Blue Skies Redux

A good friend of mine recently wrote a post about the wave of contentment and still serenity that accompanies the unconstrained portion of the beginning of summer, entitled Nothing but Blue Skies?. You should go read it. She's a fabulous writer.

And on that note, I've decided to transcribe my own redux of the same topic, because I find that I'm on a similar frequency. I've stopped short of listening to Doris Day on repeat, but the feeling of a quiet acquiescence of a tranquil, steady, if temporary, existence at the moment has come over me, accompanying the greater realizations achieved in my most recent post. I have roughly two weeks left currently in Lisbon, ten days to follow that in Paris, and then what should hopefully turn out to be approximately seven weeks of leisure in Denver, perhaps working but not forcing the issue of anything unnecessarily. I'm getting along in my proceedings uncontroversially at the moment, and I don't feel put upon for the first time in what feels like months. I also happen to be the only person in my apartment of seven at the moment, something that will change only to the tune of a fluctuation of one or two people in the coming eight days, which is allowing me breathing room to, as the cliche goes, just "do me". The space is allowing my creative side some room to formulate new projects, which I'll write about later if they come to fruition.

It turns out that when left to my own wits, to just do me, I take more spur-of-the moment decisions, but ultimately for the better. I have nights out where my excessive drinking doesn't lead to a blown-up incident at home but rather just an average night of clubbing and coming home early in the morning. I have gone to the beach at a moment's notice. I have simply lived, breathed, and perceived the simple nature of all of those actions without ulterior motive or feeling to drive myself crazy with neuroses about it. I have less of a sense of calm before the impending, inevitable storm than my friend, but therein lies the main difference between us: she is a workaholic, someone who consistently and persistently overloads herself with chores and assignments until she physically, if not mentally, needs a break from it, and I am a somewhat more "type B" personality than that. Yet there are impending duties and responsibilities, regardless of the way in which the plans I am trying to effectuate turn out, and I have a full understanding of what needs to be done to plan for everything to go as smoothly as possible. I'm just not going nuts over it. Apparently wavelengths travel a great distance.

Seasonal Sentiments, or Move Along Now, Plenty to See Here

Spring seems to be dying hard in Portugal this year, as yet another mixed week of shitty rainy and chilly days thrown in with sunny and hot days worthy of going to the beach and the month at last being June has come to pass. For my own sake, I hope the warm weather comes to stay, as I have been banking on being able to wear the tank tops I decided to purchase and am being driven progressively neurotic in the same way that the weather itself needs a Xanax.

As to the actual content of this post, a brief conversation recently with a friend put into glistening perspective the very real fact that, indeed, someone else always has worse problems, and that personal blogs have the tendency to be navel-gazing whiny introspection on the non-issues that seem like such big deals to the audiences we all seem to lack. I try to make light of that in this blog but have the circle-fulfilling awareness that I end up doing the same thing as I have just disdained, writing as I do to bitch complain about things when and in the manner in which I do. Alas.

Yet as my time in Portugal this time around winds to its overwrought conclusion, the main impression I'm left to digest is that this spring in particular has been marked by difficulties more than great progress, a consistently muddy patch of winding road. Each epoch is different and needs to be, and so it has happened that everything seems to have been processed through a filter of conflict and resolution this spring, that being the theme to all aspects of the most important things going on in my life. It has been a time to take a break from the imposed, if fleeting, institutional order to life that college represented and dig into myself and the root of my character and how I can transition from having an external structure to the way my life is run to having to create that structure and order for myself in the actions I choose to undertake and the direction in which life will head now that the fundamental building blocks have been at last put into place. Not only in an academic sense, but in the nature of my relationships with others as well–the cozy bubble of undergraduate life being what it is, social upheaval has been quite natural to the overall uprooting I have felt over the course of these months.

There have been ups to accompany the downs, although admittedly the downs seem to have taken the more dominant share of things. I have learned to desire the United States at the same time as my Portuguese has at last become conversational, if not on the cusp of some kind of fluency. Living with someone who has come to be a good friend has also showed me that the tensions of living with friends can sometimes boil over into incidents that may not be reparable. I have felt liberated and free to do to my heart's content what I choose on my own path at the behest of no other while spending months reeling from the manner in which a very profound connection and relationship has all but shattered beyond repair, and certainly beyond recognition. The necessity of all of these things happening as they are and have is becoming increasingly clear the closer to being in retrospect they become, yet I am still not there, and as such the processing lag continues to be a persistent stressor much as any of the other things left unmentioned here do as well. I may have finally chewed through what I bit off, but my jaw is sore.