I'm Climbing Up Those Walls Again

I'm currently reading Skinny Legs And All by Tom Robbins, a novel that tackles art, politics, and religion with an exceptionally vivid imagination (ex. some inanimate objects get to be character, etc).

There is one passage that I just read that I found interesting. It's an argument between Ellen Cherry Charles, a young female artist who works at Isaac & Ishmael's, a NYC restaurant across the street from the UN run by an Arab and a Jew, and the Reverend Buddy Winkler, her Uncle from her southern hometown, who is preaching the end of days and is one of the many groups of people protesting the I&I's existence. Ellen is currently defending the two owners of the I&I:

(Ellen) "They're kind, decent, compassionate---"
(Buddy) "Kind and decent got nothin' to do with it! In the End Times, there're to be many false prophets and false religions. You, little lady, your false religion is art. Verlin, I often suspect, his religion is football. He ain't alone in that one, lemme tell you. Patsy's religion I don't want to speculate on. But the most insidious and dangerous of false religions is secular humanism. It's so crafty, so sneaky, with its kindness and its decency, that only Satan hisself could've come up with it!"

I laughed at his assertion, until it dawned on me that it isn't too far from the many people's view of secular humanism. They don't trust it, and they don't trust us. They don't believe people can be good and kind and able to love the world without any reason. I'm sad that they have a lack of faith in their fellow humans.

While it's really about rehab, I always thought this was the best song for saying "I'll miss you"



Alkaline Trio - While You're Waiting

There's a hope in my head that's been cut
and bled dry as your bloodshot eyes.
And there's smoke in the air
and it's soon to clear revealing our demise.
There are some who say that it's a.o.k.
if it makes you feel alright.
It's just way too bad
now you're worse than sad
all locked up there inside.
And I don't know how you feel
but I'll make you a deal
if you make it out alive.
My shoulders and ears are all yours my dear.
I hope it comes as no suprise.
You've been known to say that you're a.o.k.
when you're feeling sick(dead) inside.
I just want you to know
I've got no place to go until the day you die.

While you're waiting, be thankful for your fingers.
I'll be fading with the colors of your pictures.
"I'm not crying wolf" you whispered,
"I'm really dead this time."

They locked you up.
They threw away the key.
Sutured your mouth shut.
Murdered your family.
Right before your eyes, what could you do?
Right before your eyes, they took it all from you.

You're contemplating you hanging from your ceiling.
I can't help hating you for having that feeling.
I'm not joking when I tell you I'd miss you all the time.
I already miss you all the time.

I've never had a girl cry over me right in front of me before. Well, maybe that's not true, but certainly not to the degree that I experienced this weekend.

Despite the fact that I usually avoid going home during a semester, I drove home on Friday. I drove home to say goodbye to my Liz, who gets on a plane bound for Australia. It was a gluttonous weekend in terms of food consumption: Thursday night I ate at O'Charley's with Kimmie, Mike, Kyle, and Matt, and then Friday night I had Italian with Liz and my parents, Saturday night to an Australian grill with Liz and her family, and then this morning brunch at an Indian restaurant.

I digress, I went back to see Liz, who has been the light of my life for the past two months. One might think that this doesn't allot much time for relationship growth, but Liz and I have been friends for six years.

I have tried to remain fairly logical when it comes to relationships, at least when I realized that some tough decisions would need to be made regarding graduate school. When Liz and I got together, it was understood that even if we got past her 5 month stay in Australia, things would become nigh impossible as she would return just a month or two before I leave for graduate school.

I plan for my time at Oxford (or wherever I end up) to be a new beginning. It's going to require more serious work than I have ever performed before, and I intend to take it on without distractions. That means no blogging (except for maybe the Demographer), no AIM, and no computer games. It's a 9 month MSc course in Development Economics. I see it as being the springboard for an international career.

Because of this, I know it makes much more sense to leave for graduate school alone. Thus we had already made the decision to "end" things this weekend. Easier said than done. Liz and I didn't really talk about it until Saturday night. She was giving in to her heart, and I was giving in to my brain. I'm afraid that I was too insistent in that we remain on course, and she started crying. Not being able to deal with the fact that I might have hurt her, I held her close and cried too.

And so from midnight on, we cried, we argued, we accused, and we cried some more. I promised her I would write, and would not try to suppress feelings, but rather let them go where they pleased, but I still warned that the end result would probably be the same: Next semester I'll be gone. We fell asleep curled up together.

I said goodbye to her on the steps of a palace. Well rather, The Palace Theater, but that hardly sounds romantic. She was looking just as gorgeous as the day I told her how I felt. A rash that had been attributed to my goatee-induced abrasion had now faded, apparently the result of using the wrong kind of toothpaste, much to my relief.

The goodbye was short by our standards, I turned away and jumped in the car my mom had parked on the curb, looked briefly back, then was whisked away. Again I am alone, ready to finish off this semester in style, but not as happy as I could have been, with my Liz. What I have left is her gift to me: a compass carried by a US soldier through WWI, and a star in the sky named after the brief moment that we shared.

Whether or not the heart and brain will come to a compromise someday remains to be seen.