much. To truly live up to my last name, I’ll tell you that it was moving to DC, a really successful apartment search after two months of looking, a fantastic and interesting internship which both reflected well on me and which I enjoyed, the intangible prospect of tomorrow and all that the next year could hold in my life, a wonderful two months staying with dear friends that only become dearer (and their wonderful daughter and dog), the periodic glimmer of success in my future, the smell of the air, the fact that I can tolerate DC heat, the comfort in knowing that I have family that is rooting for me and cares about where I’m headed, the relief in having a clean suit and enough money (for the moment) to clean my clothes, buy food, etc, the serendipity of finding in roommates people that I care about and that I will be able to very easily grow and change next to as I move from college to what’s next, and so much more. It all came into focus and into promise that unremarkable night on a carpet, perhaps while we ate ice cream out of glasses for lack of bowls.

There is so much in the last two months that I’ve done so well. I’m not trying to toot my own horn too much but…I can’t express how much of a release I feel from knowing that I can walk into my kitchen and make something approaching tasty. It’s freeing. I know my way around a recipe and ingredients. Sure, I have a lot to learn, but that’s true about everything, not just cooking. I can call up utility companies and tell them to bill me and feel reasonably sure that by the time they ask for money, I’ll probably have it. I spent the last three weeks of my internship flying solo as all the other interns had gone back to school and I soared. I managed an office (or at least a substantial portion of one)!

There are things that are driving me crazy. I don’t want to apply to any more jobs and have any more interviews. I don’t want to worry about whether or not I’ll need to accept a job I don’t like or don’t respect because my bank account is running on empty and my resume is only going to get me so far. I’d love to have the luxury of interning for another couple of months so that I could directly transition into the job of my choosing. But I also find comfort in knowing that my own ability (and dashing good looks) will probably land me something I can at least tolerate until I can work my butt of to find something better.

The time scale out here is so much different than anything I’ve ever known. Four years, two years, 9 months, 3 months–college, being an underclassmen, the length of this school year, this internship. These were the timers always running in my former life. If I didn’t get done what I wanted to get done, they ran out and I lost the opportunity. No longer. Now I’ve got…what, 70 years, 30 years, 20 years, 10 years, 5 years, 1 year–my life, when I will feel miserable if I’m not somewhere in life I want to be, when I will be halfway between what was behind me and what is in front of me, when my direction in life might seem a lot more clear, when I won’t ever have to apply to work as an administrative assistant again, when I might change wherever I’m living and working and try something else. Did you notice just the difference in length for the briefest of descriptions of what each timer meant?

I’m slowly discovering that there options for how many lives I will have here in adulthoodland, too. Will I have one life, entirely devoted to my profession? Will I have two, a life from 9-5:30 and another in the evenings and on the weekends? Or maybe three, the two I just mentioned and then those times when I travel to see friends and family? Maybe four, if I count a year or five living in another part of the world in never ending quest to make sure I’ve got the whole picture? Maybe five, if I have a family, or six, if I volunteer. It’s daunting, to say the least. While searching for jobs, I found a place where I could write op-eds on a bi-weekly basis, akin to what I did my senior year of college. It would be a lot of fun, would help build my resume for more serious work, and would keep my mind occupied if my job turns out to be less than inspiring. But what a weird…thing. A job and another life of writing about energy policy? I can just associate myself with groups like this…because I want to? I won’t get a grade in a class or more credit or some specific honor but…maybe I just care about it.

My life hasn’t been motivated, at least explicitly, by what I care about, so much as what I should care about. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college. I picked activities to participate in but to some extent, I’ll admit, because I sort of had to pick something. Now, I don’t have to pick anything. I will go out this weekend or I won’t. I can take this job or not, protest with this group or volunteer at this animal shelter. It’s all my own initiative. There is no direct pressure to be or do a certain way, as there has been my whole life. I’m in a kitchen without a recipe. I’m driving a car with no turn signals. I’m walking through a city without a map. You get the idea.

And it’s great, I think. I’ve checked Bowdoin’s website more than I care to admit in the last few weeks, but I think I’ll move past that. I’ll probably figure out a way to make new friends and enjoy the city I’ve got. My life’s been charmed enough so far that I wouldn’t be surprised if I landed a great job, too. And in the meantime, I’ll binge on hostess cupcakes and admire in what I’ve already done this summer–start becoming an adult.

By all rights I should either be asleep or trying to sleep right now. I’m getting up at 3:40 AM so that I can get to Milwaukee in time for my 7 AM flight to DC tomorrow. I tried to sleep for what felt like a long time (but, now looking at a clock, I realize was only a half hour). I’m awake because there’s a thunderstorm off in the distance enticing my consciousness and because I have a flight tomorrow and I always get a little anxious before travel.

But the real reason I’m awake is because this trip feels especially important. You see, this, by some metrics, is the last night of what was. And tomorrow is the first day of what will be. Having graduated from college, I haven chosen a city (or really a district) to make my home. I came back to Wisconsin and lallygagged about for a month, spending time with my family and sleeping as much as possible. But that’s all over. Schooling for me is really over. It was technically over a month ago, but not until tomorrow will I begin the real search for a job, a place to live, and a life to have.

I feel as though I’m off to “suck the marrow”. I’m off to carpe diem and noctem and all the other times of the day. I’m not sure that this is because I want to be doing these big, poetic things, but more because I have to. Forward motion is all I’ve got.

Recently, I’ve found myself slightly nostalgic for days when I was younger and the things I faced were a bit simpler. I’m not nostalgic for these times because I really wish to be younger, but because I never realized that I was, say, 12, and that my world was composed of 12 year-old things. I lacked awareness. I wish I could go back not so as to be 12 again, but to be 12 and know that I am 12.

So that is my resolution. To remember that there will come a day when I will look back at 22 and this flight to DC and think, “Wow, I had so much in front of me then. I had so many opportunities and ways that I could engage the world because I was 22 that I can no longer access. I can no longer befriend other 22 year-olds in the same way. That way of life and mode of conduct no longer suits my interests or experience. But it sure was great when I had it.”

I don’t want to miss anything. I don’t want to mess anything up. I don’t live in fear that I will, but I do live aware that I’ve only got one chance to do it right. The distance in my mind between the realm of possibility, those paths that I could take, and the realm of actuality, the choices that I did make, are so far apart that I often forget actuality exists. I find myself riding up and down my sister’s driveway with my niece and nephew, a possibility at the forefront of my thoughts whenever I’m in Madison, and have to remind myself that this possibility is actually happening and that is exactly what I want to be doing with my time. Make possibilities actual always seems like something I can do tomorrow. I forget that possibilities are happening all the time.

I put the below quote in my high school year book, along with another silly quote by Douglas Adams about deadlines and missing them. It was true then because I was leaving high school and home in a big way, off to the state of Maine and a college of my choosing. But high school was never all that emotionally significant to me. High school was simply a part of life, whereas Bowdoin was a path less traveled; it was a choice. I’m sure the quote will feel true again one day, maybe before I go to off to grad school or law school. Before I have get married or have kids or change careers or move to a new town. But it feels especially true today, in a way that I don’t think it’s felt like before and in a way I don’t think it will feel like again. And that is really exciting.

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” -Winston Churchill