it is possible, that i am not a person for vacations. it is possible, that i am a person for long leisurely trips or perhaps just a person for taking vacations with the right person and I haven't found them yet.
i know being self-conscious doesn't help things any and i certainly am. the weight, the dress that comes with it and the incredible unease that comes from being from the abhorred midwest...then in traveling with my mother, whom i love, but who could behave no more like a tourist if she tried in her puffer vest and inability to board the blue line bus rather than the yellow. i don't like feeling like a tourist in a city like this. for one thing, i feel like i must be irritating the people who do live here and belong and, for the second, i think i would like to feel like i belong.
people keep telling me that i need to get out of the place where i live - and living on top of chicago - a veritable mecca of intellectual debate, i never understood why that was really necessary. i mean, its chicago, for christs sake. internet, i was wrong. last night,we jumped on a shuttle from the kennedy center back to the metro station and the radio blared global political news of the day and people discussed it intelligently - not loudly, but intelligently among themselves and it was...different. it was moderate, not overly liberal or overly conservative or even equivocating - just well thought out and well structured. a few college boys - still speaking with that thick, uniquely black southern accent, discussed when the next time they would be able to make it from class to another show at the kennedy center and how they'd been to see peabody the last time they'd performed and hadn't liked it, but thought they should come back thursday to give it another try. in chicago, first generation college students do not go to classical music performances unless they're actually enrolled in a classical music program or trying to sleep with someone. really. but there they were, two heterosexual transplants in their early twenties making a plan. in boggles the mind,
i always knew there was a tremendous chance i would come to love a city like dc or boston far more than i ever loved chicago. i love chicago's history - i love the years of mafia rule and i love the hardness of the city but there is something entirely unique about each city, and the part of me that spends the largest portion of many of my days entrenched in theoretical political discussion appreciates that unique something about dc. i can't say 'i love it here' because mostly, thus far, this trip has been about pain and suffering. it's 35 degrees outside and i walked miles and miles and miles in ballet flats in a cemetery. i mean, while i have been the kind of person that could trek like that in that kind of weather for nothing and i would like to be that person again, i can't say i am right now and i never did it in a cemetery before.
i guess, in the end, this trip has confirmed for me the desire to live in a city. the part of me that is very very very cheap knows that 81% above the national average for a cost of living is insane, but the part of me that thinks you can make choices that make that reasonably affordable knows that it could, at least, be ok. i mean, okay, the salary calculators all say that, to maintain my current standard of living in boston or dc, i'd need to gross an additional twenty-five grand a year...but i have to ask myself, what is my current standard of living, really?
its been so long since my money was mine that i dont know where it would get me if i was the only one spending it. its moot anyway, since i haven't actually, you know, applied for any jobs and since i dont plan to in the immediate moment. (finish college first - then start trying to negotiate for an additional twenty-five thousand dollars a year. seems logical. seems like i have no idea how i got as far as i did without finishing that pointless little piece of paper that, for a person with an iq like mine, really just proves i was capable of sitting through thousands of hours of fairly pointless lectures.) but, it does give me a different picture of what my life could look like, if that's what i wanted it to.
if this process is teaching me nothing, it has served to remind me that i have choices and that those choices are my own. mike can do as he likes. he can be as he likes, what he likes and when he likes. i am not obligated to wait around for him to get his personal shit together and if he can't keep up, that's his problem, really. so it's served to remind me that if i wanted to pack up my life and move it to a city, i could and i could make it. living as far in the burbs as I do, there's a tendency to lean on "get married, buy starter house, have baby" life plan as your goals and, while i'm not sure on the marriage or the baby, i've become rather attached to the notion of buying a house and doing some reno. i like my sewing machine and my yarn and feel like having a room in which to do it would be, you know, nice. after years of living in an apartment that doesn't have walls, let alone doors, the prospect of one area not flowing completely into another, has it's appeal. i still love high ceilings and big windows and wide open rooms, but being able to shut a door on a messy bedroom and have people over is certainly not beyond redemption. in a city, that starts to look a lot more like a tiny table in the corner of a one bedroom or studio apartment with a narrow bookshelf, a tiny sewing table and an easel that you trip over every time you get off of the couch, but that could be okay too.
in any case, it's 9:30 in the morning and the tours all open at ten. in truth, i should have let the hotel room ages ago, jumped on the subway and made my way down to the mall to start going and doing and seeing things but today is the only day i have to take things at my own pace and this trip stopped being about seeing things sometime yesterday and started being about thinking things.
seeing the kennedy graves was something i so wanted to do and, as hard as i try to be positive about it, it was spoiled in so many ways. spoiled by the angry little guy from jersey who couldn't keep himself or his children in check as they went on their own capitol marathon through some of the most relevant ground in this country. he went apoplectic over the prospect of having to wait a whole hour to see the changing of the guard so the rest of the tour bus could stop at the kennedy gravesites. it was fortunate, in that moment, that my mother was with me because, if i'd been forced to say something, it might have been a tirade of insults thrown in his direction - along with some fairly severe condemnations for behaving that way in a cemetery. she was able to politely say that the kennedy gravesites were really the only reason we came and the tour guide was able to work it out. it was spoiled when we got there, standing over the flame for john and the two little girls poking around the children's gravesites asking 'how them die? how them die?' over and over again...or maybe by their mother, who could not legitimately answer their questions because, behind john's obvious demise, she didn't know how jackie died or who the other two headstones were for. it was ruined by the plywood and indoor/outdoor carpeting that led up to teddy's grave in lieu of an actual sidewalk for reasons that i dont really understand. his death was so long ago, surely they had time to build a three by five sidewalk? it wouldn't take but an afternoon. (reasonably, i'm trying to imagine that they did build the sidewalk but they just did a bad job and ended up letting the winter take it out. or...i dont know, something.)
arlington, for me, was a pilgrimage, not a stop on a tour destination and i didn't go there to see things, i went there to feel them. it bothered me to see that not everyone treated it the same - the bands of school children taking walking tours through the cemetery, giggling and shouting while, over the top of the hill, you could see a horsedrawn carriage escorting another casket to it's home. the tour guides say things like 'active cemetery' and remind you to be respectful of your fellow visitor when really they should be reminding people that each of those stones represents a death, and that the cemetery is still growing and they shouldn't need signs that read "silence and respect" because that you would ever imagine to behave any other way should be beyond belief.
so, as i prepare to get up and shower and get dressed and make my way down to the monuments and memorials on the mall, i also find myself struggling to believe that i won't encounter more of the same, and that those very realizations make it ever so much harder to believe the best in people, to enjoy things and to be happy among other human beings.
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