Maybe it's not nostalgia. Maybe I'm just happy.

I heart orchids a lot. I wasn't a "what's your favorite flower?" type until I stopped to actually look closely and well at orchids. This came, if I remember correctly, after I read the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, a novel in which orchids figured prominently. I read the novel, incidentally, because when I was in high school, writers in the Wall Street Journal kept calling things "Proustian" and I wanted to be in on the joke. Weird, that chain of causality—I like orchids because I used to be a fervent WSJ enthusiast.



Daniel and I went down to San Diego last week, partially to help with our church's homeless ministry because our pastor was worried enough people wouldn't show up, and partially to actually enjoy the city in which we spend so much time doing things besides enjoying (like working ten jobs, in my case. I updated my résumé this week and discovered that I had ten active positions last semester, nine of which were paid. I don't quite believe it myself, so I am going to list them here: editor in chief of campus creative arts journal, copy editor of campus newspaper, intern for literary agent, library assistant, teacher's assistant, co-editor with freelance proofreader, on-campus university press assistant, dissertation editor, freelance manuscript editor, transcription editor).



All that work was spread out, though, so I think I stayed between 25 and 40 hours a week. Oh, and don't worry, I kept my grades up.



Balboa Park was our only planned destination. Daniel had never seen the Rembrandt in the Timken (the last time we went, it had been displaced for a kimono exhibit), so we paid St. Bartholemew his due attention and then lingered in the botanical garden next door.



Outside was a bush full of munching caterpillars and a glistening cocoon with miniature gold beads. Gorgeous.



Running through my head this entire time was the Driftwood (of my ten jobs, the one that plagued me the most over the break). My advisor called me almost every day (including on Christmas) with updates and issues that needed to be resolved so that we could go to print. I couldn't do the edits from home because I didn't have a Mac, or an acquaintance who would let me borrow a Mac for 30 minutes, and it was these measly 30 minutes that were holding up production. My layout editor was getting married that week, but my advisor encouraged me to get a hold of her. I tentatively emailed her under his instruction, and she called me back, busy but willing to help. I told her I'd be in the area that day and would be willing to find her wherever she was so that I could enter the edits quickly and be out of her hair. But she never answered while we were down there, and I don't blame her.



For Christmas, I found for Daniel the pictured jeans. He hadn't owned a pair since he was (shhh) nine, so I made like commenter 21 on the Freakonomics blog post about what to get an economist and headed to Target. I even tried them on to make sure they were comfortable (which was his major complaint about the category of clothing, and not a completely unfounded one, it turns out. Spandex blends for females abound, but males are entrenched firmly in 100% cotton territory). I'm considering contacting all of our mutual friends in advance and telling them to pretend like they don't notice when he wears them, to prove to him that jeans are normal and not conspicuous and they look really good on you and you're not capitulating to social norms, I promise;).



Another in the great tradition of Daniel-trying-to-take-the-camera-away-from-me-because-he-doesn't-like-pictures pictures.



We shared lunch at Con Pane in Point Loma, continuing unintentionally to recreate our first quasi-date, sans bicycles. The people who told me Con Pane had really good sandwiches weren't lying. I already knew the focaccia was fantastic. Then Daniel, sweet, understanding Daniel, seeing how increasingly crestfallen I was becoming the longer my layout editor didn't call me back and the greater the prospect became that I would have to drive down to San Diego the next week to make just 30 minutes of edits, suggested we drive up the hill onto campus to see if we couldn't find a computer with a compatible program. So we did, and we didn't, and I was dejected. But then, Daniel thought of a solution. I could download a 30-day Windows compatible version of the program I needed onto my laptop, make the edits, and overnight the flash drive. Much, much happier, with the prospect of a solution in sight, I suggested we head over to OB.



We walked along the tide pools south of the pier and watched the surfers in the frigid water take the towering winter waves. We also saw a brilliant sunset. All sunsets are categorically wonderful, of course, but I favor the more orangey-blue ones over the pinky-purple ones (unless it's Valentine's Day, in which case the latter is entirely appropriate).



The afterglow reflected in the tide pools as we walked back. And then we headed downtown to meet our pastor and hand out sandwiches and water bottles to people on the streets, and we learned more about the strategic considerations of "the problem of the homeless," who, as our pastor wrote in the Union-Tribune last month, are neither a problem nor homeless.

Christmas at home. Insta-nostalgia part II.

The Sunday before Christmas, we went to see the twins in their youth group Christmas play. Shannon is the third wise man from the left.



It was a series of skits ingeniously titled "Sunday Night Live." Dad made a cameo appearance as Charlie Brown, but it was so quick I couldn't snap a picture in time.



After the church candlelight service Christmas Eve, we had a wonderful feast.



The four of us decided to open our pajamas Christmas Eve so that we could wear them in the morning (we had picked them out on Black Friday).



We had been watching a ton of backlogged SNL skits online that week, so we had to reenact the surprise Christmas. Shannon was highly entertaining, of course.



Sweet action shot.



I don't know why, but yes.



Merry Christmas Eve.



Because of our recently acquired ginormous couch, we had to house the tree in the corner. There are a lot of presents when seven people give each other gifts.



We lined up and worked methodically through the stack.







Aww, look at the line of Forever 21 hats. Forever 21 became an anchor store in the Hemet Mall this year (I know; random, right?) so we got our share of cute and bright accessories.



Hehe. Possibly my favorite picture from the day. When we were at the dollar store (I love the dollar store), I stuck a couple of items in my mom's basket (I like to make her life easier, haha). This was the perfect addition to my pedicure collection (ha). The best part is the typo, though. I hope this callous remover will be gentle with my calluses.



Because Rachel got me a cute dress and Angelica got me cute shoes and Grandma gave me her cute necklace, Angelica tried to teach me to swing dance. All the cuteness in the world couldn't help me move coordinately.



Dad was ready to be green all over the place with his presents.



After the flurry, we gathered on the couch and I played school counselor and created a list of potential college majors for the twins. Now that's a true Christmas present.

December at school. Insta-nostalgia.

Sad that so many ephemeral thoughts that I would have captured had I been regularly blogging this semester have dissipated into the aether. Actually, it's probably for the best. I'm trying to get the hang of this whole public sphere/private sphere thing. Here's a sentiment I can share with anyone who will listen: This is the view I had from my bed this fall, a view that will soon be radically different. Well, maybe not radically, as college-aged females all tend to shop at Target, but I will have two new roommates for the spring. Yes, I'm that girl. One of my roommates is moving off-campus, and the other is studying abroad in Spain. Amazingly, two more people have agreed to live with me.



Daniel and I did a fair number of Christmasy things in the craziness of the last two weeks of the semester. One night, we drove a couple of blocks into Point Loma and strolled Garrison St., a spectacular display complemented by the city lights skirting the edges of the view.







Less beautiful but just as arresting was eyelashes baby Jesus.



During finals week, we studied in the best Starbucks downtown (it has an unparalleled loft that looks out over the Gaslamp Quarter). Its only detraction was the neglect of the subjunctive clause in one of the promotional holiday signs, a problem that can be chalked up to corporate, obviously.



We went ice skating in Horton Plaza as well. I have no shame in saying that I'm a natural. It was a little crowded (though not nearly to the extent that it was a couple of weeks prior, when Angelica and I went to the PLNU Ugly Sweater Ice Skating event and the place was flooded with our hipster peers), but at night under the city lights, it was totally worth it.

Slightly belated second-day-after-Thanksgiving post.

So we woke up Saturday and it was like a post-Thanksgiving miracle—which means it wasn't that great, but it was kind of fun. It hailed midmorning, giving us an almost-white ground for like 20 minutes.



Action shot.



And then it magically cleared up, as it is wont to do around here, and we packed up for a day trip to Oak Glen.



This shot isn't so clear because it came from the Riley's Apple Farm Facebook page, but you can see us in action making apple butter at the apple butter festival. They gave us a free jar for participating. Mmm.



We walked the fun little trail around the property and took self-timed photos.





And the rain/hail clouds made for a delightful sunset.

An only slightly belated Thanksgiving post.

Yay for the last two weeks of school. I start to see moments of freedom because keeping up with all my homework for the past 15 weeks begins to pay off. And blogging is a moderately productive use of time, right?



Sherlock waited for Thanksgiving dinner with as much anticipation as we did. He didn't get to feast as well as us, though.



Shannon took delectable pictures of the food.



Mmm, gravy. I don't think I'd eaten gravy since last Thanksgiving.



Aww, all the women together again. I was in front of my laptop for most of the day, writing my 10-page term paper for my Shakespeare class on the conception of the self in Hamlet and the burgeoning individualistic humanism in the Renaissance. Meh.



Shannon's black-and-white rendering. We laughed long and hard at how small Mom looked in comparison to Dad here. Hehe.



And then Angelica and I took ridiculous pictures of ourselves. Angelica's going to kill me for posting these, but I can't resist (and she's right next to me doing her Spanish homework right now and she's completely oblivious...hehehe. I will say, though, that it's nice to have a companion for weekend coffeeshop outings. I used to do these by myself).

The last of my despised pieces.

In Peet’s Coffee in Orinda. Context

As long as I’m happy. And we quibble with happy and joy until they are meaningless. And did they ever have any meaning? What small percentage of all the people who ever lived had the room and the place and resources and the recourses to devote their selves to the pursuit of happiness? The bulk of human existence has been the pursuit of the hand to the mouth and maybe another day.

And here I am, with my room at home and my room at school and my room at my friend’s place if I want to come over and stay a while. And here I am with my summers in the mountains and my winters at the beach and my spring trips to the East Coast. And here I am with my academic scholarships and jobs if I just want to apply myself a little and a home whenever I need to go back. And here I am with you can do anything if you put your mind to it and aren’t you going to graduate school and go to New York to get an internship because that’s where all the publishing is.

And here I am in a coffee shop with a laptop and a cup of tea really and actually and it’s not something I normally do but it fit in this moment because I didn’t want to go see a movie but I surely did not want to sit in the house on a perfectly nice Saturday afternoon. But I remember in that vital and immediate sort of way my father and I stopping for the first time at the cute little coffee shop in the converted train depot in the middle of our little town and ordering maybe some coffee and a bagel with egg and cheese and sitting on the patio in the wrought-iron chairs in the sunshine because there was always sunshine where we lived in the Southern California suburbs and the flowers and the fountain and wishing I were old enough to legitimately inhabit the scene, thinking and not just thinking but feeling viscerally that I did not belong there, that I was momentarily visiting a world that was not mine, playing at a person that was not me and could not be me as long as I remained thirteen and isolated in my independent studies and uninitiated into the vibrant urbane modernity that wavered somewhere in my consciousness as that thing that I wanted to be.

And I remember revisiting that coffee shop on my own years later on a warm night and grabbing a coffee and sitting on a high stool in the corner and writing something I don’t know maybe a reflection on a book I had read recently and realizing that my adolescent ideal was fascinatingly inaccurate. That all I really wanted was to be out of that town and that coffee shop with its pretenses at engagement, that maybe that place in the midst of thought and art and moving happening existed out there somewhere but it surely was not here. And I laughed at how silly I had been my thirteen-year-old self.

And I laugh now at how silly I had been my eighteen-year-old self. And tomorrow I will surely laugh at how silly I am now my twenty (and three months and twenty-eight days)-year-old self. Because what do I know? What do I really know about anything? How am I supposed to pass judgment on this whole world and evaluate it and rank it and decide what the best way for me to be in it is? How I am supposed to be happy? I’m positively paralyzed with the potential for happiness.

I’m not though. I’m posturing even as I say that. I don’t know exactly what it is that I want and I don’t know exactly where it is that I’m going, but I know I want something and I know I’m going somewhere. And that’s unfortunately vague but it’s true, truer than anything else I could say at this moment. And I all I really have now is an awareness, all I can cling to is this awareness of who I am and I am just me, but I am me.

I talked to my mom on the phone last night and that’s where that phrase came from. “Just as long as you’re happy,” she said. She says it to me more and more and it’s hard to step back from my parents and ask if what they’re telling me is true because it’s so much easier to obey them and accept what they say and do and imply as The Way the World Is and I don’t know what to say except that this is what I am saying. And before I wonder whether the pursuit of happiness is even a worthy pursuit I have to wonder about what happiness truly is.

It’s notoriously hard to define, I know because I’ve read the studies and scientific studies appeal to me because I like concrete, empirical knowledge and even though they contradict each other all the time and even though my illusions of objective observation have been shattered in the past year because post-modern thought somehow seeped into my head—okay, I sought it out actively in my search for a functional worldview, a search that rested strangely on the foundationless presupposition that there was a functional worldview out there that I could grasp, a presupposition that betrayed my own unavoidable subjectivity—I still can’t resist the seductive tug of the scientific method’s assertion of conclusion. And oh gosh, I know that minimizing commute time is the best way to increase happiness, and I know that having hobbies and interests increase happiness, and I know that many life tragedies that most think would devastate them actually don’t modify a person’s resting happiness rate all that much. And I still don’t know what it is. And I have this feeling that no one else does, either.

But assuming this happiness exists, and I do it all the time, assume that it exists, especially in my protestations to my mother that yes, I am happy, I am wildly happy and everything is going well, I just cannot bring myself to blindly agree that “As long as you’re” can end with happy. Just because the drafters of the Declaration of Independence said it doesn’t mean it’s true. Just because anyone said anything doesn’t mean it’s true. Who says?

I don’t know how to determine who’s right, and I don’t know whose authority I rest upon. And I once thought that reason was independent and rationality was obvious to anyone who had a pulse and a brain and then someone told me Descartes was wrong and I believed it. And I still believe it. And then someone told me that we don’t come into the world as tabula rasa, blank slates, that we are born in context and under the authority of a tradition and I knew intuitively it was true and I believed it. And I still believe it. And maybe all I have in my limited context is a slosh of intuition and reasonable reasonability and mostly sure and if it works pragmatism. And maybe it’s a little much for me to ask for more.

I looked out the window next to my granite-topped table and dark-stained wood seat and saw a sparrow perched on the sill in the shade. And mostly sparrows don’t catch my attention but I learned this week in my ecology class that sparrows are not native to California, that snails are not native to the United States, that the grass that grows on the hillsides around here came in the stomach of European livestock just a few hundred years ago. And if sparrows aren’t natural in their blind background ubiquity, what is? The Central Valley that feeds half the world was a swampy dry flood plain fewer than one hundred years ago. We made it, dammed up all the rivers and built a giant aqueduct and between the constant sun and the water-on-demand created an agricultural dream.

And we just make reality whatever we want it to be. Now ice plant grows on the beach and rice grows mid-state and I sit in a concrete building with my plastic and metal and type in a bath of electric and wonder what I was created to do.

And it’s fulfillment, right? The old question that surely someone asked from the beginning, someone who was fed on the backs of others and had the leisure time to sit around and sip delicately prepared hot drinks. There were less of them then but it does not make me any less privileged I think; if Maslow has any credence, fortunate is in some respects absolute. Because we can’t blather about meaning and vocation and purpose until we’re firmly entrenched in the middle-upper-middle.

It’s not that complicated. We can strip life down to the bareness of being and the answer will still be the same. And I know it even as I deny that I know it. Love.

And I know it even as I pretend I don’t that none of it matters, that even the pretensions that I wish I had the abandon to affect are hollow.

And the what then I should do still does not spread itself out in perfect lines and black and whites but the smudgy grey takes a little form.

And maybe the most general map is all I can ask for; maybe if I need a fertile plain, I can make one. Maybe if I want to be that person who legitimately inhabits the world I just have to say it and it is so. If civilization is our action upon the world, then reality is created in that space. And I am an actor.

And we are all actors. I think therefore I am has no longer any hold. I am who I am in relation to the other.

And suddenly everything is a simple syllogism.

I am who I am in relation to the other
therefore
love.