all dressed up and nowhere to go (or no one to take me)

It has been said that the core of human fear stems from abandonment. When one is in need or in danger and there appears to be no means of protection or no way of escaping a situation, one experiences fear that can be traced to an overwhelming sense of utter hopelessness. In these situations, we require someone else to rescue us and it often seems or is actually the case that there is no one to perform this role.

Abandonment is an emotion I have experienced frequently during the last several months. One could argue that avoiding this feeling is what drives our behavior. It is true that much of what I have tried to accomplish in order to take back my life relates to this. Recently, I have come to understand and accept that this is inherent in the human experience. I would like to think that it does not drive all that I do, but at the end of the day, I am sure that one could make a convincing argument that this was the case.

I find myself again experiencing this poisonous emotion. We experience it in a variety of situations, from medical crises to a relationship ending to a loved-one passing on. There are also the mundane cases, but abandonment feels the same. I am sitting on a front porch waiting for a taxi to take me to an interview and it has yet to come. I called an hour and a half ago to order the cab and I am now forty minutes late for the interview. This is, of course, not the impression I would like to make on the organization. Alas, I do not having another option. I am feeling abandoned.

My extreme tardiness to this meeting could affect the course of my life. I say this with caution, knowing that it might appear that I am blowing the situation out of proportion. It may also turn out that the recruiters will totally understand the situation and overlook my now forty-five minute lateness. One might say that this is an opportunity to demonstrate how I behave in crisis situations and will actually make me a more credible candidate. I can rationalize almost any outcome.

In the end, though, I have no control. I have called the taxi company a total of four times and I always receive the same answer, that I am next on the list, that they are busy. I have phoned other companies as well and the story is the same. There is no access to another form of public transportation where I am at and walking might have been an option three hours ago, but no longer.

In short, I am feeling abandoned. At first, I was enraged by the situation. My anger has yet to fully subside, but I now find myself saddened by potentially missing an opportunity at a chance to present myself and my abilities to a potential employer. And yes, the taxi has still not arrived, I am fifty minutes late now.

To extrapolate this though process even further, perhaps to its end, much of this has to do with time. Time has bound me to arriving late. It is also time, however, that will free me. At the end of this day, I will enjoy time with old friends and I am sure the events of the day will not be significant. If, in fact, I never make it to the interview or any for that matter, time will inevitably produce other opportunities. So life continues and time will also bring our inevitable death when time will no longer matter to us and all of these situations will be forgotten.

This is verging on coming across as morbid, but the same is true in the present. We know that each day will end and that the sun will rise. In the meantime, it is our charge to take advantage of the time we are given. We will fail and succeed over and over again. We will grow tired, yet we will rest and attempt once again to fulfill the charges of the day. Morning will come and in the end, we will come to find to comfort and solace that each and every one of us craves and needs. Of this I am convinced.

(p.s. taxi never showed, no other companies could help me. i missed the interview and could just say sorry.)

breakfast of champions...

...snickers satisfies.

now that we have established that, i can move on. the swiss miss, who has been somewhat MIA lately, commented on my blog. i guess she has been bizzy, which i understand, but she also updated about her fab life in manhattan (which btw, has nothing of dez moinayz, ahem). anyway, it reminded me of berlin. back when we were kids. okay, it was like, er, five years ago, holy crap. we had an interesting life. i mean, we partied, we did artsy things, we sat in parks, we shopped, i showed them all the things i bought in west berlin, we had secret parties when my landlady was away, we made fun of east german teeange girls and loathed the brit trash that had invaded prezlauer berg.

it reminds me that life can take so many turns. even now, as i sit here in the iowhat waiting to hear about a marketing job, i could also become a famous german poet within the next year, move to berlin, wear all black, and sit in cafe's, smoke Gauloises all day, and write. we think we are so limitted in life. and i admit, despite the hopeful-sounding posts i have written the past few days, i feel limitted, too. i am stuck in the middle of nowhere, quite literally.

but i guess this is what hope is--the ability to imagine that something seemingly impossible can happen. and it has. i know it has in my life, starting with making it through the first six weeks of my life. i am sure we all have at least one experience that truly seemed like a miracle. logically, it made no sense. the odds were against us or in our favor, for that matter. but what happened, did. and here we are, but how quickly we unlearn how to hope.

lest we mire in what is...

i was reminded this morning of what a beautiful gift we all have: imagination--the power to think of what could be, and not just of what is.
i need to dream/fantasize/imagine more.

when i taught english at a township school in namibia, i was totally unprepared for a lesson one day. so i told the class, we are going to take 20 minutes and think about what our dreams are and then write them down. so i set my swatch watch and watched them struggle, watched their confusion, watched them giggle. when the time was up, i asked if anyone wanted to share. those who chose to share expressed pure delight in their fantasies. children in townships in namibia do not receive a lot of opportunities to escape with their minds.

nothing has happened in this world without someone imagining first what could be. perhaps it was academia, perhaps it was too many hard knocks, perhaps it was a constant feeling of exhaustion, but it was so long since i imagined what could be.

towards the end of december when the winter really set in here in iowa, i was at a very deep and dark place in my psyche. i was angry, i was depressed, i was tired. and then an e-mail came from pandu, who happens to be my closest friend in namibia. the subject line in the e-mail was "believe in the god of impossibilities."

really, i didn't need to read the e-mail itself.

whether you are a so-called person of faith or have some other belief system or claim nothing at all, i believe the message is universal. we are all endowed with an imagination.

use it.

(and yes, i did use the verb "fantasize" in this post.)

truth from bottle caps

Now that I have given up soft drinks, Sandeep has picked up the habit. I came back to my desk this afternoon and saw that he had a large bottle of Mountain Dew in his hand. I can tell that though he is happy to have a job for now, he is approaching his limit with this audit process. It is also somewhat comforting to know that the soft drink industry’s loss of my patronage will be made up by my office mate. As he left for the day, he showed me the bottle cap. “Try again, it says” he reads to me. Yes, at the end of the day, all we can do is try again. So we do.