maudlin intro

so right now no one but me is reading this blog, but that might change at some point. part of me feels a need to be witty or entertaining on this page but that's not really where i'm at right now. I moved back from mexico to the US in june, leaving a challenging but ultimately fulfilling job with the chiapas peace house because my nine months were up and i had some sort of idealized notion of fighting for change in my own country. somehow i ended up in DC, city of striving strivers, striving to move up in the world, and now i'm temping, looking for a job that meets my sometimes confused definition of "good work" that will also give me health insurance.

so now instead of the hands on life of community organizing and radical political art and media i had imagined for myself, i answer phones and browse the net all day, only to come home exhausted and watch tv or read.

i know the idea of the quarter life crisis is totally cliched, and whatsmore, all of my friends had theirs last year, but i'm a little behind thanks to my escapist adventure in the global south.

i get a little bit of emotional leeway, however, in that i haven't had the easiest month ever.
at the end of september, my ex boyfriend andrew "guido" lombardi died. It was mostly unexpected, he had had heart surgery last fall and had some close calls, but had been doing a lot better until then. we met when i was twelve and dated when i was sixteen. it wasn't my longest or most intense relationship, but that was a pretty important period of my life, and he played a pretty big role in it. we kept in touch and visited on and off, the occasional run in at a protest or college visit, but i hadn't seen him in almost three years when he came up to visit this summer. we went to a concert and hung out, talked about the future. i'd like to say we had some sort of meaningful heart to heart, but mostly we just told funny stories, reminisced and talked about our hazy futures. he had decided to stay in columbus, he said, because coming so close to dying made him realize he wanted to stay close to his mom. it wasn't a relationship changing visit, although it was nice to be reminded of how much history we have--how similar our personalities still were. we emailed a littleafter that. on the day he died he wrote to tell me that he had seen his doctor and he seemed to be doing better.

i think my crisis has a lot to do with his death, although it certainly isn't the beginning or the end. i guess it's easy to place special significance on a lot of people in our life, when we lose them. we all want to look for patterns, narratives to these totally random events.
looking back i realize he was the oldest friend i was still in touch with. his friendship marked the end of my childhood and the beginning of my adolesence. i'm not still close to anyone i knew before him, and really not that many people i met after. my relationship with him came on the heals of my first real relationship, and starting it meant giving up on the idea that i would spend my life with this idealized first love.
and now here i am saying good bye to him and i see all of these echoes. i'm unsuccessfully trying to become and adult. i may really be with person i spend the rest of my life with.

and it's easy to point at his death as the reason behind my restlessness. at the funeral, several of his friends mentioned that he had talked about me being in chiapas. he was proud of what i was doing-- and angry that he couldn't go down there because of his heart. and you know i come up with all of these truisms, like he lived his life as fully as he could and i don't have a shitty heart so i have this obligation to go out and do these things that he couldn't. hang out in the jungle with revolutionaries or run with the black block. (ok he didn't really want to run with the black block any time recently, but man oh man in the heady new days of the anti-globalization movement he sure did.) but i don't know if that line of thought is meaningful at all. i mean he loved working at the library and spending time with his mom and hanging out and singing kareoke and making art. he created a really rich life for himself in columbus ohio and he enjoyed it. and i'm never going to be able to create that kind of life if i keep running away to other cities or countries or looking for the perfect job or the perfect house or the perfect community. i just have to stop feeling sad and do it.