2011 (Prog)

And so begins the end.

2011 was odd.

Where there are peaks there are valleys. The highest mountains of the Earth glisten in their majestic coats of snow and ice. They are the geographic rulers of the world. But the sun is higher. It melts their confidence from time to time, and they weep in the heat of their ignorance. Their melting tears run down through the canyons at their shoulders, the scars of their own weaknesses and occasional stirring of their glacial thoughts. The waters run into the caves at their feet--the dark, damp corners of their minds.

I've spent some time at the top this year. I've had one foot on the summit, and gazed momentarily at the view of the world below. Those memories are comparatively brief, so it seems. With one last, labored step to the top, I lost my grip and fell down thousands of feet, ricocheting off the rocks and breaking vital parts of myself. I've spent great lengths of time in the dark, damp misery of the crevasses in the shadows of the great peaks looming above. I have so much now to retrieve.

On the bright side, I've gained several friends to whom I have granted my deepest trust, friends that I hope will be with me until I exhaust my last breath. I've also watched dozens of my friends--some lifelong, some brief acquaintances, blink their eyes as I blinked mine. Mine opened again, to catch another glimpse of the world. Theirs did not. Nor will they ever--reminding me of the brevity of our experience in this realm.

I have stood on the tarmac just feet from aircraft roaring by--the planes that I've always read about and dreamed of witnessing in flight. I've also watched as one of those beautiful birds crashed into the stands, reminding me of the razor thin

I have floated through the deepest clouds of powdery snow I could have ever dreamed of in one of the most epic winters on record. I have bounded through forests and soared off of cliffs and pillows of sugar in what seemed to be an endless lucid dream. I've also sat cheerlessly in the dead of winter with nothing but cold, barren rock--no white room to escape to, to shed my troubles and worries if not just for a little while. Nature has reminded me of its power over the meek attempts by humanity to harness and control it.

I have succeeded as part of a dedicated, tight-knit team of people who share my passion in racing. Collectively, we donated hours of sleep, drops of blood and rivers of sweat, and accepted slag burns and damaged GPAs to build a racing legacy. With them, I succeeded in my first attempts in engineering. But I have also failed in engineering academically, to a degree that shocked me considering the effort I exerted. From this I have been reminded of the strenuousness and extreme complexity of the career I still intend to pursue, and the atmospheric level of concentration required to succeed in it.

If I've learned nothing else this year, it's that life, and everything good within, is fragile. I have learned that I must . I have learned that war emergency power may help escape danger, but it damages the machine. All decisions in life have compromise. Between the perigee and the apogee there is a journey through the cosmos. Between the lazy heat of the summer and the dark freeze of winter there are colorful transitions. Between Badwater and McKinley, the shores of the Dead Sea and Everest, there is a middle ground. I've been at the top this year, and I've been at the bottom. I

Engines

A healthy engine fires on all cylinders. It is well-oiled. Contently fueled. It may be coerced by my affection for things mechanical in nature, but I tend to apply the engine metaphor to many different systems and situations.

We all travel this journey that we call life in a body--a vehicle. For the sake of this metaphor, you can be whatever piston-engined vehicle you like. No metaphor is perfectly literal, which would defeat the purpose of metaphorical comparison--so combustion engines only, please. Thus, with turbofans out of the picture, my vehicle of choice is a Chance Vought F4U-4 Corsair. Within your vehicle lies your mind, your heart--combined, your soul. This is your engine. Reverting to literalism here for a moment--this answers the age-old questions (one recently hijacked by the U.S. Army's PR department,) "what drives you?" Your engine drives you, in your vehicle. Your soul drives you, in life.

Now, speaking to the technical and historical critics, the engine in my Corsair should be a Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp, 18 cylinder radial engine. For the sake of colloquy, however, I will set my cylinder count at a smaller number. Now, assume that your engine is well-maintained. That is, by Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, you are driving or flying a safe, fueled vehicle. You are, outside our metaphor, a living, breathing human being with the oft-discounted privilege of homeostasis (give or take some sleep for some of us.) Your engine is capable of running. Now, hereon, forget entirely Maslow's Hierarchy because it is not a sufficient parallel to our metaphor (of note, most principles in psychology are under debate anyway.)

Suppose that each of your cylinders contains a piston which you consider to be a major operating piece of yourself. Not principles like achievement--those are contained within these cylinders, and are activated explosively with the periodic ignition of our spark plugs--instances that may be comparable to job promotions or simple boosts of morale or understanding within our cylinders. The pistons themselves are categories through which we very strongly prefer to reach our goals of belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Examples of mine are (in no particular order,) academic learning, engineering, and travel / environmental exploration.

When all cylinders are firing in a majestic symphony of carbonization--that is when we drive the fastest or fly the highest. Those times when the stars seem to align, when we feel the might and motivation to take on the world one-handed--that is when the firing order is clean and the timing is golden. If a piston isn't too happy with its operation--that is when we need some maintenance in that category. If the chamber in any of them is devoid of a piston entirely--that is when we feel a overshadowing emptiness that lugs the engine and drops our altitude or drags the speedometer down from redline. When you lose oil pressure and your machine sputters and dies, you have time to revive it--or you can bail, but in this beast there are no parachutes. Your engine needs success, encouragement, fulfillment in all categories to keep you in flight.

My engine, for example, is missing at least one piston. Giving it more fuel or air will just upset the ratio. Regardless of what I do, I can't run any smoother without that last cylinder. I am airborne, for sure, but I don't feel fulfilled. The scope of my perspective on life is adequate, but I know the horizons can expand. To do so, you should learn about the things you want to and strive for success in the most important aspects of your life. Love the ones you feel deserve it--if they are the missing piston, find them. Overtake the speed you're running now; exceed your current cruising altitude. This road and atmosphere are limitless.

Current Mood: Distant

Listening To: "Swallowed in the Sea" by Coldplay

Moondew

I walked outside tonight, just to the curb. The moon was full. Fitting, I think, for the opening night of the last Harry Potter movie. There, on the sidewalk, I took a step back. Thirteen inches back, thirteen years. There was a day, I know, in 1998 when I looked at the full moon. It was around that time that I had begun to read the first Harry Potter book. Through the years, I read all of them, and watched all of the movies.

I am not at the premier tonight, trudging through the quagmire of kids who picked up the series once they were old enough. I am here, on this sidewalk. The one where I played four square when book two was published. Where I rollerbladed when book four hit the shelves. Where I sat, in the fading light of a summer afternoon, as I read the last pages of book seven. There are critics who call out this technicality and question that detail in the story. But Harry and I grew up together. We were the same age from the beginning. Those books, unlike any other, conjured the most vivid depictions in my imagination. Like magic.

Most friends, you know, you talk to from time to time. Some of them drift away from you. You don't really notice, at first. But then, at some offhanded remark, or for no reason at all, it occurs to you that you haven't heard from them in ten years. But the conclusion of the Potter series was like the severing of a very good friendship in an instant. I knew how their lives played out. I knew they were gone as I flipped the last page.

The moon is particularly round. I never recall the edge around its circumference being so defined. Like it was drafted with some celestial compass. It seems that every time I look at the moon, something has changed since the last time. Somebody died from cancer. Or in a car accident. Or something else terrible. Even all of the good things you've experienced have a melancholy sort of aura to them, tokens irretrievably fed to the slot machine. Whenever I take time to sit still, time takes me. Everything that ever happened in that particular spot--even the most trivial things--I can remember. I know all of the cars that have parked here by my driveway. My grandfather's Buick, and the Buick he had before that…he's gone now. I can see the old trees growing in the front yard, and then falling and being cut up, and then the new trees growing. Coat after coat of paint on the house. I see everything, remember everything.

If the Harry Potter stories had nothing else going for them, they in the very least held up a mirror for me as I've torn through the years. I watched Harry and his friends grow up, and became much more conscious of my own maturation. I think I learned to savor who I was at the time. Kids, you know, always want to be older--they want to have more freedom. Can't wait 'till they can sit in the front seat, 'till they can use the taller sink, 'till they can drive a car, 'till they can drink legally. Then, of course, we trip and fall off the end of the dock, cursing the haste with which we ran towards the dark, cold water of the real world. In a way, it's good for them to have something to look forward to. But reading Rowling's masterpieces helped me understand that although I couldn't do everything I wanted, I was on the greener side of a field that I would regret running through too quickly, if I did so.

I don't know where I'm going. If you sit down with a topic in mind, with a very clear outline, and a thesis and all of the other elements your high school english teachers required you to use, you would theoretically produce a concise piece of writing. But that isn't always realistic. Veritably, the outlines in your life are often scrambled by some depth charge of reality. Sometimes, writing by free association is a better sampling of how things really work.

Richard Harris passed away after the second movie--he was the first Dumbledore. I loved the Harris Dumbledore. Although he was just a one and a half hour presence on the movie screen in front of me when I watched the first film, I felt comforted by him somehow. The same was the case when I read the books. He had a wise, grandfatherly sort of presence that put me at ease. Dumbledore is dead. Harris is dead. Both of my grandfathers are dead. But there up in the sky, is the moon. It seems to offer the same sort of security that they all did. Maybe it is my best friend, for life. I think it is for all of is--it was there, after all, before we were, and it isn't switching planets anytime soon.

I can see the Sea of Tranquility; a moment ago it was cloaked in fog. Sometimes in life, the understanding of what to do next is temporarily obscured like that. It changes as abruptly as the marine layer does, carried by a low-altitude midnight breeze. There it goes again. It's blinking.

I'll go and see the last movie at some point. Really, the story ended for me with the last page in the book. I'm sure watching 7.2 will reignite some of the things that I felt as I closed the back cover. Regardless, the legend of Harry Potter is one in which I am glad I got to partake. Although I'm not eating an eight pound bucket of popcorn drenched in three quarts of margarine, while watching the movie premiere with several hundred of my closest friends, I feel perfectly satisfied at present with what J.K. Rowling has given me. Now that it's all over, it's just me, here on this sidewalk. Me, and the ghosts of the past thirteen years. And the moon.

Current Mood: Reminiscent

Listening To: "Spirit of '76" by The Alarm

Death Of A Decade

Being twenty years old, it was my intention to celebrate the entrance of 2011 in a more sensational manner than watching the ball drop whilst sipping iced tea with my grandparents. I supposed I would like to exercise my social side and join the throngs bustling through the streets of old Sacramento to watch the fireworks over the Tower Bridge, or join in at a house party (events at which I rarely appear.) As I stood on the drive in the crisp afternoon at 000 Treehouse Lane and watched the sky darken, I felt a change of heart. This New Years, as in several past, I would stay home, accompanied only by my grandparents. This night marks the 65th New Year's Eve my grandparents have spent together, and it brings me great joy to be able to witness this transition with them.

The clouds dimmed from a dull gray to a deeper ashen shade and then to black; a subtle and unspectacular conclusion to another year. Another decade in fact--a decade as chaotic as any prior, as filled with death and birth, misery and tragedy, triumph and overwhelming exultation as the human presence can comprehend. I glanced upward at a 737 in the departure pattern from Sacramento International, nearly identical to one of several hijacked on the morning of September 11, 2001. The earliest event of the decade, it seems, that has failed to escape my memory--not the entrance of the new millenium nor the first day of middle school remain. Just that unusually bright, blue morning.

A decade ago it seems, and so it was. So much has happened--one wonders how time has the capacity to contain all of the happenings of the world. Unnoticeable, such changes are, in the blurred continuum in which we move onward, at varying speeds it seems. Sometimes we sprint, sometimes crawl--yet always keeping pace with the clock, being hindered or accelerated by the laws of our existence. At times like these we take a glance over the shoulder, shocked to see our place of origination and the distance we have traveled. New Year's for me has always been one of these turning points, a station along a railroad through the heartland of my life, and past the events destined to define the past of the future. At such stations I attempt to recall the monuments passed along the way. Much is simply lost to the truck driver's amnesia of life as an unvaried landscape, largely unmemorable however beautiful.

My entire youthhood--middle school, high school, half of college--has somehow dissolved with the acidic nature of time's progression in the past ten years. Looking through my Facebook photos (and even Myspace,) I recall each and every one "as if it were yesterday." As if it were just this afternoon. Behind the camera and in the frame, my memory unfreezes the stills and allows those events to replay like a video montage of my experiences. Fascinating.

New Year's is a celebration of sorts, as a perhaps solemn personal accomplishment of surviving another year. But it is for me more a time of bittersweet reflection--sometimes sweeter, sometimes overpoweringly bitter--for auld lang syne. This year, as in all 18 of my January firsts, I did not receive a New Year's kiss in the traditional sense. But in a sagacious, almost sarcastic sense, I did receive a kiss--the kiss of life, a deep breath with the promise of another decade of the most fulfilling experiences chance may offer. And as much as I strain to forget the pain inflicted upon me by the past ten years, I cannot help but feel satiated by the positive experiences bestowed unto me, like the celebrating of this new year with my grandparents. Perhaps not the most adrenaline-packed New Year's, but symbolic in every way.

Current Mood: Reflective

Listening To: Auld Lang Syne by Robert Burns