This is probably the greatest question I have seen on Aardvark:
Monthly Archive for February, 2010
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.