ever since I was little I have been coming home from long trips abroad. my aunt lives in the Caribbean, so my sister and I were shipped off every summer to spend time with our cousins. like summer camp, we would look forward to the trip and pack and write letters home. now, I choose to spend my time traveling the world, instead of making a living or being productive in any main stream sense of the word.
it’s the first time in a long time that I’m looking forward to going home. it’s not that I miss my parents or my sister at an unusual level. after all, thanks to skype and email I talk to them every week. but I’m anticipating the familiar moments when I first get home.
getting picked up at the airport. finding my bags on the baggage carousel and calling from the payphone. trying to get to the right exit door, and finally seeing the car pull up. the big fat airport hug. the occasional tear, and the rush to exit the loading zone to quiet the honking cars behind us.
the long talk on the ride home about my trip. the new jersey turnpike, the pollution, my renewed feeling of disappointment in my home state. seeing exit 131 and leaving the parkway. turning up the short cut street. almost home! the moments my heart sinks as I notice yet another new development going up in my home town.
the steep incline of the car as we pull up the driveway. seeing my dog run to me – I forgot about you! I say to myself. lugging the suitcase through the house to my room, knowing that it will stay in the corner of my room for at least a couple weeks.
the nice dinner out with my sister, her boyfriend and my parents. and the passing out of presents. the retelling of my adventures over dinner, and the updates on gossip from home over dessert.
the calling up of my friends who still live in new jersey and the get together at our local bar.
my sister pressuring me to hang out all the time, and my general malaise and desire to do nothing but catch up on sleep and missed TV.
not this time, though. I think this home coming may be a little different than the usual ones. this time I’m actually missing home. this time I won’t be needing of a rest – I’ve been doing a lot of sitting on my ass here in songyuan.
though like most of the other returns home as of late, this time too, I will be home only for a short while before my next adventure begins. this time I won’t be going too far away. I’ll be off to boston, a mere four hour drive from home. going to graduate school, and I am really looking forward to it.
Monday, June 09, 2008
Sunday, June 08, 2008
memories of knoxville
I like to travel.
I love looking back and realizing that in this lifetime, I have lived in Knoxville, Tennessee.
I lived in Knoxville for four months, working on a short term environmental campaign. I manage to become friends with a large group of laid back and fun-loving college students and posse who identified themselves as anarchists. I played soccer with a group of them every Thursday afternoon, and went to their music shows on Saturday nights.
their headquarters, so to speak, was a large victorian house at the end of its own tree-lined street. it was a communal house where residents paid the mortgage, not rent. the front yard had a large climbing a rock wall attached to a tree. i made an impression when i climbed it in a skirt, on my first visit. at the house, they threw some great parties, which consisted of singing to melodies played on homemade guitars and banjos, and sipping on a wide variety of moonshine. we played crazy games that were really intended for 10 year olds not 20 somethings. Twister, pass the orange, and my favorite: the sticker game – a crazy game where each participant is given a roll of about 30 stickers. you run around the yard slapping stickers on each other, and the one with the fewest stickers at the end of the melee wins. it’s amazing to me that I experienced this I my life.
bicycles served as the glue that held the group together. at the house they ran a bike library, and the individuals could easily be spotted around town atop their tricked out unicycles, bicycles and tricycles! it's almost a no-brainer that it was this group that brought Critical Mass to Knoxville. Critical Mass originated in San Francisco, where one day a month thousands of people take to the streets on their bicycles, blocking traffic all over the city, creating a little bit of havoc on the Friday night commute. in Knoxville, critical mass consisted of a group of about 10 people – my friends-- riding bikes together around the streets of Knoxville, bothering a car or two. I always wanted to join them, but somehow managed to miss all the opportunities to ride with them on my shiny red bike with wide handle bars and three gears that i borrowed from the bike library.
And they faithfully attended all the protests and news conferences that I organized calling for climate change legislation. (that was the whole reason I was there, after all.) The group also had some pretty radical events of their own like radical cheerleading practice, anti- prison group rallies and a drum group circles complete with masks. I went to one of the drum group practices which was nothing more than a whole lot of people banging on all sorts of things. My instrument of choice was a metal pipe. surprisingly, all the noise was ordered chaos. it almost sounded like music.
we'd go to swanky art shows the first Friday night of each month, and drink the galleries’ wine and eat their hors d’oeuvres. sometimes, some people from the group would have art in these gallery showings. one of whom was my very talented best friend. she was a manic-depressive 5’10’’ red headed artist. she shaved the right side of her head, but didn’t shave her armpits. one of her painting collections was called “picking” and involved a series of paintings portraying people picking gross things like wedgies, scabs, noses, you name it. she had a Chinese style scroll hundred feet long that unrolled to reveal kudzu eating all of civilization. while I was there in Knoxville, I baked brownies for her 20h birthday. I hugged her the day got an abortion. I wonder how she is these days.
during my time in Knoxville, I felt really unstable. I felt that the world was out to get me. I remember crying a lot. I worried everyday about my job – should I quit? why am I torturing myself? I reacted to common things in ways that did not reflect my usual behavior. To put it bluntly, I acted like a crazy person.
I lived with my coworker. we spent far too much time in the same quarters, and naturally there was some friction. but this was the first time i experienced so much friction with another person. i'm usually laid back and can get along with everyone. but in Tennessee, i saw the one person i spent everyday with as her an evil bitch, with a sugary coating. she'd smile and offer to make dinner one minute, and would be plotting her next move to break my spirit the next minute. she once said that she had a special ability to say the one thing that could break people. she said she once made her macho southern 6’ 2’’ father cry.
I had a crush on a guy, that somehow turned seriously obsessive—it was an intense, scary attraction. I loved him and hated him at an absurdly intense level, after knowing him for only a few weeks. looking back on it, it’s a little hard to stomach the truth that that psychotic person was me. I hope psychotic is a bit of an overstatement, but I don’t know.
I felt as though we had known each other in another life. not only had I known him, but I felt as though he had cheated on me in another life. I always felt jealous when I was around him. I couldn’t concentrate when he was in the same building. we ended up rolling around on my “bed” ( which consisted of a musty mattress lying on my bedroom floor) for a while one night. I said no to sex. and he left and that was it.
I remember jumping on his trampoline, doing backflips. pretending I didn’t care about him. pretending I didn’t care about how he felt about me. at the same time I was sad that his best friend was moving away, leaving him on his own. I hated myself for liking him.
I wonder now if it was the company I kept that encouraged these feelings. I wonder if I had been surrounded by “normal,” boring people if I ever would have felt crazy at all. it’s as if by osmosis I sucked up all these crazy feelings.
I love looking back and realizing that in this lifetime, I have lived in Knoxville, Tennessee.
I lived in Knoxville for four months, working on a short term environmental campaign. I manage to become friends with a large group of laid back and fun-loving college students and posse who identified themselves as anarchists. I played soccer with a group of them every Thursday afternoon, and went to their music shows on Saturday nights.
their headquarters, so to speak, was a large victorian house at the end of its own tree-lined street. it was a communal house where residents paid the mortgage, not rent. the front yard had a large climbing a rock wall attached to a tree. i made an impression when i climbed it in a skirt, on my first visit. at the house, they threw some great parties, which consisted of singing to melodies played on homemade guitars and banjos, and sipping on a wide variety of moonshine. we played crazy games that were really intended for 10 year olds not 20 somethings. Twister, pass the orange, and my favorite: the sticker game – a crazy game where each participant is given a roll of about 30 stickers. you run around the yard slapping stickers on each other, and the one with the fewest stickers at the end of the melee wins. it’s amazing to me that I experienced this I my life.
bicycles served as the glue that held the group together. at the house they ran a bike library, and the individuals could easily be spotted around town atop their tricked out unicycles, bicycles and tricycles! it's almost a no-brainer that it was this group that brought Critical Mass to Knoxville. Critical Mass originated in San Francisco, where one day a month thousands of people take to the streets on their bicycles, blocking traffic all over the city, creating a little bit of havoc on the Friday night commute. in Knoxville, critical mass consisted of a group of about 10 people – my friends-- riding bikes together around the streets of Knoxville, bothering a car or two. I always wanted to join them, but somehow managed to miss all the opportunities to ride with them on my shiny red bike with wide handle bars and three gears that i borrowed from the bike library.
And they faithfully attended all the protests and news conferences that I organized calling for climate change legislation. (that was the whole reason I was there, after all.) The group also had some pretty radical events of their own like radical cheerleading practice, anti- prison group rallies and a drum group circles complete with masks. I went to one of the drum group practices which was nothing more than a whole lot of people banging on all sorts of things. My instrument of choice was a metal pipe. surprisingly, all the noise was ordered chaos. it almost sounded like music.
we'd go to swanky art shows the first Friday night of each month, and drink the galleries’ wine and eat their hors d’oeuvres. sometimes, some people from the group would have art in these gallery showings. one of whom was my very talented best friend. she was a manic-depressive 5’10’’ red headed artist. she shaved the right side of her head, but didn’t shave her armpits. one of her painting collections was called “picking” and involved a series of paintings portraying people picking gross things like wedgies, scabs, noses, you name it. she had a Chinese style scroll hundred feet long that unrolled to reveal kudzu eating all of civilization. while I was there in Knoxville, I baked brownies for her 20h birthday. I hugged her the day got an abortion. I wonder how she is these days.
during my time in Knoxville, I felt really unstable. I felt that the world was out to get me. I remember crying a lot. I worried everyday about my job – should I quit? why am I torturing myself? I reacted to common things in ways that did not reflect my usual behavior. To put it bluntly, I acted like a crazy person.
I lived with my coworker. we spent far too much time in the same quarters, and naturally there was some friction. but this was the first time i experienced so much friction with another person. i'm usually laid back and can get along with everyone. but in Tennessee, i saw the one person i spent everyday with as her an evil bitch, with a sugary coating. she'd smile and offer to make dinner one minute, and would be plotting her next move to break my spirit the next minute. she once said that she had a special ability to say the one thing that could break people. she said she once made her macho southern 6’ 2’’ father cry.
I had a crush on a guy, that somehow turned seriously obsessive—it was an intense, scary attraction. I loved him and hated him at an absurdly intense level, after knowing him for only a few weeks. looking back on it, it’s a little hard to stomach the truth that that psychotic person was me. I hope psychotic is a bit of an overstatement, but I don’t know.
I felt as though we had known each other in another life. not only had I known him, but I felt as though he had cheated on me in another life. I always felt jealous when I was around him. I couldn’t concentrate when he was in the same building. we ended up rolling around on my “bed” ( which consisted of a musty mattress lying on my bedroom floor) for a while one night. I said no to sex. and he left and that was it.
I remember jumping on his trampoline, doing backflips. pretending I didn’t care about him. pretending I didn’t care about how he felt about me. at the same time I was sad that his best friend was moving away, leaving him on his own. I hated myself for liking him.
I wonder now if it was the company I kept that encouraged these feelings. I wonder if I had been surrounded by “normal,” boring people if I ever would have felt crazy at all. it’s as if by osmosis I sucked up all these crazy feelings.
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