Cafe Opusing

So I'm in the kitchen of opus right now, chilling out with Gabi and listening to european dance music. And i'm thinking about my watson proposal, and really feeling like I don't know if I can make this fly. I had a panic attack earlier today in my room while writing up the proposal: I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing with my life after college. NO idea. Not even a clue. I don't even know what I would do ideally. LIke you know that question that they always ask you in highschool: What would you do if you were given a million dollars and never had to work for the rest of your life? I don't know how I'd answer that question. I have no idea. I was ok with this, I really was, for a while. But I guess American "Do it now!" culture has infiltrated my mind. Its too late for the GREs, so Psych Grad School is out of the question next year. Maybe I could be a teacher? What would I teach? Creative Writing? I don't know how to creative write. I just do it and cross my fingers that it turns out alright. Spanish? Wouldn't they rather a native spanish speaker?
I was filling out a job application today and I realized that I've actually taken more hispanic studies classes than psychology classes. I've taken 12 hispanic studies classes and 8 psychology classes. i'm majoring in psychology. I might not even be able to minor in hispanic studies. Is that a sign of a dysfunctional academic department or what?
My parents think I should go into international relations. I'd die before working a regular 9-5 job in a cubicle somewhere, so if i get a job in IR i'd like to travel. A lot. They're not too cool with me being a teacher, although neither one has said it explicitly. I think they really wanted me to go the therapist route. But what can i say? It's just not the right path for me.
I flip back and forth from being terrified about the future to being excited. I feel like i'm hanging on the brink of the infinite abyss, i feel like i've got so many ways to go, up or down, and i just want to hang here forever but i know i can't. The minutes of my college career are ticking away and i still am as clueless as when i started.

John Cusacks of the world

July night you woke me up midnight with your stereo playing my favorite song outside my window. I waved to you and closed the blinds. You called me at two am and told me about your passionate obsession with an obscure band. And I, drunken with sleep, downloaded the song and we rocked out over the phone. You ranked your top ten favorite political films. And I told you I thought Death to Smoochy was a political commentary. You told me you were a geek in high school (and yes, I believed it). I told you I was a goth (and no, you didn’t believe me). You confided in me your heartbreaking crush on a girl you’ve only seen once. I complained about a guy who pretended to be an activist, and was quickly sold out by the “Terrorist Hunting Permit” pasted on the bumper of his red pickup truck.

My psychic italian mother asked me your name one day, waving her spatula over a grand pot of something delicious.
“What’s his name?”
“John Cusack”

I know what you’re thinking. John Cusack? But that’s the first name that came out of my mouth. John Cusack. Can you blame me? I have to admit, at first I thought it was an act. Some rare or adorably geeky game to get me into bed. It was genius. I mean, who doesn’t love John Cusack? I might’ve let you win too, if I wasn’t so suspicious.

When we met, we sat in the dog park and watched the animals playing. I like really big, slobbery dogs. I told you that I wanted to live in Chelsea, wear a mini skirt and heels and walk a huge Newfoundland around Union Square every day. I told you that I have a secret love for really small dogs, the ones that have rain jackets and matching rubber boots (but don’t tell anyone). You told me you liked labradores. Faithful, not too big or stupid, but not too smart either.

The thing about you, John, is that you blow it every time. Sure, in the movies, it always ends up well, you get with the girl nextdoor and everything is fine. But this is reality. Reality like the time I woke up in october to hear a different song playing outside my window. I opened the blinds and you had moved on. You had moved on to the girl nextdoor. Maybe that’s the thing about people like us. We know our roles. You may be John Cusack, perpetually misunderstood, perpetually falling in and out of love. And I am not the girl. I’m not even the girl nextdoor. I’m perpetually the girl next to the girl nextdoor. And you’ll pass right by me.

well ok

i guess this is how it really goes.
I dreamt about spain last night. I dreamt about wandering over cobblestone roads uphill, which opened up in the most random spaces to beautiful mozarabic plazas and hidden cathedrals with mosque foundations. I dreamt about whitewashed houses, and kisses on the cheek, wine at 4pm and eye contact. I dreamt about truth. And I woke up cold. I don't know how much longer these images will haunt my dreams, and no matter how hard I try, I don't know if i will ever forget them and just move on.
I miss the honesty of the people. I miss being told exactly what was going on in someone's mind. "eres guapa, besame" (youre beautiful, kiss me).
I wake up and I feel cold. The soltude of being the only girl in an all boys boarding school surrounds me again. Lost in a hundred year history swamped by cool dry fog from dawn over the river, and cold stone buildings that stare and say "prove yourself" Prove myself? I've been proving myself my entire life. I feel like I've been screaming to a wall. Why does it feel like no one ever gets it? And when I finally find someone that does, they just sell out. Maybe I should just let it happen. Fuck. Maybe I should just let it happen. Maybe I should just be that doll that everyone seems to want me to be. Maybe I should just shut my fucking mouth and throw away the key and be that doll that they want me to be. Do you even know what this feels like? Can you possibly? Do you know what it's like to have someone tell you you're intimidating because you're intelligent? Would that ever happen to a man? I don't think so. Even women turn their backs to me. Why should i even bother fighting for them, if at the first chance they get they'd just turn against me. It's always competition. Why do we fight over men who don't really want us anyway?
Why should I even bother. I don't even know.
I don't really want to go back to spain. I don't really know what I want. Maybe I just need to get off this campus. Maybe I need to start over again. Somewhere new, clean, to baptize myself in the waters of the outside world, a world beyond this ridiculous hamilton cool which is my very highschool, some place where I'm not radical or intimidating or "hiding behind the boy" or that psycho girl you kind of liked until she started to speak.
I will drown myself in my work. Emerge a shadow.

lightness

The minutes of my college career are ticking away. It's almost over, and yet here I am, and I still feel as if i'm waiting for it to start. I hate those movies that make college seem like this crazy time in your life, that is so radically different from high school and the rest of the "real world". I'm so envious of those characters, and I often wonder if I ended up in the wrong school because college is nothing like that for me. Or maybe i've just gone about this whole thing wrong.

I think if i were to look back onto the narriative of my life, my college experience would look strange. I was talking with a professor the other day, complaining about my thesis, and then complaining about the fact that I wqas old enough to have a thesis. I told him that I couldn't believe it's already my senior year, that I was waiting for things to pick up and i felt as if i had wasted all this time and not accomplished anything. He just stared at me like i was a lunatic So then it hit me. My activism really defines who I am here. And as much as I really feel like i haven't accomplished anything, like i've wasted my time, perhaps I haven't.

We can never truly know how other people view us. For example, I view myself as being extremely shy and awkwardly reserved. I actually mentioned that to one of my friends the other day and she replied "what the fuck are you talking about? you're the most outgoing person I know". Pretty weird. But my point is that i guess I shouldn't be too worried about the external impact of my experience here at college. Yeah, maybe i'll be remembered. Chances are I won't be (i mean, look what happened when I went abroad for a semester!) but what really matters is the internal impact. I left my boarding school with a generalized idea of who I was and what direction life was taking me. That idea got completely obliterated when I got back from spain. Now, I guess I"m just sitting around, watching the seasons change and hoping for some epiphany to smack me on the head so I know what the hell is going on.

I feel like i'm living in a hazy dream, like my life is on hold and this day to day reality i experience is part of someone else's life. I've got so many things piling up: my thesis, my grad school applications, my internship applications, my watson application, plans for speakers to come to campus, shuttles to protests, drop beats not bombs etc etc. I don't know when I'm going to get all these things done. And i really don't know why I'm not panicing. The old jess would be freaking out. But for some reason, it just doesn't feel *real* to me.

Maybe I should stop drinking so much coffee.

looking back one last time

No more "i miss spain" blogs. I promise (PS: I miss spain). Here's an article I was asked to write for the new magazine, the "Continental". They asked me to write something about my study abroad experience, to somehow describe in a short piece "how it changed you". God. What a question. So here is my response:

My last night in Spain, I sat on the edge of the Alhambra and looked out over the lights Granada. It was about two-o’clock in the morning, and the air was thick and humid with midsummer heat. There was a magnetic silence in the soft breeze, which blew every couple of seconds and brought with it the syncopated clapping of the flamenquistas in the caves of Sacromonte and the soft tones of guitars and laughter. I sat upon the ancient wall, my legs dangling over the edge of the city and contemplated the last six months of my life. Memories of people and scenarios flashed to mind, silly anecdotes and earth-shattering conversations, friendships that transcended the boundaries of language, culture and nationality, all textured with the smooth twist of Spanish. I laughed to myself as I wondered, how was it that I had come so far that even my memories were in a language different than my own? And so, as I looked out over the horizon behind me, I saw the outline of the Sierra Nevada mountains; the mountains with icing snow in the heat of summer were the only constant witness to my transformation, or rather, my affirmation into my own. In that moment, with the mountains, the soft music, the twinkling lights and the soft breeze, I knew that I was about to return to the United States a different woman.

At first during my travels abroad I made some very conscious decisions about the direction my semester would take. I avoided Americans and “American bars” as much as I could. I pushed myself to enter situations that may not have been very comfortable or familiar. But eventually I found myself naturally entering these situations, and becoming more comfortable in them than I could ever imagine.

One of my favorite memories of Granada occurred at about 5-o’clock in the evening on a Tuesday. My friends and I were sitting at a table in a plaza, drinking tea and discussing music. We are all from different countries: Mostafa from Syria, David from Spain, Rashim from Morocco, Rachel- a Lebanese American, Ben and Naomi from Israel, and Toli from “The Soviet Union.” We all spoke different languages, so Spanish was our common tongue. About midway through our discussion, it occurred to me how strange our situation must’ve appeared. Technically, all of our countries were afraid of each other. Technically, we were supposed to hate each other, to hold against each other the grudges and fears of our own nation. I remembered my own feelings of fear of the middle east while watching American news media, and I smiled ironically as I looked around the table. Yes, I was surrounded by people with histories, cultures, political and religious beliefs that were perhaps drastically different than my own, but there we sat. We acknowledged the common humanity that we all possessed, and forgave each other for the sins of our countries. It was as if we were able to transcend the boundaries and limits of culture, society, politics and fear. To me, that’s what studying abroad is really about.

It’s hard to say exactly how my study abroad experience changed me, or when exactly this change began to occur. I left the United States that day in January with one overwhelming emotion: fear. I was terrified of being alone in a foreign country, terrified of being away from my friends and my family, terrified of being surrounded by a new culture and most of all terrified of failing. But if anyone had told me to get off the plane and go home, I wouldn’t have. There was something stirring inside, deeper than the fear and the preoccupation of leaving my country behind: it was the promise of a viewing a new and different world. What I found, however, was not that I was able to view the world through the narrow lens of an American student, but rather I was able to look into my own life through the vast lens of the world.

My trip to Granada was about conquering my fears and accepting and understanding myself as an independent and capable individual. I always say “if I could do it in Spanish, doing it in English will be a breeze.” I know now that nothing ever really holds us back from leaving the country, except for our own fear of failure. Sure, our friends, our family, people that care about us may express concern, but if they know us well enough, and know that we know ourselves well enough, they will surely understand. It’s so important to conquer this fear of what is foreign, what is different from our own, to step out of the hard shells of our lives and see our world from a completely different view. It is only when we embrace our fears and doubts that we conquer them, only when we leave ourselves behind can we truly understand who we really are.

unsettling

I think i've gotten to a new low. I'm just completely unsure of everything now. And I don't really care enough about it to figure it out. The only thing I ever want to do anymore is write. It is as if the rest of the world is building up too much pressure, and all i can do is write little phrases into the back of my eye lids when I should be sleeping. I should be working on my thesis. I should be with my friends. I should be reading books. But I can't. I feel more lost now than ever.
There is a vivid fog that settles over our tiny college in the autumn morning. You can feel the humidity like a damp rag weighing in the cool air. I wish it would just go ahead and rain.