Merry Christmas, everybody. This year we had a total of 8 or 9 presents under our tree. We decided about a month ago that we were going to have a small Christmas this year, and I am so glad that we did, because this has been the best Christmas I have ever had. We (and by 'we' I mean the extensive collection of my immediate family -- my mother, my brother, and I) decided to put a large part of the money we normally would have spent on presents that would go largely unappreciated towards a local or national charitable or non-profit group. I have decided to put my ~$100 towards the Sierra Club, an organization I have immense respect for, and a personal connection with given my parents extensive participation in the Club during their younger years.
In addition to that, I spent a wonderful day in New York City the day before Christmas Eve with my girlfriend, Sarah. I have not written about her yet, and am hesitant to, not because of some strange feeling of setting things in stone that may be only temporary, but because I feel I can not do justice to how amazing a person she is. Like a painter attempting to recreate or describe a perfect scene, I cannot hope to articulate how perfect she is -- not as a person, but for me, perfect in the way she fits who I am as a person. She is subtle and understated and largely quiet...things that I am not. She is strikingly intelligent, and yet is so personable and so approachable and so humble -- all things which I find trouble doing. And while she is in many ways the complete opposite of my extrovertive, overcompensating, and highly excitable personality I find myself irrevocably attracted to her. Best of all, I feel as if she appreciates the way that I complement her own personality.
And if that wasn't enough, I have a wonderful selection of books to read over this break including finishing up my second reading of my all-time favorite epic 100 Years of Solitude, War and Peace, and The World Without Us. To top it off, Sarah got me, for Christmas, A Moveable Feast my Ernest Hemingway. My love for Hemingway is rooted in the very core of my appreciation for and fascination with the English language and literature in general. That book is also featured in City of Angels, which is one of my favorite movies. I cannot imagine a more perfect gift.
Until next time (and with more updates from Oregon),
Andrew
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Monday, December 22, 2008
Tales from Oregon Pt. 2
12/16/2008
My grandfather had me a captive audience. In spite of his wife’s persistent warnings stories began to trickle out of him like water from a leaking container, until the stories themselves took on a sort of self-persuasive force and combined they pushed into the open. With little regard for continuity and held together by the slightest of segues, stories begin to flow out of him at an accelerated and exhilarating pace.
He told me the story of his experiences in Hawaii in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. He told me how he was 17 years old, and was ticketed for taking his dad’s Plymouth down the road at 90 miles an hour with 5 of his friends in the car. He told me how is license was taken away for 60 days, and how he went to the DMV on December 6, 1941 to get it back. He told me how he signed up for the National Guard the on December 8th. He told me how he got rose through the ranks to Staff Sergeant, before being demoted when they realized he was only 17 years old. He told me how, over the next two years he worked his way back up to Tech Sergeant from Private. He told me how, after his contract with the National Guard was up, he signed up for the U.S. Army as a cargo-specialist, routing supplies through Hawaii to the various armies fighting in the Pacific Theater.
My grandfather had me a captive audience. In spite of his wife’s persistent warnings stories began to trickle out of him like water from a leaking container, until the stories themselves took on a sort of self-persuasive force and combined they pushed into the open. With little regard for continuity and held together by the slightest of segues, stories begin to flow out of him at an accelerated and exhilarating pace.
He told me the story of his experiences in Hawaii in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. He told me how he was 17 years old, and was ticketed for taking his dad’s Plymouth down the road at 90 miles an hour with 5 of his friends in the car. He told me how is license was taken away for 60 days, and how he went to the DMV on December 6, 1941 to get it back. He told me how he signed up for the National Guard the on December 8th. He told me how he got rose through the ranks to Staff Sergeant, before being demoted when they realized he was only 17 years old. He told me how, over the next two years he worked his way back up to Tech Sergeant from Private. He told me how, after his contract with the National Guard was up, he signed up for the U.S. Army as a cargo-specialist, routing supplies through Hawaii to the various armies fighting in the Pacific Theater.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Tales from Oregon Pt. 1
Right now I'm sitting in front of my gate at Eugene Airport in Eugene, Oregon. My plane leaves in about an hour and a half. It's a very clean, very small airport and they have free public Wi-Fi which is ridiculously fast, so all-in-all I'm pretty happy right now. I love traveling of course, but its always nice to have the experience go smoothly without hectic lines and crowded terminals with crying babies. Damn those babies.
Alright, to avoid going off on a tangent about babies, I'll get straight to the point. For the last week I've been staying in Oregon with my estranged grandfather. When I arrived in Eugene last Monday and walked up to his car, I got the chance to see him for the first time in my entire life. This trip (paid for by him) is sort of a last-ditch effort to meet each other before he dies. He's 84 years old and physically quite frail. I can talk about him like this for hours, about what I learned and what I didn't learn, and whether or not my perception of him as a cowardly and selfish person who did little to support my mother growing up, and who divorced my grandmother as she laying dying in a hospital in order to marry the woman he had been having an affair with for years, has changed at all. I can talk about whether or not I was personally changed by this trip. And I plan to. Over the course of the next few days, I'll post up the entries I made in a journal I kept this week. I wrote down some of my thoughts, some of the stories he told me, and a whole lot of rambling. I'll edit it as I put it up, possibly differentiating the old from the new with bold formatting or something to that effect. Anyway, without any further ado, here is my first entry in this short Tales from Oregon series...
12/15/2008 (Monday)
This is a really clean plane. I’m on Delta Airlines Flight 1003 from JFK to Salt Lake City where I’ll catch my connecting flight to Eugene, Oregon. I planned on keeping a journal of sorts for this trip (I bought this writing pad specifically for that purpose a few weeks ago). However, I was on a roll with some Sudokus and probably wouldn’t have started writing at all if it hadn’t been for this girl sitting across the aisle from me. I have an aisle seat, and there’s a really, really thin guy sitting at my window. He’s kept it shut and is currently reading something with a full page black and white photo of Clint Eastwood on it. There’s no one in the seat between us, which is nice. I can put my laptop bag there (I don’t know why I brought my laptop, I have no idea if my grandfather is even aware of the existence of the internet), and have room in front of my own seat to stretch my legs. Across the aisle from me is a clean-looking guy with dark rimmed glasses and business pants. Another empty seat, and then the girl. She’s listening to an iPod and committing a lot of herself to scribbling furiously in a notebook full of yellowish unlined paper. She’s on her second pen now. A lock of hair keeps falling in front of her face which I imagine must be rather frustrating.
Having said all of this, I believe it’s important to note that I am not some hyper-observant creepy guy. I just get bored on planes quite easily. I can’t sleep and I’m forced to read or write or pretend to work on expert-level Sudokus. I’ve got my iPod on, lasting emo-rock from five years ago at a low murmur. All-American Rejects, Dashboard confessional, and some newer Jack’s Mannequin pay at the same volume as the cycling air conditioning system and the muted engines. I should point out that I enjoy flying immensely. I enjoy travel, and the feeling that accompanies watching the ground below sink into indistinguishable flecks of color. I like the transient in-between feeling I get at airports. I like to watch the baggage checkers and the TSA screeners do their things, seemingly numbed to the awe-inspiring concept of such expedited global connection. Of course, I am numbed much in the same way. I have to sit down and think about it before I realize how large and awesome we as humans have become; where we can hop on a plane and be thousands of miles away in just a few hours. But that’s the way with things. We grow comfortable with new ideas. I suppose this is good. If it wasn’t for eventual complacency, if we were continually amazed at our own inventiveness, at our own capacity for engineering our own miracles, we would grow stagnant, we would lose our desire to replace and reinvent.
Everyone tells me I should write. That’s what they tell me. “Andrew,” they say, in a tone that conveys authoritative guidance (occasionally bordering on patronizing), “You really have a gift. You should write.” I should write. I should write. I should write…what? There are moments where I enjoy writing, moments where the exhilarating feeling of being able to articulate your thoughts and emotions in a way that makes them accessible to everyone and anyone sweeps over me and I fall prey to notion of Romantic or transcendental thought. This seldom happens when I am writing something for class, and I seldom write anything outside of class, so I seldom experience this feeling. I’m not sure if I feel it right now, but I do know that my hand is cramping up, so I’m going to stop for now.
Now I’m on my flight to Eugene. The plane from Salt Lake City to Eugene was apparently delayed and then its engines broke and then they had to reroute another plane from Reno. So it ended up being about two hours late. However, I don’t think the time was wasted, because I got the chance to try out a new Odwalla drink, which is always an exciting experience for me.
I am sitting next to the girl I mentioned earlier. She sat down next to me as we were both waiting for the plane. Apparently we’re both headed to Eugene. We started talking. We’re still talking.
Alright, to avoid going off on a tangent about babies, I'll get straight to the point. For the last week I've been staying in Oregon with my estranged grandfather. When I arrived in Eugene last Monday and walked up to his car, I got the chance to see him for the first time in my entire life. This trip (paid for by him) is sort of a last-ditch effort to meet each other before he dies. He's 84 years old and physically quite frail. I can talk about him like this for hours, about what I learned and what I didn't learn, and whether or not my perception of him as a cowardly and selfish person who did little to support my mother growing up, and who divorced my grandmother as she laying dying in a hospital in order to marry the woman he had been having an affair with for years, has changed at all. I can talk about whether or not I was personally changed by this trip. And I plan to. Over the course of the next few days, I'll post up the entries I made in a journal I kept this week. I wrote down some of my thoughts, some of the stories he told me, and a whole lot of rambling. I'll edit it as I put it up, possibly differentiating the old from the new with bold formatting or something to that effect. Anyway, without any further ado, here is my first entry in this short Tales from Oregon series...
12/15/2008 (Monday)
This is a really clean plane. I’m on Delta Airlines Flight 1003 from JFK to Salt Lake City where I’ll catch my connecting flight to Eugene, Oregon. I planned on keeping a journal of sorts for this trip (I bought this writing pad specifically for that purpose a few weeks ago). However, I was on a roll with some Sudokus and probably wouldn’t have started writing at all if it hadn’t been for this girl sitting across the aisle from me. I have an aisle seat, and there’s a really, really thin guy sitting at my window. He’s kept it shut and is currently reading something with a full page black and white photo of Clint Eastwood on it. There’s no one in the seat between us, which is nice. I can put my laptop bag there (I don’t know why I brought my laptop, I have no idea if my grandfather is even aware of the existence of the internet), and have room in front of my own seat to stretch my legs. Across the aisle from me is a clean-looking guy with dark rimmed glasses and business pants. Another empty seat, and then the girl. She’s listening to an iPod and committing a lot of herself to scribbling furiously in a notebook full of yellowish unlined paper. She’s on her second pen now. A lock of hair keeps falling in front of her face which I imagine must be rather frustrating.
Having said all of this, I believe it’s important to note that I am not some hyper-observant creepy guy. I just get bored on planes quite easily. I can’t sleep and I’m forced to read or write or pretend to work on expert-level Sudokus. I’ve got my iPod on, lasting emo-rock from five years ago at a low murmur. All-American Rejects, Dashboard confessional, and some newer Jack’s Mannequin pay at the same volume as the cycling air conditioning system and the muted engines. I should point out that I enjoy flying immensely. I enjoy travel, and the feeling that accompanies watching the ground below sink into indistinguishable flecks of color. I like the transient in-between feeling I get at airports. I like to watch the baggage checkers and the TSA screeners do their things, seemingly numbed to the awe-inspiring concept of such expedited global connection. Of course, I am numbed much in the same way. I have to sit down and think about it before I realize how large and awesome we as humans have become; where we can hop on a plane and be thousands of miles away in just a few hours. But that’s the way with things. We grow comfortable with new ideas. I suppose this is good. If it wasn’t for eventual complacency, if we were continually amazed at our own inventiveness, at our own capacity for engineering our own miracles, we would grow stagnant, we would lose our desire to replace and reinvent.
Everyone tells me I should write. That’s what they tell me. “Andrew,” they say, in a tone that conveys authoritative guidance (occasionally bordering on patronizing), “You really have a gift. You should write.” I should write. I should write. I should write…what? There are moments where I enjoy writing, moments where the exhilarating feeling of being able to articulate your thoughts and emotions in a way that makes them accessible to everyone and anyone sweeps over me and I fall prey to notion of Romantic or transcendental thought. This seldom happens when I am writing something for class, and I seldom write anything outside of class, so I seldom experience this feeling. I’m not sure if I feel it right now, but I do know that my hand is cramping up, so I’m going to stop for now.
Now I’m on my flight to Eugene. The plane from Salt Lake City to Eugene was apparently delayed and then its engines broke and then they had to reroute another plane from Reno. So it ended up being about two hours late. However, I don’t think the time was wasted, because I got the chance to try out a new Odwalla drink, which is always an exciting experience for me.
I am sitting next to the girl I mentioned earlier. She sat down next to me as we were both waiting for the plane. Apparently we’re both headed to Eugene. We started talking. We’re still talking.
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