Attempted Explanation

Last night, I was talking to my friend Christy. I told her the latest on the D$ situation and said I felt a little like a fool. When I met Brittany's dad and he asked, like everyone asks, what brought me to Kansas, Erin laughed from across the table. She hasn't known me that long, but she does know me well enough to laugh with me at the part where "you get to say you moved here for a guy." It's so unlike me! And yet, a very me thing to do.

Yep. It happens, of course, to the best of us. Why do we go anywhere? As L once said, we go for something greater than ourselves. I happened to fall in love, this one time. Which is easy enough to say now, but...

One cannot say there was a moment when I ever fell in love with anyone, but a series of moments. The string of days when we tell the story later and I say "this was how we met." Again, and again, we met. Little by little, I grew into a notion. Until finally it seemed the right thing to say. - 7/22/08

But that's not all there is to the story, of course. My whatever-it-had-been with D$ began to go south long before it was time for me to go west. Why, then, did I go? As I cobbled together those photos from the past few seasons, I also got my hands on some stuff I wrote over the summer things were coming apart with him.

I'm so scared because every time I try to find a job and I think this is the place.. this place will hire me and I will love working there! ... it doesn't pan out, it falls through.. I am going to be poor and alone in a town way the hell far out there. - 6/19/08

Well, to begin with, I was scared of doing it. This is ALWAYS, of course, a great reason to do something. (/sarcasm)

It has been a rough couple of weeks for this customer. LSU-John pointed it out, or took note of it, or something, at lunch the other day. I gave him the best answer I had.

When I coolly and frankly told him that I was simply afraid, scared about the future, about finding a job, about living in Lawrence, I think he understood. He asked, is he excited about it? I told John ‘he used to be,’ because he was.. and so was I. Things are not what they were: this is as it should be. Things are also not what I had hoped or expected. This is.. frightening? I still am going, and yet I almost cannot say why. I will admit that I have thought wildly in the past week about a mad attempt to back out of the move. Many times I have considered it.

All I can see in my mind’s eye is one horrible month in a horrible apartment, alone. And though I have seen my new apartment’s layout, and it is not at all horrible.. and though I know Dre will be there, I still worry at a whole year of something I barely stood for a month. And though I know I will find a job—I have to—I am still faced with the prospect of something unfulfilling.

What is getting me is this. I am petrified about the future. It draws ever nearer.

I am reminded that I didn’t want it to be easy. I wanted it to be right. I just wish that could be easier, sometimes. - 6/22/08

So I really did consider scrapping the idea. Taking my year off somewhere else, maybe, closer to home. But really I didn't have any other plans, and not nearly so concrete as the lease I had in KS.

This next year is going to be a journey. A sort of journey through myself to try to find out as best I can what it is I will be happy to do. I suspect that there are several things that would make me happy.. not in a sort of high all the time happy. In a hard-working fulfillment kind of way. I know far too many people who want to get away with doing as little as possible; it's not in my nature, and never was. I will never be happy seeking ways to slack off. It was never appealing to get paid for doing nothing.. doing nothing was never appealing, to begin with. Wasting time? Unless one is actively doing nothing (that is, relaxing, enjoying oneself.. but I hardly see how one could do so when on the job, on the clock, just passing time at a desk or something).

So. To be a clergywoman? A sex therapist? An editor? A teacher? I know that I freak out about these things.. I have known for years that I omg-don't-know-what-to-do-with-my-life.. but as it turns out, I operate this way with a great many things in my life. Just gotta freak out about them for a while, sometimes without knowing I'm just going through the requisite freak-out period, and then the decisions are as good as made, and were all along. Choosing a major was like that, for example.. I try too hard at decision-making because I think it is hard.

It is! Hard, I mean, to make decisions. But, not world-endingly so. - 7/13/08

Making decisions is hard when you are a stubborn person; but sticking to your decisions, that part is easier.

Some moments I stand, head high, ready to march into Kansas and take that effing town by storm. Other times, I put my weary hands on paper to fold, and I wonder, what the hell I was ever thinking. But the result will be what it will be. I cannot go for him. I will go.

For me.

To see what there is to see. Because I couldn't stand not knowing. Because there's a lot to learn away from home. And because one not win fights with God. Because life, as we learn, is hard. Decisions are, too. Finding a job, making the rent, learning to cook... all of these things lay ahead of me. This adventure is meant to be mine.

There will be days, I know it!--when I will be in Kansas and I will be crying, maybe on the floor, that pretty white carpet in the apartments, and I'll want to know why the hell I made such a dumbass decision as to move all the way out there. And if those days outnumber the good ones, I won't ever go back to Kansas after my year is over. And if they greatly outnumber the good ones, maybe I'll talk to the leasing office and work out a subleaser. But for now, I have to have to know, that even when those moments come, this adventure was for me. -7/14/08

"one not win fights with God" is a complex reference to a mistyping I made back in Rome. I made a sort of deal. All the elements beyond my control, which I had specified, turned up with the green light. In the end, I had to go for something greater than myself, because there was just something I needed to see out here.

Sometimes it really seems like it was because Jason needed a competent long-term sub, and I needed a shot at being a Latin teacher. Other reasons include all the people I've gotten to know here, in the various capacities I've gotten to know them.. the way I've become more myself. I'll even go so far as to say I've touched a few lives here that I never would have seen had I stayed home.

And I hope that the greater answer to the why is more obvious as time goes on.. it is evident in all that I learn, through the hard moments and the easy ones. As surely as the Italian postal service may have kept me from JET, and the failure to get in to JET is what brought us here (my roommate and I--), being here is what has prepared me so much more for JET, and for the rest of my life.

Finally, something of the 'how':

Today at lunch Dre said he was thinking of taking a year off before graduate school and moving to Kansas, to live in Lawrence. I stared at him and said, meaning it really, “Dre, if you do that, I will go with you. We can live together.” I was serious then and I’d do it, too. I figure Dre moving there is too much of a sign, too much an easy boat to float.. He also mentioned applying for JET; if he doesn't get in, then he might go to KS. I can't believe it. Where did he get such an idea? Whatever.. too good a sign to pass up. We respect one another. It’s all very good. I could totally share an apartment with him. - 8/22/07

Christy said, last night, that I am not a fool, even now; she was proud that I had the guts to fight for what I believed in. And I am too! It's not always easy, but I'm glad I came here. I have not regretted it nearly at all. Of course, there were those moments as I knew there would be, when I didn't want to be here.. but they were the kind of moments where one doesn't want to be anywhere, so those aren't the same as regretting moving to this particular town.