Mundane Turbulence

I didn’t post yesterday, because…we did this:

Yup. Memphis to Lubbock.

So today was a lot better. We went to Carlsbad Caverns National Park - ! It was like some other world. A world with strange and interesting, um…stone chapels?

Ariel and I were very pensive. Also, it ain’t that bright: 15 seconds of exposure.

Also, I was feeling super smug about the exposure thing:

Smug caverns.

The place was amazing. Then we watched thousands of bats fly out of caves at dusk (which we weren’t allowed to photograph, unfortunately). Now we’re crashing at a motel in Roswell, where…there doesn’t seem to be much going on during a Wednesday night. Weh-woh. Flagstaff tomorrow!

Today had quite a brilliant beginning. We’d spent the night at our uncle Rob’s, which is this gorgeous place:

It’s just a little pretty.

Rob is such a great guy. We spent the night with him and his fantastic partner, who treated us to delicious food, awesome catching up (and meeting of my sister for the first time), and – the icing on the cake – we all watched the latest episode of True Blood. Yup: Rob rules, and it had been the better part of a decade since I’d seen him, so I was so pleased to reconnect. It’s really swell to know that he’s out there. I wish we could’ve stayed longer.

Alas, we had to hit the road. After an awesome lunch in Asheville, NC (eat here) – to which I immediately decided I’d like to move – we continued on. For a long. Fucking. Time.

Ugh. 13 hours.

We’re in Memphis now, and…I think Memphis might suck? I’m exhausted.

So. Yesterday, we went from a neighborhood that looked like this:

It looks like Ariel’s car had diarrhea on the sidewalk, but…that poop was already there.

To a place that looked like this:

You wouldn’t believe the amount of bullfrog kerplunking action there was up in this pond.

And this:

Pretty little bridges.

To stay in a place that looked like this:

The bathroom here was bigger than my bedroom at home.

In order to see this:

Bubbles and kissing!

The lovely couple making kisses there are my dear friends, Marie (née Forgeard) and Justin Lacasse. I’ve known them for something like…six years? (It’s ridiculous how quickly you end up knowing someone for a long time, I think, if that makes any sense. Like, I just realized that my oldest best friend and I have known each other for twenty-two years. Yikes. Also, she just had a second daughter today. Shout out!) And how did I meet them, you ask, barely able to catch your breath? Well, my very first class at the Harvard Extension School was – of all things – Chinese.  I wanted to get my language requirement out of the way with something that I thought would be interesting (but, who knew, just turned out to be extremely difficult), and Marie is just…brilliant, so of course she decided to take Chinese for the hell of it.  Oh, not to mention that she was also taking random classes at Boston College, which happened to be up the street a ways from where I lived at the time.

One evening, I was headed up that street to a friend’s place, and there was Marie, walking to a bus stop. In fact, I didn’t even recognize her, but the same could not be said vice versa: she identified me, and even called me by name! Naturally, I thought, “ah – cute French girl from Chinese class!” (She’s French.) And I’d actually thought that her name might be Marie, but I doubted myself, because, well, how cliche is that? (Is it racist to be wrong about challenging my own racism?) In any case, I had a cute chat with her, and then she was on her way. I decided, however, that it would be absolutely ridiculous to let her off without trying to get her number, so after I worked up enough courage to go after her (which actually took something like five minutes of walking in the direction opposite hers), I literally ran back towards her. Breathlessly, I asked for and received her number, filed it under “M” (I was sure that her name at least started with an “M”), and then resolved to do my best to somehow find a way into her pants.

Right about now, if Justin is reading this, um…sorry. But, seriously, you know your wife is a babe; surely you suspected!

Anyway, a day or two later, Marie and I had class again, so I texted her ahead (I still wasn’t quite sure how to ask a lady out face-to-face at the time) to find out if she’d be interested in grabbing a drink afterwards. She couldn’t make it, because she had some other event planned with – ugh - her boyfriend. I think she invited me along, but – totally bummed – I declined, and then resolved to forget that I ever wanted to try to get into her pants. (Sigh.)

A week or so passed, after which Marie contacted me. She was having some event at her place with her boyfriend (terrible: they even lived together), and she invited me. I had to admit: I appreciated her persistence in wanting to make friendly. So I dragged my buddy Aaron along, if only to see who this jerk-of-a-boyfriend was, and to have someone else corroborate it for me. We got to their place, and there was Justin, and…goddamnit, the guy was freaking cool: he was laid back, totally sharp and clever, and his taste in music was easily significantly more hip than my own. Basically, he was impossible not to like.

And hey: when you’re beat, you’re beat. Naturally, the best thing to do was to join’em, so that’s what I did. Marie and Justin rule, I am so pleased to know them, and I was honored to have been a guest at their wedding yesterday. I hope that they have lots of beautiful and brilliant children. And I hope some day to find myself in as caring and sincere a union as theirs. Awesome.

Anyhoo, now Ariel and I are with my fantastically awesome uncle and his partner at their place in North Carolina, and here’s the trip update:

I drove today for nearly two hours. Yeah, I know, I’m kind of a big deal.

More on additional loveliness tomorrow!

And here I am: a second cross-country road trip in as many years. This time I’m helping deliver my sister into the clutches of the west coast, to that most reviled of places: Los Angeles. I’ve never been, but…c’mon. (Yeah, that’s as substantive as my criticism of the place gets.) Sadly, it’s either NYC or LA for artists, and my sis wants to be one of those, so…I guess the latter is cheaper. Or something.

It’s just around 1:00am EST, and my sister and I are in one shady-ass part of Philadelphia. I don’t know what this area is called, but we were definitely offered Percocets within the 3-minute walk from where we parked the car to the steps of the apartment in which we’re crashing. Mom: next time you offer to put us up in a motel, I promise I won’t call it “stupid.” Oh, karma…are you really this intent on proving your existence?

Anyhoo, we left from Cambridge in the mid-evening.  Those were simpler times:

Road warriors.

And here’s how far we have come today:

And by “we,” I mean that Ariel is an awesome and patient driver.

So we’re definitely hitting up the Mütter Museum tomorrow morning, because…well, who wouldn’t want a piece of that prior to attending a wedding on a fancy estate?

P.S. New Jersey: you smell like shit.

P.P.S. I’m just playin’, NJ…you know I loves you.

P.P.P.S. Take a shower, though.

Long time, no post, Christian.

I know. Sorry about that.

Graduate school: I love it. It’s tons of work, but it’s satisfying work, and if you do it right, you’ll find that you’re working on yourself more than any particular project. Or that’s been my experience, at least, and it all adds up for me. Fundamentally, psychology asserts that all individuals are changeable. And the discipline’s therapists are, I would think, the facilitators of that change. The task of training these facilitators, however, simply cannot only be a matter of teaching skills.

In order to be effective therapists, we need to remain present with our clients, empathetically acknowledging what they feel, and remaining aware of what we feel in response. We must choose our words wisely, because the power differential within the therapeutic relationship is such that those words may have a lasting impact on how clients feel about themselves, and about us. We cannot merely attune to the content of clients’ speech, but also its quality, as well as how clients appear and move when they speak. We have to organize our thoughts in a way that creates meaningful connections between superficially discrete pieces of information. It is essential that we admit our mistakes to clients, because if we fail to do so, we risk losing their trust; and if clients do not trust us, then they will not trust our therapy. Ellipsis etcetera.

So how on Earth can these be just some techniques that we pick up? I dunno, maybe it’s possible; maybe some people can learn these things and then turn them off and on, but I’m skeptical. My experience of all this is: I’m changing. I’m not walking around, “psychoanalyzing” people (an outdated word, anyway) or anything assholic like that, but I think the way in which I interact with others has been fundamentally altered. As far as I can tell, this has manifested as an utter lack of desire to engage in a non-genuine way.

That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy small talk, or that every conversation I have needs to contain some deep and meaningful connection at its core – this is instead a reflection of my own personal development. One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in recent years has surrounded the realization that I need to allow myself to feel comfortable with my own emotional experience. Sadness and hurt and anxiety and anger and envy and every feeling that we call negative is painful to endure. It’s so enticing to avoid. It’s so appealing to deny. But if I can’t be present with my own pain, how can I be present with anyone else’s? The logical progression, therefore, extends a genuine approach from interactions with myself to interactions with others.

The application of these ideas is, of course, extremely difficult to navigate, particularly because of the ubiquitous nature of the change. That is to say, no domain of living is unaffected, including ones in which genuineness is entirely unexpected. After all, our language is saturated with common speech that, in spite of its literal meaning, assumes the absence of meaningful response. “What’s up,” “how’re you doing,” “how was your meal,” “how’s the family,” “how was work,” are some of the uncountable daily examples of this assumption (which isn’t to say that many people don’t mean them as genuine questions, but that is the exception). Genuinely answering these questions can, in fact, be off-putting to some, in particular if the answer does not conclude with an expression of the positive. Trickier still is when others have expectations of your behavior, as opposed to merely your affect. A boss asks if you’d like to pick up an additional shift, or a teacher asks if you’d be interested in completing an additional assignment. The genuine answer may not just be unexpected, but could indeed be detrimental.

Reality is that there’s no answer to these risks – only that the potential gains outweigh the potential losses. I want to strive for genuineness for myself, and for how I relate to others. I feel like…I’m becoming a wholer person. And that’s my experience of my training thus far.

P.S. Happy birthday, Mama.