Yesterday I met one of the people behind the Harry Potter musicals on YouTube. He’s also been a screenwriter for The Disney Channel and wrote a children’s book. He channeled so much raw creative openness. I miss the immediacy and intensity of surrounding myself with such people. I miss their spontaneity, the fine caliber of abrupt midday phone calls that ask merely, “Do you want to play frisbee?”
A coworker commented recently that he wasn’t sure whether biographies were a good thing. Some days I feel that all I want to do is understand how others see the world and live in it. I want a way to contextualize my independence, and, in fact, to be told that I am not an outlier.
A while ago, an old friend wrote to me that he was studying theories of aesthetics. I felt afraid that such a thing existed, the way I feel just before reading the last paragraph – the coup de grace – of a pop psychology article that has thus far admirably described my most destructive traits. Apparently, there is an academic field that has studied the way that others see the world and turned it into a science. Now the little signposts and scribbles I have created to anchor myself in my self-constructed theory of others seem flimsy.
That I want to discover but I rarely want to be shown is my inherent weakness. It takes so much to keep moving, to take crushing disappointments and elated highs and remain emotionally able to answer life’s daily questions about food and work and money and why the elevator isn’t working. It is obliterating, in a way, to then consume some fucker’s arm’s length monologue about what comes next, and how the future may unravel for those like myself if only we keep certain of life’s lessons in mind. I take this education in small doses. I read advice that others forward to me and agree that it’s good for me to be aware, that so-and-so said thus-and-such.
And yet, the pervasive theme seems to be about the choices you make, largely decoupled from the hand that you’re dealt. I am not sure if this implied and assumed freedom is part of a middle-class mentality, or cultural, or generational. But it is so much the context that colors the choices. It is context that gives the choices so much weight. To look for overarching meaning in choices is a non sequitur.
Context and sentimentality. They make a cup of chai weigh like a cup of gold, and consummate words as light as the integrity within them.
