The Break in Spring

I've had some interesting Spring Breaks. I've gone to Chicago. I've gone to Colorado. I've gone to Washington, DC. So the prospect of staying here in Galveston, Texas didn't seem overwhelmingly amazing. But it ended up possibly being my best ever.

I got two play host to not one, but two world-wise and savvy modern-day Elizabeth Bennets. Sara and Em, thank-you for allowing me to be one of the cheering throng beside your parade through the world. For the life of me, I cannot remember being more entertained while entertaining. You were the perfect guests.

The last few days, however, I've kept a promise and done absolutely no work. Which means, that for the last 72 hours, I've had no place to hide from my thoughts.

It's tough to walk on a beach and not get sorta philosophical. You have waves crashing into other waves, driving them in slightly other directions and each carrying sand here and there. You have little boys who pose for pictures that parents will use as blackmail later in their lives. You have little girls who run around with little pot-bellies completely oblivious to things such as tan lines and muffin-tops. And I'll spare you a metaphor my mind concocted for old German men in banana hammocks...

But this week I've noticed how absurd life can be. How entropic the world can seem. A friend gets scammed on Ebay. Another friend is awaiting news about the "lumps" she found. And people are trying to figure out if they can find all the peices of their broken hearts. And even I, with nary a thing to complain about, am frustrated when I look at the machinery of my life.

One thing this job has taught me very well is that it is one thing to have the outlook that everything in life, for good or bad, can be used to give us perspective. That every moment is but one in a billion-billion. That we can't appreciate the good without the bad.

But it is another thing altogether to try and translate that smug and high-brow thought to someone who is dealing with the prospect of litterally losing a part of their body. Where the fuck do I get off? And so here I am, normally verbose and witty, reduced to "oh man... wow... I don't know what to say."

But then again maybe I should just have the balls to say that. No?

I'm consistently shocked that in all the entropy of life, in all the absurd things that happen without any apparent reason, I see one distinct universal truth: that no one is immune. Everyone has something. Cancer, quadrapolegia, death, loss, a broken heart. Hell, even in my favorite case study: Paris Hilton we see something: that the apparent lack of any hardship at all has completely atrophied any muscle that could allow her any meaningful interaction with the real world.

She is the leopard raised in captivity and fed spam on sticks.

Even I, with the world on my platter: a sharp wit, shining personality and stunning good looks have my issues. I have painted myself into a corner where I have no community outside of my very wonderful job. And instead of dealing with it by searching, I've buried my head in the sand of my work. And I have been so oblivious to my whole situation that I couldn't even recognize that I might be attracted to someone. I had simply cut that part of my diet out. No vitamin C. And now I'm fighting emotional scurvy.

Yeah, I know I took that last metaphor a couple sentences too long, but maybe I just wanted to show off my knowledge of scurvy there.

I guess my point is that everyone has something. Everyone is a little bit broken. Everyone has something to which they're trying to adapt or from which they're fighting back. Its all part of the natural current of things. If we're night fighting, we're dying. And seeing as how that really is the one thing that every person has in common, maybe we're called to help each other out. Maybe we're called to push each other in a slightly different direction. We need to get in each other's way.

We all have our broken parts. And maybe, just maybe, if I'm man enough to pour into others and even more manly of me, if I could have the guts to let someone pour into me, I could make my wounds heal. And something tells me they'd be stronger at the break.