Long Time No Blog

Back from a long, refreshing absence. Can you hear it? I am sounding Bananarchist's death knell. Actually, Bananarchist died a long time ago, when my banana and anarchist ambitions went abruptly south. Actually, it's just late, I'm lying, I'm tired, and I wanted to write something. I am now in law school. It is impossible to be a bananarchist and a law student at the same time, since law seems to encourage blind adherence to procedure and tradition, on the assumption that procedure and tradition is something arrived at, if not democratically, then at least through the unimpeachable virtues of civic republicanism. It's hard to be an anarchist when you're signing up to be complicit with the system. And who said anything about being an anarchist in the first place? What the fuck am I talking about.

Today (29th?) is also my 2,500th birthday. I'm sad because I was not able to produce a novel before this birthday, hence earning me the privilege of being the Jonathan Safran Foer of my generation, only better, and only nothing about the Holocaust. I told some friends this weekend that this birthday officially seals my failure to become a prodigy, or a virtuoso, or a wunderkind, or even just a plain old phenom. All amazing, gravity-defying feats performed from here on in fall squarely within the unimpressive ambit of mere adult competence. The delusions of grandeur which used to cloak my kakorraphiaphobia has, with time, become a moth-eaten granny shawl through which my self-doubt is clearly, embarassingly, evident. *Sigh*.

Which is another way of saying that I'm full of shit. There's plenty of things to write about here but I'm chosing to forgo the dissemination of information for the high dive into self. Sorry!

Here are things that I don't have the wherewithal to articulate:

0) I met a young man named Roger in the dog run. We had an altercation because his unneutered pitbull was barking at my neutered border collie (note metonymic class tensions) but then an amazing, hour-long conversation afterward about our fight and our assumptions and how society usually keeps people like us from talking with one another as co-equals--him a young urban black man from Harlem who had a pitbull with balls, me a young suburban Chinese woman transplanted to Harlem with a dog surgically cut in accordance to middle-class dog maintenance standards. It was illuminating until he asked for my phone number and then called me fifteen times in the next four days asking me to go to the movies with him, asking me to identify songs from the radio he would play into the phone mouthpiece, asking me what was up with me for not getting back to his calls, asking me what was wrong, etc. Regardless, a conversation that only happens in movies directed by racially-sensitive white Hollywooders actually happened between Roger and Me. I mean, me.

1) I went on a meditation retreat. People of color only, a.k.a., 200 black women with dreads and 1 non-black woman with no dreads. I mysteriously got hives every night so all my self-centering and focus and lovingkindness and mindfulness went to shit every night at midnight when I would break out into strawberry cheesecake hives. I did yoga three hours a day and ran two hours and then occasionally sat in on meditation sessions. I walked so slowly it took a half hour to move fifteen feet. I fell asleep while meditation about a hundred times. I ate incredibly slowly, and drank peppermint tea like it was my only connection to the world. I tried not to speak, read, write, communicate, or think about sex but actually I text-messaged and called Laura every night to whine about my hives and even once amour de soi'd semi-silently one night when I was particularly sleepless. It was wonderful.

2) I got married. It was an elemental wedding. There was the sun, water, fire, and earth. I just thought of that, I swear. The 100 guests produced only 3 bags of garbage in four days; the rest of the refuge was composted, along with the refugees from the compost toilet, in the woods and will be used to fertilize two non-self-pollinating fruit trees that Laura's older sister has given us as our wedding gift. We're thinking plums? Cherries? My dad came and made me cry. My borrowed car broke down on the way to pick him up and we ended up sitting in an autoshop for an hour fretting about the smell of the transmission fluid. My older cousin Peter came and told a computer science riddle about perfectly rational executioners and stumped the crowd. We all jumped in the Huntington River with our clothes on and it was so clear you could see to the bottom and you could see everyone's clothes perfectly clear but refracted a bit. We had ten different cakes made by our helper bees the day before. We ate vegetarian patties until we became vegetarian patties. A big posse of people got lost on the hike home from the ceremony and ended up on Main Road, Huntington, wondering where the hell everyone was. We had a big campfire that Clay almost fell into during an impromptu "naked goat dance," whatever the hell that is, apparently something that required me taking my shirt off and Jessica H. getting totally naked and Clay pretty much rolling into the campfire but for a couple of hands that pulled him away quickly. We swum at Tadpole Rock every night, late at night, with nothing but a crescent moon and occasional headlights from the road lighting up the water. We bought local and produced food from the land (sumac lemonade, honey wine, blackberry pies, corn on the cob, some wild mushroom expeditions), camped out in a rainstorm, and lay on the ashes of the fire playing indie rock songs on our guitars until Laura pointed out that it was just me and her, singing Neutral Milk Hotel by ourselves, 4 a.m. on our wedding night. It was so beautiful it made me want to hold the world in my mouth.

Then,
3) I started law school. What's all the hype for? It's not as bad as "they" said "it" would be. I like almost everyone I meet. I only regret that I haven't met everyone I will like. The work? Not so terribly overwhelming, yet. The only problem is that my shoulder has rounded into a boule and my back is bent into a peak. I'm becoming conical, with my apex falling somewhere between my fifth or sixth vertabrae. I'm thinking of becoming a corporate lawyer only to pay the chiropractic bills that await me in my middle age. My classmates and I send 70 emails per class to one another in an attempt to mitigate the agony that is Contracts. I managed to sneak a photo of a boytaur into one of the emails today.

I say all this because I have become so cloistered in my day-to-day -- I'm in the same goddamn spot in the same library in the same buildling all day long -- and so enmeshed in studying that I haven't had time to document in the way that I usually like to do. Now it's late, I'm tired, I'm verbose, and I'm 25. Wow!