I’m taking refuge while the boys downstairs consume football.
Most of us are from Massachusetts, but we also have a resident Coloradan, and THERE’S TENSION. Apparently.
We got absolutely dumped on today. Just loads and loads of snow. Good romping, hot chocolating, sledding, danger sledding.
Since I last wrote to you some two months ago, my days have honestly been just as serene and hopeful and—my gosh who are we kidding the Future is closer than ever, and with it the end of This, the ever-steady predictability of my life. Send help and time.
No, actually, I really am feeling quite prepped and excited for all the not-college ahead. I’ll be sad to leave this place (aghast! despondent! even), but I couldn’t imagine doing another year. Any month now, I should receive some piece of paper that says I’ve read Rousseau. That is, so long as I don’t fail my courses: “German Enlightenment,” “Drugs,” or “Time: a history,” (yes yes, and yes—this semester I get to say, “I’m taking drugs…the sociology course with the fairly unnotable Benjamin Haber,” or “Sorry! Can’t go to your post-feminist, devised theater bra burning—I’ve got to do my drugs work,” and so on and so forth, the jokes write themselves).
Where was I? Oh—postgrad and mortality. Yeah it’ll be great, I think! I now have separate resumes for reporting, teaching, raft guiding, and speciality marketing vehicle driving.
Barring the small but nevertheless tantalizing possibility that Oscar Mayer hires me to pilot their glorious, 27-foot Wienermobile around the more elegant cities of America (in which case I would drop everything and run, wiener-first, to man the Hotdog Highways), here is a dream: I graduate Wesleyan University and return home to Deerfield, where my family takes everything out of the house (all 27 chairs, three ornamental grandfather clocks, and 1,524 boxes in the basement, left, un-unpacked, from our last move ten years ago). All of this moving aided, perhaps, by everyone I know, whom I will invite over for a weeklong party and supplicate with promises of local beers and/or up to 15 chairs. AND THEN, for the second time in two years, I Drive West, this time to Idaho, where I spend the summer months working as a whitewater rafting guide, before I eventually end up in San Francisco, where I have scored either a reporting gig or work in food recovery (it’s dawned on me that this is actually my true calling…I am never more energized than when I’m saving and redistributing food.)
I have a few interviews next week—a dream feels accessible.
Check this out! Inspired by The New York Times’ collection of their readers’ real-life best breakup lines, the Argus is turning to our own readers, friends, and lovers for a fresh collection of the funny and the kind, the heartbreaking and the haunting, the sincere and the unexpected. For our Valentine’s Day print edition, we’re looking to publish a collection of these lines—texted or spoken, delivered or received. Submit yours here. Deadline Feb. 12.
Winter break was lovely and full of good Family Time and reading and cross-country skiing. I was in the city for five days, partly to see Phish live at MSG in NYC on NYE. (My dad’s friend’s law firm got us free tickets in this luxury box (because we are, as you well know, potential clients with a need for tariff law consultation). And in the box, this septuagenarian lawyer (very enthusiastic about life and specifically me, apparently) flails around. “We got decent seats. And I mean decent,” she says. “So, who’d you sleep with for these tickets?” “Who’d you sleep with for these tickets?” I respond. “My husband” she says). But mostly, I was in the city to see people and also to ask the New York question: to go or not to go—to bash one’s head against the subway or ride it. I want to believe in New York. I really do. But I know I can’t live there. Not quite yet at least.
But being home really was a dream. The last time! Agh! Great to have long, slow time with parents and Luca by the fire. Great to cook in that kitchen. Great to be alone for a couple nights. I went ecstatic dancing in Northampton, I sold some of our chairs, I volunteered at soup kitchens. I watched (kind of an embarrassing amount of) this amazing-so-good-really-it’s-fabulous reality TV show “Below Deck,” that follows the life and times (and troubles! you betcha there are troubles. Troubles galore, these folks. Don’t know how they ever got hired) of employees on a chartered superyacht. I also read lots of great books and applied to so many jobs and successfully pitched one magazine article on the US National Toboggan Championships, so it wasn’t all bon bons and fruit cakes, mind you.
I’ve written little of plot and less of substance, so here is something tangible: My hair is short again, which takes some five years off my appearance. This has been weird, because no 22-year-old is trying to look younger. “Has anyone ever told you,” someone approaches me at a party last night, “that you’re a little baby boy?”
I spend most the morning wondering what she meant.
Okay I must be off. To no one’s surprise, I have signed up to become a nude art model—tomorrow morning is my first session with Drawing 1, and I’ve still got to pick out my first day of work outfit. Updates to come.
I’M ALIVE!
Thomas