Westbound

This summer has flown away-- I'm not sure where it went. But I do know where I've gone:

Gettysburg, PA
Washington, DC
Philadelphia, PA
Boston, MA (many, many times)
Worcester, MA
Wakefield, MA
Albany, NY
Manchester, NH
Walden Pond
White Mountains

And soon, it's back to Buffalo for me. I'm going with less trepidation, less nostalgia, and more hope this year. Last year was definitely a big transition, and I've dealt with many changes, losses (see Elegy for a Dog post), and anxieties. But I've realized that I have, indeed, dealt with them. I suppose I'm a real adult now, and whatever comes my way, I think I'll cope with it.

Homeward Bound

I'm going home this weekend to celebrate Easter with family and friends! I have really missed New England, and all week, I've been thinking of places I want to go around my hometown, going to Mass with my nieces and then seeing Jarrod's family for Easter lunch at his grandparents' house. Although I have the specter of two final papers to write hanging over me this weekend, nothing can dampen my spirits. I can't wait to go home.

Home has a more complicated definition for me now, though. I've been in Buffalo for over nine months. While the city itself doesn't exactly feel like home, and can never feel like home the way Marlborough does since it contains my entire childhood, I realized last week just how much my apartment has become home to me. I spent Thursday through Sunday morning in another person's house, pet-sitting, and I was a little surprised to find how much I missed my apartment. Jarrod stayed in the house with me, which made it better, but we both felt displaced. It was more than just not having our things around or not knowing the layout of the house. It just wasn't our home, and I appreciated more deeply that our apartment is our home, not merely a place where we keep our stuff and sleep at night.

When I first moved here, I anticipated feeling the same way towards my apartment as I did towards my college dorm rooms; a place to stay, a space which becomes comfortable and welcoming, but which isn't really a home, just a pseudo-home, a temporary resting place. We will probably have a different apartment next year, somewhere closer to campus so we can save on gas money, so in that sense, it is similar to my college dorms. One year occupancy, then move on to another place. But this little second-floor, one-bedroom apartment feels more mine than my dorm rooms ever did, and I can't quite explain why. I do know, however, that spaces become meaningful because of the people that animate them, the memories that linger and follow you.

Memory absolutely fascinates me; I write and read a lot about nostalgia, perhaps because I'm very prone to this emotion. I'm interested in the ability to move yourself back in time emotionally, but only in part, returning to the same place and mental state, yet impossibly remote from it. Tonight I'll probably share my room with my sister for the first time since she got married six years ago. It will be a lot of fun and we'll probably stay up way too late, laughing and talking like we always have. But we're such vastly different people from who we were the last time we shared a room. There's something beautiful and sad and joyous in that, all at once.

First Semester Re-Cap

Happy 2011! I'm back after the most grueling five months of my life. That's right, I completed my first semester of graduate school (I'm getting a Master's in English).

A lot has happened since I first started this blog about a year ago; I started off by posting about the books I read as a way to keep myself in a semi-academic mindset in the gap year between graduating college and starting graduate school. Now that I'm here in grad school, academic exercises do not require the kind of extra exertion that they did when I was out of school. Academics now take up a large portion of my life-- in this first semester, it felt like an excessively large portion-- and that requires a redirection of energies. Reading and scholarship will take care of themselves now; I have and will put in the necessary hours of studying, writing, editing, etc., but I need to be as diligent about not letting other areas of my life slide for the sake of scholarship as I was about keeping up with reading and thinking critically when I wasn't a student.

I will always think of myself as a student and learning will always be an important part of my life, but now that I have this first semester behind me, I know better what it's place should be. Academia is not the place for me, and I will be very happy to finish this program next spring. I value all that I have learned and I look forward to my remaining time as a Masters student, but I would not consider going for a PhD. Scholarship cannot be my entire life.

As far as this blog is concerned, well, I'm not really sure what shape it's going to take now. I want to hold myself accountable for being healthy, nurturing my relationships, and enjoying the new city in which I live. I suppose now its focus will broaden to include all the aspects of living on my own and shaping my adult life. Still much to be learned, so I'll keep the title as it is.

I particularly want to make sure that I keep art in my life as I press onward with graduate studies. I did not take time to paint or draw at all this semester, and I noticed a change in my mood as a result, so I will probably use this blog to document some of my artistic projects (like the mural I started on the back of my bookcase in August, which I'm working on presently).

That's all for now; the new semester starts in less than two weeks and I intend to make it a more balanced one than the first.

Still Alive

I don't think anyone actually reads this anymore.

Anyway.

I'm almost done with my first semester of grad school.

This is harder than I had ever imagined. I've been pushed to my limits. Tears have been shed. Much sleep and a few pounds have been lost.

But I've gained so much being here, and I think I've become better for these past five months. I know that this experience will make me a better teacher. I have a new empathy for struggling students, the ones who just can't seem to get it. I've been there now.

I still hope to get it in the end. I'll write back later for a more comprehensive reflection, but until then, I'm writing until my fingers break.

All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go

This is my final night at home. I'm sitting on a mattress on the floor of my bedroom. It's strange that, even though all of the stuff I'm taking with me is packed and out of the house, this room is still very much mine. My dresser, my TV, my pictures, my high school diploma, some paintings I did years ago, bunny slippers, and GRE books are all still here. An elementary school name tag is still thumbtacked to the wall.

I guess I'll be haunting this house for a while.

My last posts have all been about looking back and reflecting on my life here in this small town with pizza shop owners who have known me since I was a toddler and quirky points of pride including a stolen bell from the Civil War. But I haven't adequately expressed just how excited I am to do this. I really can't wait to arrive at my new place and arrange all of our things. This is an adventure, and I'm so happy to be doing it with Jarrod, because we will grow, explore, learn, struggle, laugh, sing, wash dishes, discover, run, study, and love.

But I've been correct in looking back, because this is a big step and my excitement for the future does not discount just how dear this time has been.

Mom and Dad, I'm not leaving you and I'll continue to need you, not in the same ways, but I'll need you nonetheless, just like when I could tie my shoes by myself, there were still other things that I needed and wanted you for-- I'll always need your ears, your words, your support and encouragement. But now I can give more to you too. This isn't easy, but it's good; I'm leaving home because you've been such incredible parents. You have raised me to be an adult, and I am one.

Now I can look forward, and move forward, and construct my life. This is a great responsibility, but I'm equal to it, and I'll do so with zeal and joy.

Plus, you know, Buffalo isn't all that far away and I'll always come back to this place, and it will always be my home. It will change and so will I, but it's still home.

Movin' Out

My life is slowly being packed away into cardboard boxes, stuffed and crammed into impossibly tight corners, waiting to explode into a new space.



(I have four boxes packed like that, nothing but books.)



This is my final week of living in my parents' house, which has been home for my entire life. This inspires certain thoughts.


I remember what it was like in the days before my older sisters left home. I was eleven when my eldest sister got married. Just a few days before the wedding, my father, my sister's fiance, and the best man stood around a huge map unfolded across my kitchen table and traced the route from Massachusetts to Kansas with their fingers. I was enthralled by the idea of driving hundreds and hundreds of miles away to a place that would instantly be their new home. I foolishly imagined my sister making the entire journey in her white wedding dress, and failed to comprehend why my mother was crying in the other room. There was a wedding and an adventure, and this was the best time of all because of the pleasure of anticipation; none of it had happened yet, but it was so close, just brushing the fingertips of the grand event. To the eleven year old mind, it was like 10 PM on Christmas Eve, and called for excited impatience for a day when everything would be different.

I expected great change-- my sister was now going to be a bride and immediately transform into a wife. The entire day would be filled with romantic magic. But we got up the morning of the wedding and Laurie's maid of honor and bridesmaid came over to watch a few episodes of Friends, and I sat on the swing outside until I was made to come in and put on my yellow dress. My hair was braided and sprayed stiff and had flowers woven into the twists, and then it was time to go to the church. The church did not look any different than it ever did; I genuflected and sat in the pew between Katie and our mom, as always. Then I watched my sister and her husband have their pictures taken, and we went to the reception hall, where there were no mysterious and romantic boys for me to dance with, no glittering aura filling the air or reflecting off the candle centerpieces.

Afterwards, my life went on and we all settled into a new normal. Laurie left and Diet Coke was now excinded from the grocery list. She had been living away at college for the last three years, so her absence wasn't completely foreign. There was an empty room in the house now, and my parents moved their bedroom downstairs to give my sister Katie and me free reign over the upper level of our house.

We could have had our own rooms then, something that most eleven and fourteen year old sisters would rejoice over-- but Katie and I were unusual girls. We decided to stay together in the same room we had shared our entire lives. Little changed, even when Katie graduated high school and began college; I was her only college roommate, since she commuted to school from home.

I was 18 when she married Eric, and much more comprehending of the significance of the event. The night before the wedding, Katie and I sat on our beds in our pajamas and talked, like we always had, the conversation ranging from the wedding to her moving to Maine (and how I was going to buy her a big ugly flannel nightgown for the cold Maine winters), to random childhood memories. I wasn't sad, though I was wistfully aware that this was the final night of us being the two Jaworek girls and that, from tomorrow onward, things would be different. It would never be like this again, and that was sadly sweet; childhood never lasts, and the final vestiges of ours were falling away. The next morning, we woke up early and padded downstairs to a breakfast of muffins (I took a cranberry one, Katie went for the double chocolate muffin), and talked with our parents at the table like always. Then it was time for Katie to change into her white dress, me into my pink one, and we headed to the church.

After the wedding, I returned to my half-empty room and for the first time, I was Jen Alone.

That room gradually metamorphosized into my own; my twin bed's twin was dissembled and stowed away in the attic, my desk and bookshelves eventually took the bed's place, our old stuffed animals were donated or passed down to Katie's daughters, and my own twin bed joined its counterpart in the attic when I upgraded to a queen-sized bed.

And now I sort through it all and decide what to bring with me, what to keep here in my parents' house, what to throw away. This room will soon be vacant. Before, it was Laurie's and then it was passed into my and Katie's hands, and then left solely to me, and there is no one to take my place. Already, it feels like it's not fully mine, like my college was no longer mine during my final week on campus; I walked about by myself in those last days, remembering the places and people and felt that I was already absent. I was a ghost.

Will I haunt this room, this house? Katie haunts it still, so does Laurie: I still keep my bed to the left side of the room, perhaps to preserve the space for Katie's phantom bed, there are marks on the ceiling from our old glow-in-the-dark plastic stars, the carpet in my parents' bedroom is the same deep cranberry color that a 15-year-old Laurie chose, my sisters' chairs at the kitchen table remain vacant. Rooms store memories in their corners, even when those corners are empty and dusty.

Soon, I will leave this house and leave part of myself here. I'm just not sure what part will stay behind in these rooms, how much of me is left out in the backyard with the old spoons and plastic toys, long forgotten, rusted and buried and broken, but still there. And other parts of me will emerge in Buffalo from the strange new soil of grad school, my own apartment, Jarrod's presence, my natural mutability.

Everything feels so amorphous and jumbled together, though it's all wrapped in paper, packed away into tidy boxes and labeled neatly. I feel excited, nervous, wistful, hopeful, hopeless, afraid, ambitious, determined, and everything all at once.

You know? I wouldn't change that. I want to feel everything, think everything, and write this all down, as confused and inelegant as it may be.