What I Love / What Makes My Head Spin...

What I Love (about having a job that takes regular "breaks"):

the world slows down. at least a little bit. you can pay attention. you realize what machinery you invented last semester to make the production that is *you* possible. you tinker a little bit with the machinery. you realize that maybe your machinery isn't the most important thing. you notice the world. all the worlds that you traverse and orbit and crash into. and you take a minute to enjoy what's going on in them.

What Makes My Head Spin:

getting off break. i think it must be a little bit like getting off drugs. a little bit, i said. i know which is worse...

but once you slow down a little, the breakneck pace from before seems even more dangerously careening then ever.

What I Love (about some of these worlds that i've been noticing):

that everybody's life demands SO MUCH ATTENTION. if you don't pay very close attention to what you're doing, the whole thing collapses.

and you love that because?

...because it means that everybody's paying such close attention to these really small details. the fine grained nuances.

but doesn't that mean that we're missing so much

it means that we have the capacity to care! the capacity to look hard! the capacity to attend!

hmmm. you sound like a guy who hasn't blogging enough to get to the point in good time....

right, right. what i'm trying to say is:

that there's something SO BEAUTIFUL about how TENACIOUSLY we hold onto life.

All day yesterday and today someone I love very much may or may not have had cancer. We were waiting for some results. And the whole time I was just wrecked. I was just at my wits end thinking that EVERYTHING, every little insignificant item on my to-do list, every dish in the dishwasher, every fourth time I asked J & A to climb in the van, every post-it note affixed to my desk (and there are hundreds) is shot through with the looming end. With the ugly truth of our mortality *&* the horror of the smallness of our lives -- but together somehow the one makes the other so much more beautiful.

its emily's speech in _our town_, but that doesn't make it cliche'. i'm so in love with life that it makes my head spin right now.

right here in this lonely cramped office in an ugly brick building on a small campus of a mediocre campus in the middle of Ohio. I am glad for life.

The test came back negative, but I hope the buzz of every single life, all the complex worlds, all the ridiculous attention that all the strange people pay to their own small but endlessly meaningful lives stays for a while anyway...

peace~