Since the beginning of the new year, I've made a few promises to myself. Not resolutions, but promises. Goals. All to make me a better person and all that. It is especially important now for me to figure out how to be a real person in the real world now that I am done with my undergraduate career.
My goals:
1. Figure out how to exist outside the ivory tower of academia.
2. Read (shouldn't be too hard)
3. Run a few races. This looks like a half-marathon year.
4. Be good to myself.
5. Be good.
So far #2 is working out great. I've re-read a few books, including Beloved. I still wonder what that "hot thing" that Beloved keeps repeating in her stream-of-consciousness narrative toward the end is. Is it love? Is it the pain? Is it desire?
I've also read this past week: Lose Your Mother, Stone Butch Blues, and Push. It would appear that I am on some quest to make myself cry with my reading list. Beloved certainly wasn't laugh riot of a re-read.
These books led me to think a lot about the concept of "home". What is home? What/who/where makes a home? This is what I think "home" is:
1. A place
2. Imagined
3. Occupies space
4. Self
5. Love
6. People (family and community, which blurr together, since family doesn't have to mean blood)
7. Warmth
8. Acceptance
9. Memory
10. Safe
11. Favorites
12. Experience
13. Relation
14. Rest
15. Where "otherness" doesn't exist.
Am I missing anything?
Currently working on Jhumpa Lahiri's collection Unaccustomed Earth.
