If you were born and reared in the South it is certain you will remain a Southerner as long as you live, no matter how far you've travelled or wherever you've made your home. You may consider yourself alienated from your native soil. You may think your early life in the South a disposable integument, something to be shed like a snake sheds its skin, but you would be mistaken.
Throughout your days you will be seized by memories, memories desperate and sweet enough to make you lose your breath, and they will entwine themselves into an umbilicus firmly linking you once again to the violent, tender, inexplicable land of your beginning.
William Styron
14:12:23
desk in midtown
I think this might be long. I've been stockpiling.
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I just paid $39 in library fees. Can I consider this my donation to a good cause for the month?
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In response to this interesting article about the carbon emissions in everything you do, and one comment on the way you cook your food having at least as much impact as how it was grown and delivered to you:
me: I dunno -- why does he criticize mashing them, too?!?
becky: YES! I was wondering about that~
me: "If you leave the lid off, boil them at a high heat, and then mash your
potatoes"
becky: is he assuming I'm putting them into the oven from there or something?
becky: or is the mashing releasing something?
me: I guess mashing them you lose a lot of the heat?
me: but you have to cook them whether you mash them or not?!!
me: maybe you have to get them extra cooked in order to be smooshy enough
to mash
becky: and you serve them after that, right? I mean...I dont reheat them
after mashing
becky: maybe
me: and then you're using energy of your own elbow
me: that you could be using instead to ... clean up pollution
becky: Marilyn I dont know if you knew this, but one's elbow emits more
greenhouse gasses than a 747.
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things more important than the goals of career ambition (:prestige, fame, money, a certain type of intellectual pride)
-- building a network of people that you love. Some would define this as a family, but I'm talking about people who aren't related to you as well.
-- being a good person: trustworthy and genuine, one who tries to effect change for the better.
-- being well-rounded. Single-focused people who can only talk about one topic in the world may be great scientists, researchers, and entreprenuers, but are not the ones I respect and most want to emulate. (Obv. this list is not attempting to be an objective one; it is subjective to importance in my own life.)
-- regularly doing something that you care about and that fulfills you. this should make both the career- and ambition-related goals and the personal goals stated above easier to accomplish. It also implies that there are things you care passionately about. Invest emotionally in the world. It's not just the highs that make the lows worth it; both the highs and lows are worth it.
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I wish I had written more while in New Orleans. I did get a chance to
go out and take pictures one day, to eat my half of thirty oysters, to
drink a cool Abita on a balcony with iron curliques looking down on the
Quarter, to just see and be around my boyfriend, which does me so much
good, to consider and in the end reject the idea of going to school
at Tulane, to consider and apply to be a teacher in one of their
charter math and science high schools next year, but I don't know if
I'm really serious or not, to eat a hot beignet, to sing in the street,
to stare out at the slick wet afternoon, at the people walking in the
steam of it, at the way the trees breathe it in.
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I've been thinking about career and life compromise a lot lately, like it's a song stuck in my head, but I may as well write about the factors in whether I'm going to take Bo's name when we get married than be so ponderous in my feminine whine.
I've also had the song from The Little Mermaid stuck in my head, the one Ursula sings, "Poor Unfortunate Souls."
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Casie's coming to visit this weekend, so I don't think this post is the beginning of a post-every-day stint, but maybe at least once a week. I hope. I think that because I've been seeing a psychiatrist sporadically over the past few months, I've been getting all my random thoughts out in story form that way, including a few of the things that I deem private enough not to talk about online (primarily things relating to my relationships with other people who may not appreciate their private details being hashed out online).
But I don't think she fully appreciates the thought I put into my words and my depiction of myself. Maybe someone who reads this does.
love,
mcc