Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true

[mhuzzell]

O My Readers, I've neglected you again. It's been ages since I've written, and even longer since I've written anything I've been really proud to share with you. I've just looked, and it's all ramblings about bees and eyelashes and the Apocalypse. Yeesh. (Though despite all the mentions of The Apocalypse, The Revolution, etc, please never think that I've become a Christian, or a Marxist.)

There were so many entries I was going to make, over the past couple of weeks. I could say that I've been busy, and it would be true. It usually is. But most of the time I still manage to write here, anyway. It's not as though I haven't had a spare moment to sit down at the computer and type it out, it's more that, for the past few weeks I haven't felt capable of writing. Several entries are wallowing, half-written in Word documents. Others never even made it out of my head. There was the whimsical one, about the creepy Facebook advertisements selling me weddings when I got 'Engaged' and vitamin supplements when my 'Activities' included 'naked yoga'. There was the lonesome one about how my cousin Leigh got married in Charleston; about how I miss my family. How I miss my Home, or at least the one invented by nostalgia. I never shared my ruminations on America, nor the poem I wrote to that effect. Well, that at least I can do:

I wrote my own myth of America:
in chilly August nights, with shivered sighs,
remembered frog songs in the humid pines
creaking with the lyrical cicada
shrieking love-songs to the bawdy skies
and hazy stars behind electric lines.
The myth does not include the orange lights
obscuring stars on hot October nights.
No giant cities loom, nor suburbs sprawl
across imagined forests’ purple dusk,
where laughing children catching fireflies
are not racist, and there is no highway wall,
just miles of vines that sprawl on leafy trunks,
blanketing the hillsides in a march of lies.

So I guess at least my creative energy is going somewhere, if only to poorly-composed sonnets. I've been worrying a lot lately about wasting my time, my potential, my energy. I feel like a lot of my life has slipped by without me really noticing. Maybe it's just that I'll be, to the eyes of much of the world, a Proper Adult^TM tomorrow. And yet still, no one will listen to me, "they" won't listen to me, because I am so young.

But even now, I've come to a point in my life where the possibilities no longer seem limitless; where I can see the paths that are shut down for me, perhaps forever. I'm referring, of course, to this entry, in which I explain how I always wanted to be a pioneering research zoologist like my childhood hero, Jane Goodall, and bemoaned my decision to study Philosophy instead of sticking to science.

Well, last week I got an early birthday present from my dad. It was a book by Jane Goodall (who had spoken at a Montessori conference he'd attended), and it was signed with the caption 'Follow your dream'. Which kind of shook me, since I had never particularly complained to my dad about my broken dreams. It felt like a fated spur to action.

But... what action? There is not actually a way for me to obtain a degree in zoology in time for me to start the career I'd always dreamed of. But then, according to her book, Jane Goodall didn't have a degree either. Maybe I should start looking into non-degree-specific work in Conservation and Ecology, which are as much to my taste as the actual science -- and which will expose me to a lot of the science, anyway. I just need to stay positive. I've been so negative lately, so pessimistic. It's not as though I haven't followed any of my dreams. I'm here, am I not? I got the hell out of America, and that was a big one. I have, at various points since coming to university, felt a strong sense of direction, a sense of purpose. I've just got to get that back, somehow. For now, the cheesy signoff:

There'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams, in plenty
before the last revolving year is through.

Comments

[lizardist.livejournal.com]

Or maybe university is so silly, a place where we learn so little REALLY, that it doesn't matter what it says on that bit of paper, as long as you get out of here with one... and intanct!

[smoothoperetta.livejournal.com]

I think you write better every post. I really love reading this journal now.

Also, good poem. Of course. Want to talk it (and life) over over coffee soon?

And what happened to the last one you wrote (ornaments, blue-veined hands . . .) Do we get to see a reworking?

[mhuzzell.livejournal.com]

Thanks man, that means a lot. Coffee soon, yes. As for that poem (or glimpse of poem, or scene, or whatever):

Again

Porcelain rabbits,
dropped long ago, still show their glue-seamed scars,
crouched quiet on shelves in a house once home,
unwitting metaphors
the paper touch of ancient hands
cannot quite mend or comfort.

More importantly...

[mhuzzell.livejournal.com]

Now as opposed to when?

Serious question. You know you were saying you might start a 'real blog' to mostly-replace your LJ? I've been considering that myself, but the trouble is that I've got a very poor internal quality control. I'm aware that my writing in this journal has become better over the last year or so, but as I look back at those entries, there are a few that I know are good and a few that I know are terrible, but with most of them I'm just not sure.

... and at the same time, my only external indicator of what is or isn't a good entry is the comments section, but I'm not sure it necessarily has anything to do with the quality of the writing. For instance, things that I've written that I thought were very good might have gotten no comments because they were actually terrible, or it could have been that the 5 or 10 people who actually read them simply had nothing to say. Similary, things that were just silly and personal, like my most recent entry about cutting my hair, get lots of comments simply because my readers are mostly my friends, and for some reason friends are always interested in haircuts.

(Yes, I realise this comment is several weeks old and I could just wait until you get home tomorrow and ask you this in person, but for some reason it feels important to write this down. Do you even get notifications for comment replies?)

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

Actually, there is time to follow that dream. You merely won't be taking the conventional path to it, and who knows, that might be better. Here's a grand example, in Kate Elliott's husband, J. -- he always wanted to be in law enforcement, went to Police Academy out of high school, became a law enforcer and realized it wasn't for him. So J. went back to college part-time, got a degree and PhD in archaeology/anthropology, and has now done excavations in Central America. I don't remember how old he was when he got the PhD, but his kids were in junior high. He now has a job that combines both dreams, working as a forensic anthropologist in the MIA program out of Hawaii.

I'm another example: always wanted to be a writer, never got around to it till I was 38, published first novel at 42 -- and you know how that worked out. :-)

So you really don't have to give up. Sometimes all you need to do is reconsider the steps toward achieving whatever dreams you have.

[lizzellwild.livejournal.com]

i like that poem. and that you're finding your love of science and Jane Goodall again. i knew it never really faded anyway.