Saudade

A year and two days ago, I left Ely in eastern central Nevada and drove through the desert until the isolated highways were swallowed into interstates and I found myself back in California, at the end of a trip that ostensibly started two weeks prior when I packed up a minivan’s worth of possessions that whimsy had decided were worth keeping and headed west out of New York. There is another version of the tale where the trip actually started three years earlier when I first left Southern California for the uncertainty of a new life in the city (for is there not only one City, for any that have lived there and many who have not?), but this isn’t that version. I still may figure out how to tell that story someday, but today I want to talk about the act of leaving.

Choosing to leave New York wasn’t necessarily a difficult decision to reach – there were practical reasons, as well as promises I had made, that had long since removed any sense of personal agency in the action. That doesn’t mean that leaving wasn’t one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. In fact, it was only by buying into the illusion that I had little choice in the matter that the transition was possible at all. I don’t mean to mislead you into thinking that I was not, at least in part, looking forward to moving back to Los Angeles; in many ways, I was anxious to try for a life in California that had commanded a large share of my younger aspirations. What I only mean to say is that no part of me wanted anything to do with committing that greatest of transgressions, the sin of leaving New York.

There have been many who have said that staying too long in New York is a risk run by everyone who chooses to live there. Despite only being one of those anecdotal bits of wisdom, it's something you accept as an unalienable fact when you first decide to make a go of it in the city. I remember thinking during my first days there, “Two years. I can do two years here, and then it’ll probably be time to go home.” I did not anticipate that long before those two years were up, my conception of “home” would change, and that arbitrary prognostication of when I would be ready to leave would stretch far beyond any horizon I could see. In the end, I left when the enchantment was still in my eyes, with great hope but little real chance of ever returning to call it home again.

It has been a year and two days since I was last in New York. Since then, I have made a new home in Los Angeles, largely by virtue of putting down roots because it was easier to have them than to not. I have not stayed this long in one place in a long time, and the steadiness of the days is not something I am used to just yet. My time in New York was adorned with a desultory mode of being. Every few months, there was either a trip back to California or to somewhere new, the Ann Arbors and Austins I found a sudden interest in seeing. Other countries seemed closer than before, even when they were not, and anyway it was a simple matter to go find out just how close they really were if the fancy struck. Moving to a new place shook me out of my tendency toward a sedentary default, and changed the rules for what boundaries my life had to fit in. Even when I stayed local, work constantly took me to Long Island and New Jersey, those bastions of the butt end of jokes people who lived in New York told each other, yet oddly exotic to me. I knew the jokes, but did not know firsthand why the punch lines were funny, not until I went myself. And the city itself had an endless number of corners and crevices, ready for me to reach toward, waiting for me to find. What I am saying is that when I found myself living in a place where how I fit into it was not already assumed, where the history was not already congealed into something tactile in my subconscious, even the mundane could skew magnificent, and it is that easy wonderment and the appetite it awakened that I have missed since steadiness first cast the pace of my days into an even canter.

I have enough of a pragmatist streak in me to know that the change was inevitable. That having a savings account and a healthy diet would have to, at some point, trump a second floor walk-up with great natural light and getting hammered at Whiskey Ward on wayward weeknights. Leaving, in that regard, was the sensible thing to do, and I am realizing now that I do not regret it, not really. What I do regret is being unable, maybe even unwilling, to find a way to feel how I felt when New York was home. But when I start to think that, another notion creeps in, telling me that perhaps I am looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place. That perhaps the point is to find a new way toward wonderment, a new way to feel now that New York is not home.

It is a convincing theory, and a comforting one, but ultimately one for tomorrow, or the day after. Right now I am not looking to be convinced or comforted; I am looking to miss something that is not mine anymore, knowing full well that the fair (to spin one of Joan Didion's characterizations) looks rosiest after it has ended. But that does not change the fact that once the fair has ended, nothing feels like it will ever be the same again.

Pause For Breath

I meant to write a couple of posts on leaving New York before I actually left, but between cramming in the last few gasps of city air and packing for the trip home, I wasn't able to get anything done in time. Instead, the few paragraphs I was able to write languished in a perpetually-open Chrome tab, taunting me while I questioned if I could ever find an original and meaningful way to talk about leaving that place, especially when plenty of people have done it so strikingly before (I'm looking particularly at you, Joan Didion).

Writing nostalgia, in general, has become increasingly problematic for me. As much as I've traded in its saccharine currency over the years, it's only been recently that I've started to wonder exactly what value, if any, I've been able to extract from it. While personal blogs are allowed to be self-indulgent -- and are maybe even necessarily so --, the amount of navel-gazing I've done in the way that I've done it has begun to seem directionless and uninspired. I could've been doing better.

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The other form of navel-gazing I've enjoyed trimming my blog(s) with over the years has been the picture/recap post. Seeing as how that old standard hasn't been causing me any existential grief, you can expect a good amount of it in the coming days (or more likely weeks, given my updating habits) as I recount, in the thrilling monotone of text, the resplendent journey that was my cross-country drive from New York to Los Angeles. And maybe when that's all done with, I'll be able to finally figure out what I've been trying so hard to say about New York.

Pictures starting next time.

Retreading Old Ground, or A Prelude

Consider this a Foreword.

As my last year in school ticked past its halfway mark, I began to confront -- actually and practically -- the fact that I didn't really have a plan for What Came Next. There were options certainly -- a desk job at a studio or production company, freelancing on production crews -- but I hadn't proactively pursued any of those options. There were half-steps taken in fits of misdirected enthusiasm, most clearly manifested in an aborted move to a house in Silverlake. But all of these things fell apart or never came to fruition because of a deeper thirst that was beginning to foment inside of my unsophisticated spirit -- a thirst for escape.

Certainly, there were reasons to stay. A final, pesky class to complete my major would leash me to the area through the end of the calendar year. The film industry, though certainly present elsewhere, built its castles in Los Angeles. I had the beginnings of a network, however fetal and unshapen, of colleagues and friends that needed nurturing to continue to grow. Much of my family was there. It was my home, the place where I kept my heart.

Then in my final year and a half of school, I began to develop -- a tad belatedly, I felt at the time -- a taste for greater interaction with a wider world, a taste I had spurned for the indelible but familiar flavors of old friends and favorite places. Maybe it stemmed from being the child of immigrants, or a kid who read too many fantasy and adventure books, but I didn't want to be someone who only ever called one place home (even as I realize now that "one place" is only a relative term). As the end of my 18-year education approached, trimmed in armaments of sentiment and idealism, it seemed appropriate to not only dream big, but to start new. To find a new school to administer my learning, a new home to keep my heart.

So fuck it, pick up and leave. See where the road goes. Why not?

It's hard to pin down the reasons we do a lot of the things in our lives, especially big decisions made when we were different people in different spaces. And it's easy to shape a narrative in hindsight, to paint a picture with a single, tidy brushstroke. To button it up with some pithy platitudes. So maybe the decision to move to New York was not as neat as I've portrayed it to be. Maybe I've left out the part where whimsy and inertia did most of the work. But looking back requires a certain amount of erasure and adjustment. It's baked into the process, forcibly, by selective memories and retroactive auto-corrections. But that is the cost of doing your own storytelling; you cannot hide your vanity.

Now, let's get on with this silly endeavor, shall we?

Video Games

What is it about the Lana Del Rey saga? It continues to attract attention, both critical and metacritical, from a perplexingly broad spectrum of pundits -- everyone from indie blogs to tastemaker celebrities to well-regarded network newsmen have weighed in with their opinions. I should preface this by saying that I'm digging all of it -- LDR continues to be an artist whose infinitely constructible and de-constructible narrative I enjoy immensely.

I have no shame in admitting my own affinity for certain slices of pop music. In fact, I may actually be more bashful in admitting my regular listening habits, which usually trend toward the indie scene (whatever that means this week day hour). So it's no surprise, then, that when Lana Del Rey ambushed the music blogs with her two haunting singles and a hypnotic lo-fi video last year, I was hooked. Who was this girl, who made this grandiose-yet-simple, slightly-left-of-conventional pop music with seemingly blase indifference?

Of course, by now, you probably know the story, or at least some version of it. The strength of those first two singles gained her instant adoration on the music blogs. It also landed her a hefty recording deal with a major record label, which promptly stamped her as the next big thing (one of many, sure, but arguably THE next big thing). She quickly earned more and more fans (her December 5th show in New York sold out in minutes. The $15 tickets were subsequently hawked for $100+ on StubHub. I only know this because I tried to get them), even as she settled unsteadily into that odd square of space between the indie scene and pop superstardom. Did she still have indie cred? Did she even still need it? Would she cross over and become the hit maker her record label surely demanded?

Through it all, she maintained that distant, couldn't-give-a-fuck-about-anyone-but-my-fans attitude, but there was something more there that started to intrigue me. While critics busied themselves with ripping her "gangster Nancy Sinatra" persona as an image manufactured by her label, a beguiling subplot began to emerge across the various concert videos and reviews that sprouted on the internet, like wildflowers in a roadside ditch. She could be charming in a way, sure, and she could definitely sing. But what seemed to come across most viscerally was the fact that she was awkward. She wrung her hands between songs. She clearly sought to be great, to be perfect. The indie scene clamors for cool authenticity while the mainstream has an appetite for polish, and yet here it was, so plainly butted up against all of it -- Lana Del Rey wanted this, badly, and was trying really hard not to fuck it up.

Then, of course, SNL happened.

There are performances where you're awed by the talent on display. There are performances where you're discovering something you've never seen or heard before. Then there are ones where it isn't quality or originality that suck you in, but the greater narrative unfolding behind the product. And here is Lana Del Rey's narrative that I've latched on to -- a 25 year old singer whose first go-around amounted to nothing much (the Lizzy Grant album) suddenly finds herself in the wings to the grand stage she's been chasing so long (and here I mean a metaphorical stage, not the one in Studio 8H), and even while the dream begins to crystallize, she realizes how fragilely it's held together. Maybe it's suddenly funny, in that inappropriate, funereal sort of way. Under the heat of a growing number of lights, anxiety starts to boil over. She wonders what to do with her hands and, finding no good solution, lets them wander awkwardly, occasionally in foreign, uncomfortable patterns some label executive, or perhaps her flagging confidence, has convinced her to try. She tries to stay true to some idea of herself that she promised she wouldn't lose, only now she's struggling to remember what that idea was, and what significance it had ever held. She just wants to sing her songs, under her terms, yet why is it suddenly so hard to remember how to do that?

The problem with forming these narratives is that they are inherently speculative, and usually wildly so. But to confirm or deny them would ruin the illusion (you could even argue that much of the criticism against Lana Del Rey has been based on some prefabricated narrative not being met), so they're intentionally woven together from scraps. That my affection for Lana Del Rey is built on a foundation of willful ignorance, then, is something I accept. Why not? We do it for so many other people -- actors, politicians, historical figures -- why not for a singer who makes songs that are catchy as hell? The narrative will likely one day resolve into something resembling the truth, but I'm comfortable with where it stands for now.

And where it stands is that Lana Del Rey is moving forward. After gamely taking on, and soundly winning over, David Letterman, she sits through a meandering, depthless profile for the Times. She does nothing to clearly prove, one way or the other, what her story is, and so the narrative -- my narrative for her -- continues. She heads to LA and stops by Amoeba, where perhaps one of her most illuminating performances is given.

She looks comfortable. Casual, even. The dream remains unachieved; the challenge remains unmet. But she's come through something, and found herself still standing. Her fans couldn't love her more for it. You can see the emotion bubble over for a second, before a hand is placed over her lips, bottling it in. You can't see what she's thinking, but you can speculate. You can continue to build the narrative (and even begin to wonder if maybe that's the point of Lana Del Rey's cordial detachment). Behind the artifice and the hype and the criticisms and even the speculation, Lana Del Rey is still trying like hell not to fuck it up. But she's also learned that it isn't necessarily the end of the world if you do. And if you look closely, you can see her start to believe that maybe she can pull it all off.

At least that's what I believe. And sometimes, the most compelling stories are the ones we can attach our own to.

Moms, and a Tree She Climbed Once

There is a current of basic pragmatism coursing through my mother that I struggled to see past when I was younger, especially in the days when when it was forbidding me from going out with friends or insisting I pursue another insufferable educational endeavor. My mother liked to dispense advice as fact, often following up with, "You should listen to the wise woman." This closing sentiment (toxic to a teenager's ears) was, of course, itself a piece of advice, and also presented as fact -- there was going to be little choice, only obedience.

If my mother was often right, my brothers and I never let her know it. To some degree, we didn't have to -- she knew, as she had all along, that a mother is very seldom wrong. In any case, she had lived a longer and better-traveled life than any of us could have claimed as teenagers, had in fact given us the very life we now cried as our own, and no matter how far our childhood was from her own, there were certain realities even a new era an ocean away could not change. And so, after numerous blustery arguments followed inevitably by our reluctant obedience, we usually found ourselves exactly where our mother had predicted us to be -- smarter, better, fuller from whatever experience we had initially fought so hard against.

But more and more, I've come to see that my mother has the habits of a romantic. Behind the intransigent pragmatism, she cultures a small garden of poetry and flights of fancy. At the dinner table, when we attempted to turn away vegetables, she would trot out idioms to chastise our finicky, juvenile tastes. In the midst of shipping three unwilling boys off to Chinese school or after-school enrichment academies, my mother would soliloquize about knowledge and its value as both weapon and armor in the lives we had ahead of us. She would dream about taking trips to China and quote Chinese poems written centuries ago about those faraway, jeweled cities, then turn to us with a smile, asking, "Don't you want to go?" More often than not, we rolled our eyes and asked,"When?", worried about potential conflicts with our social calendars.

My mother insists, even today, that my brothers and I all pursue graduate degrees. She believes, with a fervent mix of maternal arrogance and protectiveness, that it will ensure us a steadier and more secure future. But she also does not complain when each of her children abandons traditional careers to pursue their ideas of success on their own terms, in fields she did not understand but made a point to take a more active interest in. She, too, has dreams. She had them when she first came to this country, and then she wiped them away for new ones almost three decades ago, when she had the first of her three sons. She dreamed of happy and fulfilling lives for them, and that dream hasn't changed, even if her idea of how they would get there has slowly become only her idea, and not a blueprint for theirs.

But my mother understands because she understands the impulse for beauty, for spontaneity, for a kind of unbridled idealism. On her first date with my father, they spent time walking around the campus of UT Austin, where they were both graduate students. She saw a tree with low, thick branches, perfect for climbing, like the ones she and her brothers and cousins used to scramble up in her youth, half a world away. And perhaps, she may have thought, not unlike the ones from the youth of the man she had just met. She veered off the path and walked straight for the tree. She put one hand on the lowest branch, pulled herself up, and didn't look back. A few branches up, she called down to the man she would one day marry, marveling at the view. My father, the kind, gentle, decidedly un-romantic man who had grown up on a farm, was shocked. Who was this woman, this climber of trees? He could not help but marvel back.

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My parents grew up in a place I don't know, with a different value system, a different language. Though I've learned about many of these things from them, they are still nevertheless foreign things. For a boy heavily steeped in his own evolving idea of what it means to be American, these foreign things of his parents are stored separately, in the attic of his mind. They are a part of his story, but only figure into the preamble. This creates a divide that I've struggled to get past as I've gotten older, as I finally came to the realization that my parents had entire lives of their own before I was ever an idea. Hearing their stories now, it helps. It helps me grasp at a somewhat clearer notion of who my parents are as people, and why they raised me the way they did.

When I think of my mother, I think of a Gustave Flaubert quote I read somewhere once that has unexpectedly stayed with me:

There isn't a bourgeois alive who in the ferment of his youth, if only for a day or for a minute, hasn't thought himself capable of boundless passions and noble exploits...in a corner of every notary's heart lie the moldy remains of a poet.

I don't know to what extent my mother, working in medical academia, is fulfilled. We cannot all chase the smoky substance of our hopes in the way we wanted. But I would be ungrateful if I sought to argue that my mother, with her heart of moldy poets, did not birth a fervent (if inconsistent) romantic in my soul, and provide a foundation for my own try at marvel.

How to Live, or What the Future Looks Like at 25

When I was younger, the blueprint for life was simple. I imagined it to be something like this: school through to college, graduate, get a job, meet a girl, fall in love, get married, start a family. All of that was ahead of me, way in the distance. As is common with such a perspective, my measurements were skewed. I estimated -- rather reasonably, I thought -- I would have all of that taken care of somewhere between 25 and 28, maybe as late as 30 if I opted to pursue a graduate degree in between.

I don't remember when I discarded this blueprint. But when it went, it went quickly, with a scoff, and without a second glance. It wasn't just that I was changing, but that the times were. The combination of socioeconomic conditions forged by our parents' generations with a greater cultural acceptance for pursuing "life experiences" (sprinkled in with longer life expectancies) meant that kids my age -- who had grown up idealizing the aforementioned blueprint, who now found it grossly outdated -- had the luxury of time. We could explore, misstep, or delay all we wanted. And so we traded careers for jobs, plans for detours, and stability for transience. There would, after all, be time for Life later.

It's been written about abundantly (in this Times article that Google spit out, for example, albeit not the one I had read some time ago that I had been searching for), but the categorization and examination of this shifting dynamic among young people is always treated with a certain alienness. Its otherness is always at the forefront, and even as I recognized myself going through this larger realignment of attitude, reading about it somehow made it seem strange and perplexing. And so I began to wonder just what my outlook was becoming.

I do still want a career, but I am no longer in the hurry I once was to attain it. The idealism that colored much of my later teen years has metastasized into a kind of optimism about time -- a belief that deferral of certain career and life goals now does not mean being denied them in the future. There's been a subtle shift toward a certain kind of passivity -- a desire to be impacted, rather than impact. This isn't to say I've abandoned proactivity, but that I'm more focused on goals for what lessons and insights I can take from them, rather than on those that are based in my accomplishing something.

I say all this, but there's a slight hypocrisy in the fact that I'm still pursuing career goals. I have a small production company in Los Angeles that I run with three partners. Being in New York, I can never claim to be as involved as my two partners steering the ship in Los Angeles, but I am actively planning and scheming and working, for long-term goals of the company and, by extension, my career. But perhaps what I've been trying to say is that those career goals now find themselves being balanced by a healthy appetite for discovery, in ways completely unrelated to my career. I am lucky to be working in a creative field, because if I live a life of constant discovery, it stands to reason that I will become a better writer, a better thinker, a better dreamer.

And so I live in New York, because this is where I wanted to spend part of my 20s. It's a city rich with life, still distinctly American, but also incredibly different from the Southern California I grew up in. I lust after travel opportunities because I want to see new places, encounter strange things, and interact with something unspeakably foreign. I believe it will make me a fuller person. I read, I watch, I consume, because what I learn from strangers will undoubtedly inform how I empathize with the rest of the world. I aim to learn to do things -- from getting scuba-certified last year to a years-long dream I've had of learning how to work on a farm -- because coming from a humanities background, I am always seeking to balance my knowledge with things that exist outside of theory and interpretation.

This wasn't the life I thought I'd lead when I was a kid, but it's a life I'm thankful to be able to lead now. I wonder, if kids today will see us and think to emulate, and if they do, whether or not the shifting strata of ideas and expectations our society sits on will again dictate a change in pace by the time they are in their 20s.

I will be able to call myself a filmmaker without feeling completely fraudulent one day. But I am not in a particular rush to get to that day. I have other things I want to be as well. I think what it boils down to is a desire, perhaps youthfully naive, to continually have my perspective altered. After all, it is not just me that is changing, but the world around me, and what better way to understand a mutable world than through flickering lenses? As nice as stability sometimes sounds, it requires a commitment to a certain sedentary acceptance -- that this is how things are going to be -- that I'm not ready for yet. There will be a day when I will seek a steadier life, I have no doubt. But when that day comes, I want to be able to look back on a life of imbalance, composed of both indulgent days and meager months, all the while ravenous for newness. Discovery should never end; astonishment always pursued. For now, that means chasing my interests in a hundred different directions. For now, that is the blueprint.

Dreaming, Then and Again

Last week, in a hotel in Connecticut, I had one of those dreams that inexplicably finds a way to linger in your head, the trivialities of wakefulness failing to wash it away as the sun washes away the night.

The part I remember starts in a network of large cabins in a generic forest, where people I knew and some I didn't had been gathered. Each had been brought there from different home realities, realities where they had emerged as the main characters, the fullest and most heroic permutations of themselves. In other realities, they had died, or shrank from the glare of capital-D Destiny, and there they remained, uninvited to this mysterious place.

But something was wrong. A slumbering beast was awakened, perhaps out of necessity, and it set about cleansing this hub world. Those that were deemed unworthy by some unspecified criterion were turned to ash, not unlike what I had seen in recent ads for a movie about malevolent invisible aliens. Some shrugged as it happened, knowing that some place else, a different version of them was safe from this beast. The beast, slighted, changed tactics, now stopping people mid-disintegration, taking their feet but leaving the rest of them, screaming, terrified. The dream was suddenly very unhappy.

People fled, and in the ambitious geography of dreams, the woods turned into a vast harbor, where fleets upon fleets of boats and ships were moored. The group I was with -- left blurred and underdeveloped by my dreaming mind but likely composed of waking-life friends -- ran down the maze of piers, looking for an adequate boat, knowing we would be safe on the water as the world behind us crumbled away. Other groups in boats sped by, ignoring any calls for help. Somewhere in my sleeping mind, I rolled my eyes. This was turning into an apocalyptic cliche.

We found a boat. It was a good size, sturdy, but we panicked at the absence of fresh water aboard it. We searched and searched as we drifted by numerous empty boats, passed over by other refugees due to some unrevealed shortcoming. And then we found one covered by a blue plastic tarp, filled with 5-gallon jugs of Sparkletts and 24-packs of Poland Spring bottled water, a twisted liquid Costco at the edge of the sea in the middle of my slumbering mind. We took what we needed and left the rest for others, determined not to succumb to the kind of reckless inhumanity we'd seen in too many movies and read in too many books. We pushed off and headed for deeper waters, worried, scared, but hopeful for a future in the end of the world.


I woke up shivering, having left my arms and shoulders out of the covers, exposed to the Connecticut winter that had snuck in throughout the night.

Weird, I remember thinking, I can still recall it. Dreams usually slipped away from me as the circuits in my brain blinked awake. But this one hung around, leaving a strand for me to grasp onto if I so chose. Offering to let me have it.

I reached out and took hold of it, if only because I could. And maybe if I could hold on to this one, I could hold on to others yet to come.

On Expression

Expression is hard. Regardless of whether you're trying to do it through words, art, or action -- it's hard. Even those of us who make a living out of expression struggle with its elusive nature. But it's the entirety of what we need. More than anything, we need to be understood.

It's why we make friends. It's why we fight. It's why we fall in love. It's why we break each others' hearts. It's why we pursue our dreams, find a career, buy a car, or post our lives on the internet. We bare our souls, and, to varying degrees, we demand an audience. No matter what results from our pursuit of it, though, at its root, it's a simple need.

Whether it's through paint and pencils or tears and tantrums, whether it touches on the profound or dwells in mundanity, the little pieces of ourselves that we put out there just want to be heard, to feel some sense of reciprocation. Because we feel so strongly. And more often than not, we have no idea how to capture that sensation and reproduce it; how to bottle it up to put it on display for everyone -- or just a select few -- to see. To say "Look! This is what I mean! This is why I am!"

But we try. Not always knowingly, and not always with the best of intentions, but we all try. We hold a sliver of our hearts up to the light, to examine and wonder. Does it look the way we thought it would? Do you see me the way I see me? These experiments can end in disappointment, but rarely in defeat.

We keep trying. Against reason, against doubt, we try.

We hope. Boldly and fearfully, we hope that those fragments resembling our truest selves that we send out into the universe will one day reach a destination. That someone will receive it, absorb it, and see what we've been trying so hard to say all along -- that we are here, that we feel, and that we want to be felt in return. We want to know that we are not alone in this. Because no matter how personal expression may be, it is, in the end, an act of communion.

Those pieces of ourselves, floating and lost between us, don't always find a home. But we continue. Against the fear of wasting away, we continue, because we know when those pieces are found, by us or by others, we are made fuller. And so.

We speak. Or, in our silence, we yell. We write. We sing, dance, cry, laugh, scream, and shudder. We create. And in creating, in trying to convey who we are, we become. And it's in the trying that we refuse to give up.

On Language

We all (for the most part) know how we feel. It's an intrinsic, instinctual sense. Beyond second-nature, our feelings simply are, and in that way they are definitive aspects of who we are as people.

But there's a wide gap between knowing how we feel and expressing how we feel. Far too often, we fail to adequately or accurately express our feelings, and it's that discrepancy that causes problems, big and small. It's why we laugh at something that isn't funny or snap at someone who doesn't deserve it. Those situations are the manifestations of our failed attempts to do something incredibly basic -- let others know how we feel. It's not always so dramatic. A lot of times it's something as simple as being unable to recount a dream to a friend. We can go on and on about the colors we remember and the vague shapes of people we think were also there, but we can never capture that rush of happiness or exhilaration last night's dream left us with.

Because language is where we try to solve this dilemma of self expression. It's one of our best means to make others understand us, but it's rarely as easy as it sounds. That's why so many of our stories end with "I guess you just had to be there." We try, but can't manage to give an appropriate rendition of what's going on inside our heads.

Language is the key to that expression, but it's also a tool many are good at but few have ever mastered. Still, while self-articulation is deceptively difficult, it's in the pursuit of it that I find a great deal of joy. Which is why I can't explain (appropriately enough) the utter euphoria I experience whenever I catch myself mid-sentence, struggling to find the right word that's hanging on the tip of my tongue, floundering in my pursuit of clarity, until out of the muddled haze of forgotten SAT flash cards emerges the perfect word, blessing me with the ability to do one thing, simply and purely -- and that's finish my fucking sentence.

Bliss.

It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's one of those victories nobody can take away from you.

So what's the lesson? Maybe it's that while language is one of those basic things so many take for granted, it's also our most vital path toward self-expression. It may confound us with its temperament, but it's worth perfecting as best we can. Today I toast language, for its frustrations, for its power, and for its promise.

On beauty

Beauty is a funny thing, and not in the way that makes you laugh -- in the way that makes you smile, for no reason at all, three days later in the pouring rain on your way back home from the grocery store.

On blogging

Though never what you'd call a regular updater, I've blogged for the better part of the last decade. In all that time, I never wrote about anything beyond a simple recap of my day or a poorly executed and partially guarded transcript of my thoughts. True, for much of the last decade I was a teenager; and like many teenagers, I was great at exuberance, terrible at expression. The fact that my personal blog(s) was a wasteland of inconsequential musings and inarticulate ramblings shouldn't be much of a surprise.

As I get older, though, it'd be nice to have somewhere to write and, on occasion, receive some amount of feedback. Consider it Blog 2.0. Or, to better account for the number of personal blogs I've actually started and abandoned over the years, Blog 4.0. And this is its manifesto. It will be a better organized and properly filtered repository for my brain droppings. Be it reflections of the more quotidian variety, slightly more thoughtful insights, or small writing samples, this blog will have a place for all of them.

The nature of it being a blog means it's publicly accessible, so of course this is, in many ways, meant for you. But it will always firstly, and in many more diverse ways, be for me. It's a selfish declaration, but one we all implicitly make when publishing anything to the internet in the form of a blog. So hopefully what you read here will be of some merit to you, able to provide a laugh, a smirk, a scoff, a momentary distraction. But even if it doesn't, it does provide something for me -- a laugh, a smirk, a scoff, a momentary distraction.

A voice.

So please, listen for a little while.