is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Still. And Yet?
Still. And Yet?
Water is still pouring from the sky. It is doing so vociferously, if it is possible for water to be vociferous. I would not be surprised if frogs started falling, too. Or cats and dogs.
Last night I went home to cook some dinner, listen to some music, and unpack my boxes. This is all possible now that the boxes have arrived and I've finally found a grocery store and procured some foodstuffs. However, when I got home, around 5:30, it seemed odd that there were no cars in the parking area, given that there are 7 units in my farmhouse. I soon learned why. There was no power! This left me, as it were, powerless.
It is very dark in an old ramshackle farmhouse when there is no power. There was no power for a very long time, like six hours. At first I sat on the couch-like thing for quite a while trying to decide what I would do. My first thought was to go to the movies, or to a restaurant. But since I had no sidekick coverage it was (seemingly) impossible to learn where movies might be. I thought of going to the fairly nice italian restaurant in downtown Amherst for some fuck-it-all spaghetti (um, when I say fuck-it-all spaghetti, it is because I love tomatoes but am not supposed to eat them), but then I realized that I had also noted how odd it was that so much traffic was headed towards downtown Amherst on Route 116 when I was driving home.
So I ate some bread and some chipotle hummus, some tiny peanut butter cups and some yogurt. Then I started unpacking and mopping by flashlight. I did that for about four hours and then the power came back on. And then I kept going very late into the night, accompanied by music. Things are getting much more manageable and the apartment is starting to look like a place in which Jill would choose to live. In fact it is getting very cute. I'll post photos at some point.
Normally there are few things I love more than going to bed when it's raining knowing that I get to sleep in in the morning. The sound of the rain is very comforting to me for some reason. But in a ramshackle old farmhouse there are many many new and unexplained noises and for some reason I ended up feeling slightly terrified and slept with the light on. Don't worry. That would happen to me in San Francisco on occasion, too. I'm just a scaredy-cat sometimes.
And now we return to topic: Still. And Yet.
Recently I had a meal with someone whom I don't know very well, but with whom I had once had a very inspiring, nay life-transforming, evening of conversation. Of course such evenings don't happen very often and can't be planned. When they do happen it's because they appear out of nowhere, made possible only by a confluence of factors over which no human being has any real control. There are so many social conventions and also human defense mechanisms in place in any casual conversation that usually not much of importance gets said. Anyway, the particular confluence that brought about the conversation in question involved being stuck together on a bus-ride for an hour on the way to a conference dinner. There was a conference, and the organizers had put together a dinner at a restaurant outside of town, and they had rented buses to get the scholars to the location. I didn't see anyone I knew well on the bus so I sat next to someone I hardly knew. And then we talked.
We talked about a lot of amazing things, personal and philosophical. It was really quite astonishing, the way the evening progressed. It was an evening to be thankful for.
Anyway, that was a number of years ago, I'm straining to remember how many, but can't precisely... let's just say it happened around five years ago. We've kept in touch over time, and occasionally have emailed about interesting things but mostly it has been professional discussion or the like. So anyway, I had a meal with this person recently when I was in his town. And it was very awkward. Or, not really awkward, because it was pleasant enough. There was plenty to say, etc. It's just that it was very formal. You can't just jump back into being able to discuss meaningful things with people, I guess. That's just the way the world is much of the time. And so I've been thinking about the real way in which circumstances way beyond the control of any individual human being really do play a part in the relationships people have with each other.
This doesn't mean that I worry that my friends in San Francisco won't like me anymore. When you have fairly developed friendships and are as old as I am, it takes more than distance to undermine a relationship. But time and distance do change things. And they matter especially to things that aren't so well established. You know the two opposing cliches: "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and "out of sight/out of mind" (though those seem to apply to romantic attachment which is not necessarily what I'm talking about when I speak of relationships among human beings). It can go either way. Distance can make the time you have together much more fun and better spent, more meaningful, what have you. Or it can turn what you know about someone into a fog from which it's hard to emerge.
And I am not entirely in control of which way it will go with any of my relationships, since a) it's not only up to me how things will go when it comes to other people and b) other kinds of circumstances outside the control of either party to any relationship sometimes intervene. There is just no avoiding it: human things are so fragile. And so it is inspiring when they, on occasion, are long-lasting.
Thus, eternal optimist that I am (despite my rather well-researched knowlege of just how badly human beings can and do behave... and I guess this means that I really am an optimist), I think that vigilance or willingness on my part and the same on the part of others is what really matters. Things will work out, even if no one knows yet what exactly that will end up meaning.
PS--For those who know me: I should have a phone number by some time on Monday. You'll get an email from me, or a call, soon thereafter. Also, this weekend I'll be in NYC so I'll have more consistent cell coverage.
2:19 p.m. - September 09, 2004
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