Reason Breeds Insanity

As I suspected, I could easily live in San Francisco. The beauty of the city is its small area, because it literally takes twenty minutes to half an hour to get out of the city to Golden Gate Park where the world is absolutely beautiful. My cousin, Jane, said that San Francisco is more like Greece than anywhere else she has been, and I can say that I must be more Greek than I usually admit. I loved it. What I loved about it was that I could breathe in the sea air and look any direction and see nothing but beauty. The weather was perfect, slow soft sunshine, a nice light breeze off the bay, and the sounds: city mixed with nature. I felt at home and comfortable in a way that I usually don’t. Have you ever been embraced by a city? I have and I miss it. Perhaps the only part that I don’t like at all is that I have such horrible respiratory problems here. Not one day in SF did I wake up congested. Not one day did I sneeze and cough and wheeze until noon. I think it was the level of humidity. So, although I loved San Francisco, and I really could see myself living there, I love it here too.

Beauty is what you make it. Muncie has some beautiful areas and Becky and I are fortunate enough to live in one. By walking from our house across the street, I can see the river. By walking a block down the river, I can cross one of the dams and the water spills over it making one of my favorite sounds. You know that gurgling, rushing, water splashing on rocks sound? If I walk a couple of miles around the river trail and past the sweet smells of QL’s, I turn on Bunch Street and eventually end up by a wetland preserve. I look forward to this summer, when the dogs and I will walk that way every morning before my class. Hopefully, the conservation is far enough along to have blooming flowers and wetland specific animals. Already, by looking carefully at the birds on the river, I have seen a pair of mergansers. However, this morning the female was missing. I hope she is merely nesting and not gone. The male looked so sad floating in the middle of the pond by himself. I have also seen some wood ducks, and this morning I saw a little muskrat swimming out into his house. I couldn’t help but smile.

We went to San Francisco to present at a conference, as I am sure I have written here before, but the amazing thing about our participation is that it didn’t just go well, we ROCKED it! When we started to present, we looked out and noticed that many of the biggest (no pun intended) names in fat studies were in the audience. I must confess that I was a bit nervous, but I didn’t need to be. Apparently, the matriarch of fat studies, Marilyn Wan (Fat?So!)
was so impressed with us that she told out professor that she felt like she could retire! They were also surprised that there is such a strong group of scholars and activists at BSU. I could go on, but I just wanted to say that we were stunned with our reception. Amazing.

My favorite parts of the trip were going to Alcatraz, visiting City Lights Books and hearing the SF poet laureate read, trekking all over SF with Jane, especially visiting Grace Cathedral, and riding the streetcar to Castro with Jim. Thus ends Corby’s Web Tour of San Francisco.

Now that I am home, I enter crunch time for school as I have three major papers to write, adn several small assignments still to do.

Yesterday, I met my friend Myra and her son, Phil, for dinner and a poetry reading at City Lights Books. We had Italian food and some nice sorbetto for dessert. I had Lychee fruit, and Phil had this huge chocolate hazelnut crepe with whipped creme. The pasta was homemade, and mine had a nice vegetable and white wine sauce. When Jim got here, we checked into the hotel and then went around the corner to a sports bar for some beers. We shared a pitcher of a San Francisco IPA, which was pretty tasty, nice and hoppy.
Today we went to Fisherman’s Wharf and went on a “duck tour.” The captain was part of the Swedish military that invaded Normandy, so it was especially interesting to hear him compare the bay to the beach at Normandy. Our amphibious boat thing was actually one that was used in WWII, so that made if even more interesting. We spent the day walking around and riding the old cable-cars that you see in movies.
Since Internet access is $2.95 for fifteen minutes, I’d better go.

I guess I should have worked a little harder over Spring Break, because now I am in my office grading. I will probably be here until about 5 AM. I’m an idiot. It’s official.

Do you remember when you were in elementary school? Every year when school started your teacher would make you write an essay about what you did over the summer. Mine usually said something like I played and read a lot. My friend usually went to Disneyland, to King’s Island, or to relatives’ houses. I always just played and read and swam in the pond in our front yard.

If I had to write an essay about what I did over spring break, it would say:

For my spring break, I felt alive. I felt more alive than I have in months. Everyday I walked three or four miles with my dogs. I walked in the morning just as the temperature was turning toward spring and just as the sun was coming up above the bridge over Martin Luther King Blvd. I saw the mergansers, wood ducks, blue herons, and Canadian geese as the snow thawed into the lake, as the lake spilled into the river, as the basketball stayed suspended by the pressure of the water just west of the dam. I saw some hawks and an accidental cardinal, too. The fog billowed up from the brown churning water as the train passed overhead on the trestle that groaned and squealed with the weight of its load. Everyday I read a little bit: the newspaper, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, The New York Times Book Review, other random books, and the journal of the Pop Culture Association. Everyday I learned more about who I want to be and more about who I don’t want to be. I don’t want to be strapped to this place, this life, this path. I want to move, to breathe, to be carefree and contemplative, not giving a damn whether my ideas pass rank for journals, professors, conferences. I want to just be for the sake of being instead of being for someone else. I don’t want to HAVE to work. I want to be able to be occupied by life instead of being imprisoned by life. I learned that life is about what you make of it, not about what other people of it for you. I feel like I live my life for the sake of others’ expectations and sometimes those expectations are too high. I want to be able to walk around the land and fall in love the idea of being alive, but there is always a deadline. There is always a time when things have to be done. There is always a constraint. I just want to live indefinitely, with no boundaries. For my spring break, I became restless.

Every year, when I was little, I wrote the same essay. Every once in a while I would toss in a variation about playing softball or going to summer school, but my general essay remained the same. I played. I read. I swam. I played some more. I always got an A. Maybe it would have been helpful if someone would have said to me then:

You will never be settled, so don’t settle down. You may be entirely happy, but you will never be settled. When you are in your thirties, you will long to play. You will long to read. You will long to swim. You will be content but never complacent. You will never stop moving in your soul. You will always be restless. Never settle.

“Just as you have the instinctive natural desire to be happy and overcome suffering, so do all sentient beings; just as you have the right to fulfill this innate aspiration, so do all sentient beings. So on what exact grounds do you discriminate?”

“Genuine human friendship is on the basis of human affection, irrespective of your position. Therefore, the more you show concern about the welfare and rights of others, the more you are a genuine friend. The more you remain open and sincere, then ultimately more benefits will come to you. If you forget or do not bother with others, then eventually you will lose your own benefit.”

Some days I lean more toward Buddhist thought. Today is one of them. I lean particularly toward listening to and applying to my life the wisdom of the Dali Lama, because I think he embodies compassion. I put Mother Teresa in this same position of authority in my life—not Godlike authority, in case there are any religious wackos reading this)—mostly because I think we all need models of grace and compassion to strive toward. Earthly models. People we can tangibly touch, easily see, and actually hear talking about their struggles and successes in living out a life for others. I mean the last part of the second quote rings true: when we help others, we help ourselves, and when we don’t, we receive no benefits. It isn’t like we give to others solely to get the benefits; but we give because it is better to give than to receive. This giving is a giving to all sentient beings. Giving to all equally and freely.

On what grounds do I discriminate?