halfway everywhere

I am half in grad school now. More specifically: I am in math camp. Math camp started on Monday, but I missed the first three days, while I was traveling. Luckily the first three days were easy to make up on my own: all I needed to do was remind myself of things I learned long ago. Today was a little like that too, except someone else was reminding me.

Doing problem sets last night I remembered both what I liked and what I disliked about math. I like when it is clean and easy, when equations click together just the right way, and you find a solution you can circle and check off. I do not like when it is complicated, and messy, when I have to fill line after line with brute force, adding this, multiplying by this, forcing it into the right shape. The tediousness of algebra takes away the joy of an answer that is simply right, and usually leads to some equally nasty solution, a terrible fraction that introduces a note of doubt into what should be a clean process.

This will probably be the cleanest process of my year though, messy fractions and all. I should enjoy it while I have it. I should wallow in circle-able solutions.

In the realm of Life, I am also halfway to somewhere. I slept in my Berkeley apartment for the first time last night (a friend stayed with me to allay my nerves about being all alone). I am moved in but furniture-less. I am haunting craigslist, waiting for my bed to come. I am checking items off my to-do list: entrance loan counseling, grocery shopping.

nostalgia for the present

I’m moving to Berkeley in a month.  Berkeley and San Francisco are next door neighbors, but living next door is not the same as living in your very own lovely laughter-filled house.  I am going to leave mine, which I moved into so recently (six months, just).  Yesterday we had friends over to eat “gay cake” (rainbow-frosted) in celebration of Pride and warmth.  We sat around in the backyard drinking homemade mint lemonade and mimosas and eating food and talking and laughing.  At some point a guitar was brought and put to use.  The remnants of the party decided to make dinner, and we sat 10 people down for a feast just because we were all there and did not want to leave.  I tied an apron on to cook, and my friends in the dining room made up blues verses about each of us.  At dinner we argued and laughed and drank wine.  After dinner we cleaned up, crawled into bed.  My roommates came in to kiss me goodnight and gossip.  It was a glorious day.  

I won’t have a lot of days like that when fall hits.  There will be good moments, I am sure, and I know I will come back to my friends in the city.  But as a student, weekends are no longer enormous blocks of leisure time.  I will have to measure and worry and trade-off time.  It’s worth it; I am excited to do it; but days like yesterday remind me of what I’ll be missing for the next two years.

This is brought to the forefront of my mind due to the true beginning of my apartment search in Berkeley.  I went on Saturday and looked at three apartments, two of which were uninhabitable (one tiny, one too crowded by the residents of the adjoining house) and the third of which I would have to pay an extra half a month of rent for.  More will come, I know, but I am in the anxious stage now, where I don’t know where I will be in a month, I don’t know if this move will be an upgrade or a downgrade, and I am already nostalgic for the life I haven’t left yet.

moving

I didn’t know if I was ever going to write in this blog again, until just this moment.

I am moving tomorrow. Or the next day. Everything, as usual, is in flux. No, not usual. The last six months have been, by far, the most unsettled of my life. I have not had my own bed since June. I have lived out of a suitcase since June too, and not known exactly where I would be in a month, or what I would be doing there. Now my life is finally reordering itself. Tomorrow I am going to talk to my former boss about coming back to work full time. Tomorrow I am going to move my meager belongings into my beautiful new apartment. I am getting (almost) everything I wanted, when I was far away and dreaming of this moment. But no matter how happy I know I am, it is still difficult, the process of moving. I made a point not to really unpack in my current apartment – where I have been since the beginning of December – but still looking around my room at the piles I have created in lieu of shelves, I grow panicked, thinking of repacking it all away. I am only moving across town. I am going to live with wonderful friends, whom I love, in a neighborhood I love, in a beautiful apartment with plaster cherubs in the corners and fanciful chandeliers. I am thrilled. I am also shivering with tension. It’s almost impossible, facing an enormous task like beginning a life again, to imagine how quickly it will pass, how soon I will be on the other side, living the life I am (re)creating now.

the first time I have ever been pleased with a flight delay

Written 8/22 in the airport:

Yesterday morning I got up early and went to the Seattle airport to catch my flight to New Jersey. I had a planned layover of an hour in San Francisco and I’d fantasized that my second flight would be delayed and maybe I could have lunch with some of my former coworkers (the office is ten minutes from the airport). Well the airlines did me one better: my first flight (Seattle to San Francisco) was delayed and I missed my second flight altogether. The United personnel gave me a few options: I could take a red eye flight, leaving at 10 pm and getting into Newark at 6 am; I could fly through Chicago; or I could take a flight today. Waiting nine hours in the airport, making an extra connection even though it hurts to walk (sprained ankle), or spending a night in San Francisco with my friends? The decision was easy, to put it mildly.

What a wonderful day, in the way days in San Francisco are usually wonderful: I had lunch with my coworkers, as imagined; I sat in my old kitchen filled with afternoon light; I had seasonal local vegetables for dinner in a hip diner; I ate an ice cream cone; I had a few beers. Of course the reason all of these things were so wonderful is that I did them with my friends. My lovely, smart, funny friends who welcomed me back with open arms. How marvelous to pop in for a day and rejoin my life (almost) as if I never left. I know three months is different than three weeks, and when I come back for good some things will have changed. But the fundamentals will remain: good people, good food, good life.

In the meantime, I am excited to start campaigning. Two people at the Seattle airport yesterday told me they thought we had two bad choices in the presidential race. What are you talking about? I wanted to cry (but didn’t due to an inability to marshal arguments in a state of extreme exhaustion as well as a desire to disengage). Can’t you see that Obama is different than the candidates that have come before? Sure he has his problems. He is human, and he makes bad choices sometimes; he is a politician, and he makes political choices sometimes. But he is smart. He understands nuance. He has good, detailed policy positions. He ran a brilliant and well-organized primary campaign. And he is a fresh start. Electing a mixed-race man named Barack Obama is a rejection of the politics of fear and division that we have lived with for the last eight years (longer, really). He can’t fix everything that has gone wrong under Bush, but he will make a good start – better than anyone else I can imagine.

if only I could see the future

So the reason I am in New Jersey at the moment, instead of, say, on Monday, is that I was trying to go to a Camp Obama training session, which I was told would put me on track for a campaign job. The training was Friday and Saturday, and I signed up too late – but wasn’t sure that I was too late until after I had booked my ticket. Now I am here, untrained.

Tonight, just when I was about to go to bed, I received an email from the Obama campaign inviting me to Camp Obama… in California. They are now holding fifteen or so of these trainings, on the West Coast. Argh. If you go to a training, they then send you to a swing state. So I applied, anyway – I guess nowadays flying across the country is no big deal – but I feel very silly. Every step I take seems to be in the wrong direction these days.

In other encouraging news, a friend of a friend sent me a long email about where I should apply for campaign jobs, including possibly Florida (their offices opened late because of the primary issues). I submitted a resume to the national campaign also, just in case they are randomly hiring (which apparently does happen). Fingers crossed something works out.

EDIT: I almost forgot – Biden looks like the VP (still no text message though! boo Obama campaign!) I am OK with this choice though not super excited. I think Biden balances out Obama’s inexperience with foreign policy/McCain’s experience. I also think that Biden is good at attacking Republicans (remember how he dismantled Giuliani with the “noun, verb, and 9/11″ thing?) Both of those are good things. But he is a little conservative in other ways for my tastes, and he has a tendency to say really stupid things. So I am OK but not ecstatic. That’s fine – I was ecstatic when Barack won the nomination, and one super exciting person on the ticket is enough.

packing

The act of packing makes me sad. Wading through my possessions and picking out the things that I can’t live without for three months and the things that are, by some definition, pointless reminds me of all the other times I have packed up my life recently. Each time I leave something (someone) behind, and each time it gets a little sadder. The sadness seeps under my skin as I fold clothes, and stuff shoes with socks, and throw away trash.

Tonight is a mini-sadness, because it’s mini-packing. This is my third packing session this summer: previously I packed to move out of my room in July and again to move out of San Francisco in August. In each iteration I have fewer possibilities, so packing is faster and feels less monumental. The paring down process was aided by the people who stole my car last week, along with half of my wardrobe. Thanks, guys (or gals)!* This is also one in a long line of exits. I am backing up my computer. I am checking to see if my phone is charged. I am unmaking the bed I just made up.

I don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to become a transitory figure this summer, since my favorite thing in life is to be settled down. We are arbitrary beings: we set ourselves up to do the things we fear the most.

I promise this blog will talk about politics and campaign work eventually. I am working my way up to it.

*In case you didn’t notice, that was sarcastic.

the difficult part

I went to see a psychic today. She told me that I had three past lives, and in each life I was ripped away from my home (kidnapped or something similar) and in each case, I was never able to return. That is why, now, I am feeling so much grief and sadness even though my life is good. I have left home, and I don’t know if I’ll go back.

But: I left of my own free will, and I am going to do something exciting and worth doing. I am going to try, in whatever way I can, to help elect Barack Obama. And after that happens, then I can choose to go home (in the process healing my karmic debt!).

I’m not sure I believe the past lives part, but the process of leaving San Francisco has been harder than it should have been. There are many (more mundane) reasons: I fell and sprained my ankle moving out, I am confused and sad about a relationship I left behind, my car was stolen from the street where I was supposed to leave it safely parked for three months, etc. But these are all circumstantial, and I can deal with them.

The difficult part is the difficult part for all twenty-three year olds (at least in our culture of overabundant choices): I am in the process of figuring out what I want and what I need, and what the difference is between those two things. I want to be in San Francisco, in my old apartment, in my own comfy bed (ideally with my ex feeding me chocolates) but I don’t need that. I need to be proud of my president (or I need to find a new country of residence). I want to change, I want to stay the same. I need to let go, I need to hold on. I need to feel at home. I want to make home wherever I go. In short: I am confused and in my confusion I make decisions and sometimes I regret them more than I think I will.

Or maybe it really is about my past lives. Who knows?

This post this is just to say: I am here. I am going to New Jersey in a day and a half to see what I can do for the campaign there, or anywhere else anyone wants me. (If you are hiring for positions on the campaign: I am unemployed, and hardworking, and hopeful. Also, I do not go to see psychics on a regular basis.)

This blog may not be updated frequently. Depending on what I end up doing for the next few months, it will contain writing about some combination of: grassroots campaign work, current (political) events, writing, and my personal life and feelings. I will try to label appropriately.