banan-xd

I will be gone from here in a little over a week. It is, of course, just closest to the times of change that I most value the present. When I walked into the night earlier, it was warm and humid and the air pressed in around me. The air was filled with the smells of life happening around me and I drove home with the windows down, enjoying it all, even the sickly sweet smell of tobacco lingering around the Philip Morris plant. Nothing, save the ocean at night, brings peace to my soul quite like evenings like this. Had I first come to Richmond in the winter, I may have never moved here. But I found it on a similar summer night years ago and fell in love. The river closed the deal. I will miss nights sitting on the porch watching the fireflies circle above the treetops. I will miss swimming in the river and sliding down the rapids and fighting the current back out. Despite my frequent complaints about this town, I have found things about it to love. While often times I went crazy from a lack of intellectual stimulation, I established good friendships and relationships that showed me that there were beacons of light amongst the masses. Richmond is somewhere I can live, but I don't think it's the time in my life for it. I have too much I still need to do and Richmond cannot contain it. I still have much more of the world to go see. But someday, when I am much older and I have perhaps satisfied my driving need to always be doing something, I will come back here--to spend nights on my porch and afternoons by the river.

As I try to get things in order for starting grad school, I'm questioning it more and more. I know I have an interest in sustainability, but I don't know if this is the path I should choose. I always feel like I have two paths--the one where I prove myself by society's standards and the one where I prove myself by my own. On the first, I go for the Names. Good schools, good job titles, good companies. It's all about being able to rattle off impressive names. It's about status. It's about being able to put it all on a piece of paper and impressing people with it. It's validation through others and I know that it's the way most people try to go. With the latter, I'd basically remove myself from society. I have this vision of living on a farm surrounded by nothingness and putting in a hard day's work on my own terms. I could see myself either pursuing some sort of artistic, practical craft (perhaps woodworking or furniture building) or raising horses. I think a large part of me never pursuing this second path is a lack of resources. How would I even get to the point where I could afford a farm and acres of land and tools for a craft or horses? I can't really foresee that happening. The first path is much easier to attain. It's not actually easier, but it's much better marked. The problem I'm running into is that if by picking grad school I'm picking wrong, it will be hard to change. I will likely graduate with close to $100,000 in debt from undergrad and grad. This will effectively marry me to that path because I won't be able to afford to do anything else. And what if I only like it for 5 or 6 years, which happened with my undergrad? I'll be that much further from the second path and not really able to change. Part of this is a growing neurotic fear of debt. I fully understand that not having debt will provide me with a huge amount of freedom. However, there is the daily temptation to simply acquire debt in order to have the things I want, but cannot outright afford (like an education). It's a cultural standard. It's next to impossible to be in the middle class and have anything without simultaneously acquiring debt. Honestly, it freaks me the fuck out. It guides almost every decision I make. It limits me. I used to think that I could just bust my ass and get myself out of the debt I have now. But I tried and it didn't really go away. I made a small dent, but it didn't help much. Am I supposed to just sell out for a few years (or decades) in a job that is barely ok in order to get myself out of this and perhaps pursue something better? I can't stomach the thought of being in a 40 hour, 9-5 job for any appreciable amount of time. I can't do it. It drove me crazy. I need my freedom and independence. I am also worried that I'm losing sight of myself. I feel myself become more and more distanced from my core self and this drifting is spurred and furthered by this psychotic obsession with finances and work. It clouds my judgment. My previous answer to this problem was to quit my office job and move out of Boston to Richmond. It helped tremendously. I don't know what the answer is now. In lighter news, my neighbor set my back yard on fire yesterday. Burning bamboo sounds a lot like gunshots.