Spring on Monument Avenue

Snippets

A man and two women sitting outside at Betty's. Drinking wine. Smoking. Laughing. Engaged in a light and leisurely conversation. They seem to be enjoying themselves. The man gets up and leaves, soon to come back carrying a white cardboard box, our of which chocolate cake comes out. They start eating the cake, continuing the conversation and as i watch them, i can't help thinking how cool it is to have someone to bring you chocolate cake, while you're hanging out on a Saturday afternoon thinking that life could not get any better.

***
Once i woke up in the studio apartment of a guy i used to spend considerable amount of time with, to find out that he wasn't in bed. This rarely happens, since i'm usually the one who's always first to wake. He was in the shower, the door between the room and the hallway shut. He had closed it intentionally for the noise not to wake me up. i found this little detail very touching and endearing. Later the same morning i made french toast and scrambled eggs for him, and left his place with a smile on my face.

***
I have a whimsical, almost wistful desire to have someone bring me breakfast as i'm waking up. Or make breakfast for someone other than myself, even all that it involves is making coffee and pouring milk into a bowl of cereal. But i almost always end up with men who generally do not eat breakfast. Bummer.

I have so far learned to tell the difference between a regular and diet drink. But to learn to tell apart Coke from Pepsi is yet another skill to be mastered...

On accomplishments

I used to wonder whether accomplishment is about the actual achievement of some kind of end-result or the feeling that arises when you know you’ve done something productive, positive, no matter how small. I used to further wonder whether this end-result had to be something tangible, valuable or material or was abstract and just as relative as anything else.

I don’t really like the word accomplishment – it’s too finite for me, too definitive, too focused on this end-result, whereas I do things for the sake of the process and would rather not think of its outcome.

I’ve never had a clear view of what I’d like to do with myself, things I’d like to have, or have accomplished. True, since I was little I liked to speculate about what I could be or do, more considering those options with wishy-washy wistfulness than any kind of seriousness of intent. With the exception of becoming a doctor - I was pretty determined on that one for a while until my mother talked me out of and for which I’m forever grateful to her. Since then I've dreamed about becoming a biologist, psycologist, a writer, but I could have just as well been dreaming about being an airline hostess, train conductor or astronomer.

If you asked me some five-seven years ago where I thought I would be at this point of my life, I would hardly have a clue, and Richmond would certainly not be one of the places I would start guessing.

The problem with me has never been about being or not being able to do things that I want to do – the problem has always been in not wanting to do anything at all, and being depressed, bitter and disillusioned to even get motivated enough to do something. And if that was not the case, it was insufficient amount of faith in myself that wouldn’t let me as much as even try. And besides most of my late teen and early adult life was spent worrying and taking care of things of more basic and imminent nature, like supporting myself, helping my mother, making sure that at least she didn’t have to worry about me. Granted considerable part of that time was spent feeling completely hopeless and apathetic and helpless to try and change anything. Another part was spent in an unsuccessful and failed relationship that was a complete desaster, unless you consider choosing no relationship over a bad one as accomplishment in itself.

Today when I think about accomplishments, I can hardly name a few that appear important, significant. The fact that I was good in school and good at the very few things that I actually did end up trying hardly accounts for anything. Yes, I did manage to miraculously graduate from school with straight As, despite my less than exemplary attendance, my active attempts to drop out at the beginning of each semester, and simply not going to class the whole senior year. And yes, I’ve always been successful in finding jobs that I more or less liked and was appreciated enough to feel “accomplished” about them (one of my bosses actually called me the best legal assistant he had had, since the existence of the firm – how awesome is that?). I’ve been described as “talented, promising, bright” - but when it comes to accomplishments, I really don't have much to brag about. I have not written a book, made a movie, become famous. I haven’t built homes or opened a business. I don’t have exciting experiences of exotic countries and foreign cultures other than what I’ve found here and the ones that were sort of “given” to me by birth. I really haven’t done anything much at all, except for moving from States back home and back to the States again every two-three years or so ever since I was fifteen.

And yet, when I think about what matters to me, and what I feel “accomplished” about, a few things come to mind. Being able to pull myself out of my previous hopeless and helpless state was an accomplishment. Overcoming depression, bitterness and apathy was another one. Saying no to a relationship that was bad and harmful for me and realizing why exactly it was bad and what about it was so harmful for me was an accomplishment. Staying alive and not breaking down after a strenuous, emotionally demanding breakup was an accomplishment. Choosing my sanity over chaos was accomplishment. Giving up my illusions, delusions, utopias and dystopias and learning to live and cope with the reality as it is was certainly an accomplishment. Overcoming an eating disorder was one of the greatest thing I have ever done, knowing that I did it on my own makes it even better. Being able to overcome part of my fears and starting to make weak, but at least some kind of attempts to do things that I want to do is an accomplishment. Learning to appreciate life as it is and being happy with the mere thought of being alive is an accomplishment. Having been in a new relationship for almost a whole year without going crazy about any of my past relationship issues is definitely an accomplishment. Learning to dream again is probably the greatest one of them all.

I may have not accomplished much, but I’m still young enough to afford to think that the greatest part of my life is still ahead of me. I may or may not write a book, make a movie, save the world or millions of dollars. But at least I have overcome one of my greatest fears – the fear of living – and that, definitely is an accomplishment.

Where does a Human Rights and Social Movements major find work without prior experience?

Mental checklists

of things that i absolutely have to do
(even though i keep ignoring and postponing them as long as i possibly can, trying to pretend that one can be an adult and be just as fine without...)

• Get a divorce (seriously!!!)
• Learn to drive and get a license (and dont even ask me to elaborate on this one...)
• Get a credit card (sounds easier than it actually is)
• Get a degree!!!

and things that i'd like to do at one point or another, with no particular order

• Make a bead curtain
• Take a photography class just for the sake of it
• Write a research paper on causes and origins of poverty
• See the fat bastard one more time
  
• Make a documentary about Armenia
• Teach my own class at Yerevan State University of Linguistics the way i wish the classes were taught to me
• Write a book - "Perfect Vacuum" that currently lingers as an unfinished blog project. Maybe even turn it into an artsy, surreal, david lynch like film that nobody would watch.
  
• Speaking of David Lynch - i'd like to meet him and try to talk him into visiting the lovely town of Kapan, that is in the South of Armenia- a town that would be dead was it not for an old Soviet mine that is currently run by the British (?) - is it still them, digging out there? A place with really desperate people and freaky things happening that everybody knows but no one talks about-Twin Peaks without the excitement. To imagine what great source of inspiration this would be for David Lynch to make a whole new miniseries that would be so much better than the Twin Peaks...
• Make an apple pie and learn to say "pie" in a deep Southern accent that i find so cute and am still unable to master.
• Get a job in Planning Commission of the City of Richmond, the likelihood of this being very slim - that is if i decide to settle down here after i'm tired of my yet unstarted career of foreign aid work and am ready to trade it for community development, which is another way of naming miscellaneous projects that do not fit neither under urban planning nor under social work, but sound nice and cute enough to be considered.
  
• Have a kid, and if it happens to be a girl, name her Inessa, after my Bosnian roommate who i lived with back in Charlottesville
  
• Get another degree, in counceling, and work with people with eating disorders.
• When i'm old, and i mean really old, become an armchair astronomer and try to figure out the secrets of the universe...
  

Recently I was asked if I ever wanted to go back home to Armenia. Or rather, the question was put before me this way: “You don’t want to go back to your country, do you?” The question itself struck me as ridiculous, if not insulting, and despite the fact that lately I have been wondering whether I actually will be going back home anytime soon and knowing that I’m in a much healthier place now, that I’m away from everything that used to frustrate and aggravate me about my own country, my immediate respond to the question was “Why? Of course I want to go back. I love it there…” In respond to which I got a look of disbelief and something resembling pity – the way you look at slightly disturbed people, like they don’t know any better…

It makes me slightly uncomfortable to think that I might be looked upon as a refugee, who was lucky enough to escape a post-communist, underdeveloped third world country and has found shelter in this land of freedom, wealth and prosperity. As much as I know that this is not the case, I am aware that very often that’s exactly how I am perceived. As much as I try to persuade them (as well as myself) otherwise, I am not sure if I will be able to list at least one rational and legitimate reason for my being here, other than this "wealth, freedom and prosperity". I’m here after all, aren’t i? This time neither as a student, nor an “alien relative”, my permanent residency status obtained in series of rather unfortunate than lucky events. In a way I feel like I’m being hypocritical. I could have chosen not to come back at all, or if I had to, follow all the steps to obtain a student vise before I was granted a residency status. Yet I made the choice, and even if I know that it wasn’t the promise of a “better life” that brought me here, I don’t think I will be able to explain to myself, let alone anybody else, why I chose to come back. Does personal paranoia of being trapped and landlocked in one place for too long stand as a valid reason? Do past unresolved issues and memories appear legitimate? Does it appear plausible that one day I would probably be just as happy to leave the States, once again, for some other, completely unfamiliar and unexplored place? This pretty much ends all my arguments… So where do I go now?

The truth is, I’m split between the two countries. And it goes beyond liking them both, for one reason or another. Or disliking them, for that matter. They say when you spend considerable amount of time away from your own country, you will no longer be able to go back and feel at home in your own home. You change somewhere between exploring a new, different culture and reconsidering your own. It's inevitable, especially when the process starts when you're relatively young and flexible (I was fifteen, when I first got here). At the same time, as easy as it was for me to adapt to this new country (and I do not think that it’s possible to get more assimilated than I am right now, unless I was born here), I will never be able to feel fully at home here either, knowing that as open as I am, I will always be foreign, to one degree or another.

Being split between two completely different cultures, this partial assimilation to the new, acquired culture and dissimilation from your own gives you a unique, dual vision of both worlds, and a somewhat split and at times surreal sense of reality. It is both fascinating and overwhelming at the same time. It takes away the ability to take any social, cultural or political phenomenon for granted, or as some kind of an absolute. It makes you constantly question, compare reconsider, and makes you a bigger skeptic than you'd actually want to be. They say that’s how you grow beyond cultural borders and broaden your outlook, but perhaps that’s just being spread thin and scattered, with a feeling of being constantly uprooted…

It’s true that a part of me is glad to be away from Yerevan. As much as I love it, I know that it’s better that I’m away right now. It’s not starvation, oppression and economic hardship that I’m trying to escape, but whatever the reason is, I should consider myself fortunate, if for nothing else, at least for having a choice to be here on my own volition. Something that many others don’t and will not have. But at the same time, I have this nagging feeling that by being away from home, I am missing something important and valuable and losing the grip of the reality there. As if soon enough I won’t be able to claim it as my own ( and more on this later…)
It actually disturbs me more than being considered a first generation refugee-immigrant who was lucky enough to escape whatever it was she was trying to escape.

Twelve Random Musings

that i'm too lazy to turn into full blogs, but i've never been good at blogging anyway, so what the hell...

• i drink coke when i'm bored - and by coke i mean every carbonated soft drink that's out there. I do not drink it very often, the reason i mention this is cause i'm drinking coke (Mountain Dew) right now, which means i'm bored out of my mind - it's Friday, and i really do not want to do any more work.
  

• Morning is my most favorite part of the day. I like the promise and possibilities it holds, even if the day ends up being as undistinguished and uneventful as any other ordinary day. Still, i find the promise of early morning almost intoxicating, when even the most unlikely event still has a probability of happening.

• Breakfast is my most favorite and perhaps important meal of the day, and i always wake up looking forward to it. Even if it ends up being orange juice and a plain bagel. It hasn't been that long since i started appreciating the joy of something as simple as breakfast, having spent the most part of my “adult” life in self-induced semi-starvation and neglecting such basic needs as food.

• In no particular order: I like apples, peanut butter (and peanuts), bran muffins, cinnamon, crepes, dark chocolate (very dark chocolate, like 85% dark chocolate) and coffee - good coffee, only good coffee, and always freash, preferably brewed and not filtered, the coffee that i make, although occasionally I’ll opt out for starbucks, which leads to…

• I’m a starbucks junky – not because I’m all that crazy about their different kinds of coffees with names that are a foreign language – it's more about the feeling of gratification and self-pampering that every one of their cardboard togo cups holds. i also like the idea of coffee shop culture - long afternoons spent outside some coffee shop (most likely the nearest starbucks) with a good book or a notebook, random encounters and bonding over a cup of coffee between complete strangers... I like the sense of familiarity of seeing the people who frequent that one particular store that i go to and the realization that i'm one of the regulars, especially when i get a free refill or a whole muffin for that matter. This leads to...

• Coffee shops are one of the best places to watch people. People watching is one of the most amusing activities - the better you get at it, the better the stories that you make up to match every face you see, the better the chances in predicting their behavior at any random social situation. I draw comfort from the fact that as random and bizarree human character is, there are certain patterns that can be foreseen, certain behavioural codes, unwritten rules that you intuitively know - and how much in common we all have. Bars are another good place to people watch, although a completely different world with its own, completely different rules - it's amazing to realize that i've learned more about life and people during a year of barhopping when i was in Yerevan, than in the previous five years taken together.
  

• I love cities – or rather the idea of a city, any city. More specifically, downtown. Something about tall buildings and streams of roaring traffic and crowd that makes me feel small, anonymous, almost invisible. I love the feeling of being small next to something so vast and big, I like feeling the weight of those building on my shoulders, i feel safe and hidden in the crowd. i like the noise, smells, sounds - the pace of the city. i wish i worked downtown, since at present moment I ‘m fascinated with downtown Richmond. Funny thing is, although people keep telling me that i will really like Boston, i never had a desire to see it. And still dont. But I'll be moving there in a few months, so we'll see... Cities I’d like to check out in the near and maybe not so near future while I’m in the States - Baltimore, Philadelphia, Charleston, Nawlins at some point, and maybe San Francisco. At some point SF was the top of my list, but lately I'm more drawn to working class, crime-ridden, decaying neighborhoods, which leads to…

• I have a strange and dark fascination with urban decay – as much as i'd like to elaborate on this one, i can't quite explain what it is about things old and rustic that i find attractive, genuine and real...

• Sometimes during my evening walks (and I walk all over the place), when the lights in the windows start coming out, I like looking at the houses and trying picture the people who live there, wondering what their life, or a random moment of their day is like – what they do when they wake up in the morning, how they spend their evenings after they've finished dinner and settled quietly for the night – musings that give me an almost whistful, nostalgic longing, although I know that I’m longing for something I have never had…

• I also like to picture myself in most random and improbable situations and places, trying to imagine different lives that i could have had - trying them on like one would try an outfit... knowing that this one life that i have is way too short for me to experience everything that i wish i could...
  

• Other places that I’d like to see and maybe live in at some point of my life or another: Istanbul (I can’t believe I didn’t go there when I was so close and had a chance); Beirut (for me the symbol of Orient); Tehran, Prague, Budapest and maybe Samarqand… or take that random holiday to Spain and while i'm at it, stop at Lisbon and Morocco on my way...

• I’m still trying to decipher the true and full meaning of decadence…

Last night, for the first time in a while, I was falling asleep without any unresolved and disturbing issues pressing on my mind, and as tired as I was, I felt peaceful, happy, somewhat accomplished... I am not sure whether it was the nice weather, the run we went for earlier, great dinner of steak and roasted potatoes, or the overall quiet and relaxing evening, but I felt happy and grateful and was soon fast asleep, as I thought about the coming day and realized that I’m actually looking forward to it.

It's all about possibilities...
I'm a sucker for possibilities. I have left countries, marriage, changed places, turned my life upside down in the name of these possibilities. Without them life turns pale, mundane, it's safe, secure, perhaps even comforting in some ways, but it's limited, predictable...

I always said that any given choice that's limited in its options is not a choice at all, but rather a forced decision. I need to know that at any given situation there will always be more than a limited number of choices. I need a life of possibilities that go beyond a career, income, security. Possibilities that allow me to be at any place at any given time, even if my decisions are driven by whims and do not necessarily follow logic. Even if after making any given choice, however random and whimsical, i'll be eliminating all the rest of the options, at least i will know that my i was making a free choice, instead of being forced to choose between black or white.

I'm restless again. Impatient. Part of me wants time to pass quickly, since i cannot wait to find out what's going to happen next. And yet another part of me is stalling, wishing that i had more time, a little more time, although i know that even if i had all the time in the world, it wouldn't be enough. It would never be enough...

And i'm running again. Running in hope to find answers, to chase away frustration and uncertainties, running for distraction, when it becomes too unbearable to sit still for another minute, to think for another minute. when it becomes impossible to wait, and wait and wait, losing count in hours, days... to suddenly realize in panic that another month is over... and wishing i had more time...

Once i was told that as long as I knew whether i was running away from or towards to, i would be fine. And once again, i have no clue, and i have too little time to try and figure that one out. so i run, and run in hopes to tire myself out, because at least then i can give myself some rest - something that i'm starting to lose - I'm becoming restless...

ambivalence