a few scattered thoughts

I pull out three folded purple post-its from my purse, filled with scribbled words I thought breathed of poetry at 10 am when my mind strayed from the job aid I was eeking out in scattered keystokes. Unwrapping them now, I search between the lines for inspiration but the thought is gone, energy emptied in three meetings between 1 pm and 3, typing one-line emails to my coworker in a neighboring cube. I'm restless...

My writing lately has accumulated into a pile of creased post-it notes, five lines stashed in the upper left corner of Word documents saved in my "misc." folder. The story I'm working on sits with paragraphs of scene summaries, but the strands of plot seem like stray threads that pull out when I tug at them.

I wonder if other recent grads feel like this: like I'm thirteen again, all angst and acne, trapped in a body I can't quite figure out, filled with warring desires for the past simplicity of childhood and the autonomy of growing up.

a toast to Eliot

I've been thinking about time...mostly about not having enough of it, I suppose. My work day blows away in a midst of papers and key-strokes, sometimes drags in between bleary eyed computer stares and counting the birds perched on the power lines outside my window, but the work piles up the same. I think in cliches: so much work, so little time.

I'm left with the longing for time to just sit, just think, just spend some hours to process all the whirling changes, the tangled knots of life that only get more twisted everytime I shove them back in the "later" box that I'll open when I have more time.

I remembered a "floaty," metaphysical paper I wrote about the relationship of time & Christ's death as portrayed in several of T.S. Eliot's major works--the whole point of it being that in his poetry time is presented as one of the things redeemed by Christ's death, time itself, as well as humankind from it. A few lines from The Four Quartets keep running through my mind:

"If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present. "

and

"But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time is the occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love."

And...this is the part of the post where I'm perhaps supposed to ask poignant questions, draw some conclusions about how this poetry intersects with my life right now...but honestly I don't have any (conclusions), so I'll just throw some Eliot on the screen & some of my own uncollected and somewhat tangled threads of thoughts...

one form, stage, or style to another

Transition:
Webster says it's "passage from one state, stage, subject, or place to another, CHANGE;
a movement, development, or evolution from one form, stage, or style to another,"
and even he feels ambiguous at best to this thing I'm trying to navigate. I remember being warned about the "real world," but any words of wisdom on how to navigate it are lost somewhere in this passage from one state to another, a state that feels tumultuous in a frozen, sluggish sort of way, like a hurricane painted in still life.

I try to get used to this:
daily drive to work, cup of coffee (two, three...) to warm my hands, chilled by the the vent that never fails to blow above my window, whether in the snows of early April or the streaming sunlight of the weeks before. I've got it down--how to write in:

• succinct,
  
• yet detailed,
  
• bullet points;

I've got objectives mapping out the next 8 months; I'm learning to plan out my day, prioritize...the scattered papers across my disorganized desk an objets d'art to something delightfully irregular.

But I haven't mastered the CHANGE, the move from a day filled with words and philosophers to a life of "personal development plans" and people arguing about whether to source cream cheese or peanut butter. Somehow I can't, don't want to, make myself fit there.

The work world never seemed glamourous; I'm not that naive, but I imagined those "free nights" with eagerness born of too many nights huddled over my computer screen, scraping words from a mind more like a wrung-out dishrag than a sponge. But they came then, the words that seem to elude me now, during free nights not filled with last-minute papers, dark-mooned eyes trying to eek out what the heck was so great about Aristotle.

I'm still trying to find movement, evolution from one form to another.