Making good time in 2009

I've never had real New Years resolutions that I actually vow to stick to. Usually I do make a resolution or two in the spirit of sharing with friends over a toast at midnight, but this year, I didn't even do that. Instead, I silently vowed to myself in the wee hours of the first morning of 2009 that I would try to be more mindful this year. I want to write more. I want to open myself up more to talking about the things that really matter to me, the things that are on my mind. I want to spend less time distracting myself with things that don't matter at all. (Hello, Wii and Uno FreeFall!) For a moment, I entertained the idea of vowing to post on this blog every day for the whole year, or maybe write in my journal or something. But I'm not one for making promises I know I won't keep. So, instead, I'm just going to try. And I am holding myself to it by announcing that here.

So now I'm sitting in the Duke undergraduate library, typing out this first entry for the year while I kill time down in North Carolina. I'm in NC to visit old friends, people from a life I feel I've left pretty far behind by now, but not so far that it's irrelevant. I spent a good two years here, developing my post-college identity and setting the course that eventually landed me here in law school, engaged and more content and settled, if a bit more boring. Boring has been the theme of this "vacation" home to visit friends and family all over Virginia and NC. Not that it's been boring, but that I wonder if I AM boring. Even writing that, I laugh at myself a little. I don't feel boring, and that's what matters. But hanging around my bro, and other old friends, I remember myself from five years ago, seven years ago, when I would run around all night with them, hoping from diner to basement to liquor store to parking garage, playing video games and doing stupid suburban things. They don't do that stuff anymore, but they have moved on the grown-up version of such pasttimes: parties with friends in the city, clowning in the circus (literally), I don't know. I just feel different. It's not bad, it's just something I don't notice except under certain circumstances.

Anyway, that's one thing running through my mind this break. Another was the whole shadow of living under my parents' roof again. That's the kind of stuff that trips me up from writing on a blog, because it's dark and scary and I'm afraid of making my family life sound terrible. I'm also protective of it, but at the same time feel an urge to write. What I realized, on my drive down to NC, is that I am terrified of sadness. Too much time at home and I start to feel scared and lonely. So I'm ready to go back up to the big city, where T awaits me and I can live MY life rather than worry about my family's. I just wonder, I keep wondering if I am running away from something.

Well, I have to get back to driving around these old streets and trying to make sense of being here. As unhappy as I sometimes feel with living in a big city and having disrupted something good T and I had going on in Richmond, I feel very very grateful to be with him in our tiny little apartment, and I don't really care where it is. Big city, tiny town, boondocks or cookie-cutter suburbs, I am just happy to have the little family I have and be living in something that is mine, that is the present.