Blue Christmas

I am feeling melancholy this morning, largely because it's an anti-climactic Christmas.  Most of the usual family festivities were yesterday, and I'm having a fairly low-key lunch with my parents and grandma, followed later today by a train ride back to Chicago to get ready to leave for India tomorrow.  I'm feeling less eager than usual to go to India, and I can understand why.  It is my first visit since my five-month stay earlier this year, and I came out of that feeling like I had survived rather than thrived in Mumbai.  I also just finished a pretty dark book set in Mumbai in which the worst of rat-race human nature was in full force - the same sort of forces that turn me off to living there myself.  And then there's my apprehension about going for the wedding of my guy's sister - he's been busy and his calls have been less reliable than usual, and I'm not sure just how out of place I'm going to feel during all of the family chaos.  I'm staying with neighbors who are friends of his family since the family house will be full, so I'm afraid I'm going to feel like a total outsider.  I also just don't really feel like going on another long solo journey - I dread my consecutive flights of 12, 5 1/2, and 2 hours, followed by a 2-3 hour car ride, followed by disorientation, exhaustion, and feeling overwhelmed.  And I don't want to deal with all of the last-minute details (paying rent, calling my bank, packing, making sure I don't show up without at least some small gifts of thanks for my hosts...) before taking off.  Whine, whine, whine.  Bleh.

Probably because I've got so much anxiety about my life for the next...well, foreseeable future, I am also feeling my sense of disappointment in humanity amplified.  The book I just finished didn't help.  The neighbors in a housing society end up killing an old man who was once their friend and mentor, because if he doesn't go for the huge payout that a developer is offering to move out of their building and let it be demolished for a new luxury high rise, then nobody else can get the money either.  And the crazy thing to me is, it just seems like an extreme consequence of people applying the common logic of operating always in their own self interest.  I want us to be better, to have consciences and an interest for the greater good.  Even Christmas seems taken over by people's interest in buying and consuming, and it's hard to imagine what it would look like if you took out all of the things money can buy.  Where's the joy?  Where's the real commitment to peace and connection with other people?  And what can I do to start living that way all of the time, to stop worrying about whether some people are getting more than they deserve and start working toward everyone having what they need and a fair chance to dream bigger if they want?  How do we start making sure we measure ourselves and others according to our human value and not our monetary value?  We need to spend more time with people and not at work.  We need to think about others' dreams as well as our own and realize that we don't lose our own by taking others' into account.  I know I'm idealistic, but I really don't want to live in a world where everyone just accepts that other people may suffer while they spend their resources only on themselves.  I don't want to hear debates about the entitlement of the wealthy not to have to share their wealth, as though they are not connected to others around them, as though the most important issue at hand is the injustice of forced redistribution and not the inequity of the way resources are distributed to begin with.  I know I've talked about my feeling of guilt about my relative good fortune while others struggle, but this is not only about guilt.  It just seems so ugly and unjust, and I just wish that we could look at each other in a way that we see our shared humanity and not only our competition for pieces of the same pie.

Ani D.

One of the most exciting parts of this week has been getting Ani DiFranco's new album, Which Side Are You On?, nearly a month before its official release date in mid-January.  I've heard all of the songs before, either at a live performance or in concert footage on YouTube, but it's been great to hear what she decided to do with them in the recording studio.  And it's just this really beautiful thing - she's found a wonderful lifetime love, with whom she has a young daughter, and her political voice is also more pointed and articulate than ever.  She's got roots in her community in New Orleans, and it shines through both in her lyrics and the other musicians who accompany her on many of the tracks.  It may sound cheesy, but she is really a role model for me.  I'm not going to follow the same path as her - I'm not a folk music prodigy or poet or artist - but her social consciousness and pursuit of joy and balance is inspiring.  She's someone who's always learning and growing.  Listening to the album makes me feel motivated to re-engage with the world around me and appreciative of the love in my life. 

A couple of tastes:

The political: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7BgtY3_Ltc&feature=related

The personal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz6snoSNeE4

Want, Need, Should

I find myself thinking a lot lately about what it is that I want to, need to, and should do, and how those three verbs (want, need, should) balance vs. each other.  In any one choice, can I accomplish all three?  I find myself feeling selfish when I do something that I want to do and not something I should do, even if it's not something I'd say I shouldn't do.

That's vague, I know.  But a little more specifically, I think about the relationship I'm in, the things in it that I want, and the other needs that I have.  No relationship can meet all of my needs - there's a lot that's up to me, and a lot that gets filled in by having different relationships - but which things are requisite for me to be happy in a relationship, and which things am I willing to concede?  I've never been happy with any concessions - even as a kid, and even when making trivial decisions (e.g. which item on the fast food menu would I like this time?), I have had a hard time with the things that I know I'm not getting when I choose something else. 

My guy is lovely, and I'm pretty crazy about him - I like the way he sees the world differently from me and doesn't balk at the challenge of being together, to name just a couple of things.  He's a pretty non-ideological and level-headed person, which is a good counter-balance to me with my critical eye - but at the same time, I know he's not likely to share my interest and passion for social justice (and I don't share his love of sports).  Knowing that I myself have a hard time being disciplined in my approach to life, I know that being with someone who isn't going to be inclined to push me means that I will have to motivate myself a lot of the time.  I know he will always be supportive and encourage me to follow my heart and my principles (another thing I love about him - never overly concerned with what other people think), but he may not have the same causes trigger him.  To what extent do I need or want someone similar to myself, and to what extent is the difference good or at least manageable?  I was married to someone with similar principles, and I didn't feel sufficiently challenged and engaged in the relationship.  Now I'm with someone who sees the world quite differently in many ways, even coming from a very different cultural background from myself, and I sometimes face doubts about how we're going to pull off staying together.  For now it works, with blips here and there, but since my wants and needs are shifty things, it takes considerable discernment to decide, with confidence, that this relationship can last, ebbing and flowing as it may need to, but persisting.

Then there's also the tug of superhero aspirations - I want to make a difference in the world, and I know I have a hard time maintaining the will to make the effort, so maybe I should be with someone who will "crack the whip" more and push me to contribute, not let me get complacent.  I don't think "taskmaster" is a quality I'd really like in a partner, but when I think about doing the most good, I wonder if I need someone to help hold me accountable or spur me on by their own example of drivenness.  Then again, I love my guy...and I know he wants what is best for me, so maybe that's all that is needed to have the support I need for my aspirations.  I lean in this direction and hope that it is true...and that it brings happiness, fulfillment, and some good things to the world around me. 

Different

I feel different.  From myself, as I've known myself to be, for most of my life.  It's not that my personality has changed, but I had this moment today when I just realized just how much transformation I've been through in the past couple of years.  It's hard to describe in a way, partly because the connections are still being made in my brain, but I can feel the change in myself.  Two years ago, I was struggling in my marriage and with my job, I didn't feel like I was at all where I wanted to be, and I didn't know how to fix that.  At the beginning of last year, I decided to end my marriage.  I lived alone for the first time, and for the first time I was making some decisions based on what I wanted and not what I thought I should do.  I got to travel the world for work for most of the summer and saw a lot of new and amazing places.  I had times of depression and loneliness and times of peace and joy.  I had no idea how things were going to be when I got past the feelings of guilt and shame about getting divorced.  I fell in long-distance love, which was wonderful and agonizing and another source of uncertainty.  At the beginning of this year, I went to India and danced for a wedding and then went back to India for five months after that to be closer to my new love and learn what living in India would feel like.  I struggled with uncertainty, the feeling of being in limbo for a long time, being out of place.  I had a beautiful apartment materialize and then get washed away (literally) by monsoon rain, and then had nobody to help me rescue my moldy belongings and move elsewhere.  I made a wonderful new friend during the ordeal who was preordained to be my karaoke partner.  I had wonderful moments and times when I wanted to get the next available flight back to Chicago.  My love grew in the midst of my doubts.  My job existed, but it was not the most important thing.  I returned to Chicago and still feel like I'm in transition.

I feel different because I feel like I can see life from more angles now.  I still abhor patriarchy and injustice and small talk like I did for so long.  I still don't like Twilight.  I don't like unrealistic fantasies.  But I also can now see the possibility of being happy, even through the residue of guilt that I still need to deal with.  I can see an imperfect relationship with an imperfect person and think it's perfectly wonderful.  I can see that I simply cannot do everything, that there are some paths that I won't take in favor of taking others, and I am more okay with that than I've ever been - I may never go to grad school, I may never have kids, and either way, I think I'll be okay.  I can see the good fortune I've had through some unexpected twists at my job, when I never thought I'd still be at the same company after more than seven years.  I still have some dark, difficult lows, and I'm definitely lonely, but I also have hope and some experience seeing how things ebb and flow.  I know tomorrow I might read this and not be feeling as optimistic, and it might seem overly sentimental and sugar-coated.  But right now, I know it's true.

Generally speaking

I am guilty of doing it myself, but still I have to say - I can get really frustrated by the way we humans seem to want to generalize about other people or compare ourselves with other people.  A few examples...

- I posted this link on facebook to an NPR story about the media portrayal of the American South.  I know I've used the words "hillbilly" and "redneck" in recent memory myself, as well as imitating a Southern accent (in front of a friend who is from the South...oops), so shame on me!  Truly, it's embarrassing when I'm part of the phenomenon I'm critiquing.

- An acquaintance in Mumbai posted this link showing how one of the best musicians in the US, Joshua Bell, played his violin at a subway station in Washington, D.C. -- and only one person stopped.  My Mumbaikar pal captioned this, "Americans are ignorant?..."  But really, I think the clip says more about humans at large than Americans in particular -- we are so carried forward by our habit energy that we aren't aware of the present moment.  But it caught me that he captioned the picture with a generalization about Americans - first, because as an American I'm going to immediately feel defensive, but also because I know that this guy has more exposure to American media than actual Americans, and from my perspective the jump to a not-so-favorable generalization based on a video of a few hundred people one day in a subway station in D.C. betrays a pre-existing view on Americans.  I do find it disturbing that people didn't stop and recognize the beauty of what the guy was playing - particularly because I could see myself being one of them - but spinning it into a generalization about 300 million + people is a leap.

- Another acquaintance recently posted a picture on facebook that was intended to be humorous: it was a chart with two columns, one for men and one for women, and under men it had things like "Conquers nations", "Frees slaves", "Discovers America", "Fights terrorists", and under women it had only "Gets more likes on facebook".  I am sort of annoyed that this one even bothers me, because I consider it so easily collapsible by any reasonable, fact-based 30-second argument (men didn't do all of that alone, men have historically oppressed women, the things listed under "men" carry with them some cringe-worthy bad effects, there are plenty of notable things for the "women" column, I've not noticed a pattern of more facebook likes for women...)  But it does bother me, because clearly some people think there is enough of a kernel of truth to find it funny in the first place.  Gender generalizations are probably the most irritating of all to me, because I grew up in a place that still has relatively narrow options for women and I know I've internalized some of the implicit and explicit messages of patriarchy.

I don't entirely understand why I chafe so much against generalizations and comparisons.  I think it's likely coming from feeling different in many ways from what is considered normative, as well as from my natural skepticism that the surface view of things is sufficient.  I always want to get to the reality of things, and it frustrates me that we are all so subjective, driven to see things from perspectives based on emotional reactions and conditioned values.  There must be a way to have our views, to feel things deeply, but still to allow room for others to do the same with different views and feelings and not end up arguing with or marginalizing or generalizing each other.

Social struggles

I've had a hard time over the past week since my guy left and I've been on my own.  I've been feeling kind of bad about myself, wondering why I have such a limited social life and don't feel like I have much going for me here.  And then today, in the midst of an other bout of self pity, I realized just how many things have gotten me to here:

1. Divorce.  Yes, it's been over a year since the divorce was finalized, but it's not just the divorce, but having been married for a while that led to me not hanging out with friends that often - evenings and weekends were mainly time spent with my ex and at times also his family in the area.  So my friends from before my marriage adapted to the low-frequency get-togethers, and they also had plenty going on in their own lives to keep them busy (relationships, school, etc.)

2. Travel.  I was in India during January of this year, in addition the 5 months I spent there from May through September.  So I've not really been around much, at least not consistently, so I've had a hard time staying in touch with friends here in Chicago (and admittedly I was not great at making a point to email and Skype from India, either).  Being away so much has also had the effect of keeping me in a perpetual state of adjustment, which makes social life less natural and comfortable than it might otherwise be.  And of course, any hobbies, classes, etc. that I might have signed up for had I been here did not happen.

3. Life changes.  One of my key social activities used to be my weekly small group Bible study, but that ended last year and I only see one friend from that group regularly, though I do see a few others occasionally.  All of us have been through life changes, too - moving, getting married, having kids.  To a large extent, we have grown apart as we've gone down our own paths.

4. Discouragement.  Last year, after I'd separated from my ex and moved into my own apartment, I found a group on Meetup.com that seemed fun and quirky, and I tried going.  The first event was fun, a scavenger hunt at the Art Institute, but the next event was awkward.  It was a trip to an annual holiday craft sale, and only two other people came -- they were regulars with the group, and they seemed to feel a little uncomfortable with a lone newcomer there.  I also signed up for a screen printing class earlier this year, which was cool, but the one person from the class with whom I had an actual conversation, who also lived near me and seemed to have some shared interests, didn't end up coming back again on the same nights that I was there, so that sort of ended before it started. These kinds of thing probably affect me too much - but I really hate going and trying to befriend strangers.  I've never made any friends outside of school and friends of friends, so I find the blind date approach to friendship incredibly uncomfortable to begin with, and when it doesn't go well it feels particularly grim.

It's clear to me that I need new friends, but making them doesn't come very easily to me, and when I'm depressed, it's extra hard to get motivated to start.  I know I'll keep trying, but I'm not really having a great time in the process.