This is probably the greatest question I have seen on Aardvark:
I hate limbo.
This was a realization I had while stuck in the Narita airport for five days, trying to get back to some form of US soil. It was a time of being stuck between a fantastic time in Japan and an open future, with nothing to do but eat Subway and analyze passenger priorities. Five days of Subway sandwiches really puts the brakes on your desires to eat there again. Limbo is a trap between a past you have acknowledged and a future you can’t access.
I’ve been in limbo pretty much since I graduated. The year in China didn’t present itself that way, but I can’t deny that it was a state of existence that kept me confined between my life before and my life after. That year changed my life in many ways, both physically and emotionally, but it was undeniably a year of limbo.
I say this because I feel my brain’s status now as roughly the same as while I was in China — an amorphous, slushy, pudding sort of consistency. Limbo is a state of stagnancy, a lack of stimulation. My life and brain are both incredibly stagnant right now, breeding parasites that seek only to drain away my existence.
The past few months have been spent applying to grad schools — my lifeboat into some other sort of life dimension. They’ve all been submitted, and now is about the time when I’m starting to hear back from them. It’s still pretty early, and I’ve only heard back from 2 out of 7 so far, but I’m already at 100% rejection, and it’s hard to take rejection well when your life is a mosquito nursery in a barrel of pudding.
It’s getting to the point where I’m starting to need a contingency plan yet am too trapped in limbo to think. I’m all for suggestions. This is what I get for studying what I wanted to study.
It annoys me that I’m making another “Sorry I haven’t posted in a long time” post two posts after the last, but I’ve lately paid little enough attention to most of the things in my life, I’ll let it slide.
I’d like to point out that of all the people who have pestered me to post again, it was Cody Brimhall who actually convinced me to do so. In an email titled “BLOOOGER,” he wrote:
Hey, start writing for your blog again. All the cool kids are doing it (http://somuchwit.com/).
How could he, in so few and nearly meaningless words, yield so much power? What makes Cody so cool? I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to answer that question.
Cody and I met in the Fall quarter of 2007 in a class on phonetics. For the first few weeks of knowing of each other’s existence, our interactions mainly consisted of me making fun of him drinking coffee from a jam jar. For this, I’m fairly certain he viewed me as an obnoxious irritant, and I was fine with that because I was fully aware that I deserved it.
For our final project in that class, we all had to submit languages we wanted to study, and our professor sorted through them and assigned matching languages to partners or unique languages to individuals. To both of our surprise, Cody and I were both assigned Greek. I’m pretty sure Cody was reluctant to accept this particular lot in life, but being the mild mannered guy he is, he played along.
A while later, we met at my apartment to do some preliminary research and organization. It turns out that I picked Greek for the obvious reason that I was also a classics major, but Cody chose it because he previously attended a classical college and had also studied ancient Greek. Knowing this about each other, things sort of clicked.
After working for a little while, we decided we were hungry enough to venture out for some food. As we were walking out the door, I quoted to Cody, “Let us go then, you and I,” to which he replied, “When the evening is spread out against the sky,” and then we continued reciting nearly the entire 131 line poem by TS Eliot.
Among other things, Cody also has his aforementioned weblog So Much Wit, titled after an unusual translation of a classical work (See any similarities to your current reading material?)
Basically, Cody is one cool cat. Actually, the examples mentioned above would indicate to most people that he’s for from it. If you know me well, however, you’ll know that I rarely care about what most people think.
In closing, sorry about the hiatus. Here’s my return post — requested by, dedicated to, and written about Cody.
I’ve been busy cleaning out the storage sheds and getting rid of things we’ll never use or want again. One of the interesting things about this family is we tend to do a lot of unusual things and we also have a hard time getting rid of things. I’ve found it very easy to create appealing listings in the Craigslist “free” section, such as this one:
Free Land Shark
Free leopard shark, maybe 10 years old. Survives well on land or suspended in air, but I don’t know about in water. I’m not sure of the gender, but you can investigate for yourself if you need to use it for breeding. Plays well with other pets, as seen in the picture.
You pick it up and supply your own cage/food.
Dog not included.
There had been about 5 responses within the hour, so I decided to go with the most appropriate, a local commercial fisherman who wanted it for his son. I suggested a trade of fish for fish — payment that is not generally the norm for Craigslist.
Nearly everyone who reads used to read this blog and has physically interacted with me in the past few months has reprimanded me for not posting more/at all. It’s strange how my desire to write declines so drastically when there are increasingly interesting things happening to me. Five years ago, I would write every single day about things that even bored me, but I don’t qualify a trip to Japan for even a mention.
Fortunately for those who, long ago, subscribed to my RSS feed, there will be at least a few new entries coming from this site. I’m in the process of moving on with my life, a change that involves applying to both jobs and graduate school. While the job application process shouldn’t interest readers much, I’ll claim the grad school applications should.
My reasoning for this is that all of these applications require some form of writing, either showing how well qualified you are for the program, how much you want to help the world, or some other persuasive piece of self promotion. The truth is, I haven’t done much writing in the past year — not just counting the absence of my blog. There haven’t been any research papers I wrote in two hours the morning it was due or any stern emails to corporations expressing my dissatisfaction over faulty products. Even my oral conversations were usually with those who had only basic English comprehension, so if I worded something in a way that made me particularly proud, I would generally have to reword it in a way that was more easily understood. And that’s not even counting that most of my conversations were with my girlfriend Caitlin, a relationship usually noted for pet names and personal lingo (in our case, we could often sustain conversations where we only stated our sentences in acronyms).
In short, I haven’t written anything in a long time and I need to do so for the future. Thus, I am reactivating this blog.
This is one of my all-time favorite pictures. I feel it truly captures the heart of Chinese culture. On one side, there is a beautiful foreigner, modeling makeup at a mall. On the other side, you have an enormous mass of Chinese people staring at her and taking pictures.
For some reason, sticks with inflatable poop on one end are rather popular, particularly at amusement parks. They come complete with little flies buzzing around.
For one of the speech projects I had my students do, several of them used the board in order to illustrate their stories. I’m not entirely sure how these managed to make things clearer, but they were amusing enough for me to document.
Also, this drawing was necessary to explain what it would look like if two people shared one noodle (“Lady and the Tramp style” doesn’t quite work here).
Back in Davis, I noticed this note above the button you push in order to cross the street. I thought it was amusing, so I added the last line. The note was helpful for me, since I sometimes forget that jaywalking is illegal. Also, sometimes I’m six years old.
Over the past year, there have been many instances where I see something, find it humorous, and take a picture. Usually, I intend to post these pictures on my blog, but due to me being incredibly lazy, that hasn’t happened. Fortunately for you, I happen to be more bored than I am lazy, so I think I’ll post a few of these pictures. Enjoy.
