Old Main; originally opened in 1903
For anyone out there who hasn’t completely given up on this blog, let me assure you:
I’m alive. And I haven’t laid down my pen.
Yes, that’s “laid”: the past participle of “lay.” And why do I open my first blog in months with the potentially alienating parsing of an irregular verb?
Because I’m teaching copy editing now. At Texas State University. In the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. On Tuesday nights. For three hours. On the second floor of the campus’ first structure: a hoary, beautiful building in the Victorian Gothic style.
Those sentences were phrases. They lacked verbs. OK, I’ll stop now.
The larger point I’d like to make is that it’s a new year. No duh, right? But I mean this in the most symbolic sense. New things are happening this year. The wheel is turning; old hopes are dropping into the abyss and new ones are clinging to the spokes.
I turned 31 on Friday.
The day after my birthday, I shared a notable conversation with a friend. Patrick is 34. Sitting outside Artworks, watching my two toddlers frolic on a playground, I asked him how he likes his 30s.
He paused for a good 10 seconds, so I knew something true was in store. And then he got deep.
The first half of one’s 30s, he said, are spent reconciling oneself with the fact that life, more or less, is now locked on a track, somewhat like a locomotive en route to a final destination. Major deviations are unlikely (although catastrophic derailments are always possible). If you are living in San Antonio with a family of five and working as a journalist, for example, it’s unlikely you will end up playing drums in a post-rock band in New York City.
All manner of exotic fantasies seemed possible in our 20s. But as Neil Young sang, “Sooner or later, it all gets real.”
The second half of one’s 30s, Patrick added, is spent deciding how one should cope with life’s natural intractability.
Do you continue striving for “greater things” — new travel destinations, better shoes, tighter abs, more cash, true love, the flowering of creative potential — or accept your “track,” as it were?
I suspect this would be a question for a Zen master, who then would subtly implode the nature of the inquiry. As Arthur Russell sang: “On Sunday, I read somewhere that real love is heart and soul, yeah, but only a master could understand that.”
Russell also sang, “Every step is moving me up.”
So maybe life is more like a rocket ship than a locomotive.
In any case, new vistas are coming into view.
Big Sur, 2010; Photo by Xelina Flores-Chasnoff
In the first week of 2010, I packed my fleece jacket and family (wife, kids and saintly in-laws) and flew to Big Sur, California. I was there to write a travel piece on the place. Xelina, my wife, took photographs, which will be published alongside my story in the San Antonio Express-News next month.
It’s been a dream of mine for years to visit this place, and it’s been a dream of my wife’s for the past couple of years to begin publishing her photographs.
These were manageable dreams, and we accomplished both. I don’t know what a Zen master would say about that. But I do know what I’ve already said to my students at Texas State.
“Come to class, pay attention, do your homework, and you’ll be fine.”
nice but I come across this blog looking for totally other things. probably means that this page has visibility for a word that I’m sure doesn’t seem to be appropriate to the subject you are writing about here