sour times

Yes, I know - it's been a while since I last posted anything (in fact, as someone is fond of reminding me, it's been over a month). There's no promised trip recap - there's no promised photos. I swear I'll get to it eventually. First, tho', you get to hear my excuses.

Y'know that new job I started over the summer? It really takes a lot out of you to get up at 6:00 every morning when you're used to getting up around 11:00 a.m. (especially since you crash to bed at 10 p.m., whether you want to or not - or at least, I did). I'd have maybe half an hour of actual time to get anything done in the evenings, once I got home from work and had finished eating dinner and all - and a blog post, I've discovered, takes me about 40 minutes to write up, unless it's really short and mindless (what can I say? I'm a slow worker, I always have been). I have no idea how you people with kids ever get a damn thing done, because lord knows, I didn't have that kind of extra demand on my time, and I still didn't manage to ever do anything. I'm still not entirely unpacked from that last trip we took - and we've been back a month! Because as soon as I finished my last full-time week at work, school started up again.

Ah, school. It's such a love-hate relationship I have with school. I like being a student, and I really love learning new things and getting to do cool stuff like going to anime club, or seeing artwork and thought-provoking films and stuff on campus. I like feeling that I'm not letting my brain atrophy, and that involves more than just reading highfalutin' magazines and doing the daily crossword puzzle. But - I'm not so keen on half the subjects I'm taking right now, I hate feeling like a total idiot when I just can't get it no matter how often stuff is explained to me, I hate being on campus surrounded by all these kids who are either younger, prettier, skinnier or smarter than I am (or some dreadful combination of the above), and most of all, I hate doing homework. It's the end of the weekend now - I have piles of the stuff I should have done. Did I do any of it? Nope, not one bit. Not my reading for my Ethics & Value Theory class (it's Plato, blecch), not the problem sets for Organic Chemistry or Biology (double-blecch), not the post-lab write-up or the pre-lab write-up for the Organic Chem lab (triple-blecch), not the dictation exercises or the flash cards I desperately need for Japanese. None of it. Wow - come morning, I am so screwed. I should be in bed now.

But I haven't even gotten to the heart of why I finally carved out some time to write this post tonight (or why I called it "Sour Times," after the Portishead song of the same title). My two trips in July and August both included some time spent back home in Hampton Roads. The trips themselves were great - really, by and large, loads of fun - but being home again was kind of sucky, because it definitely forced me into the realization that the hometown where I grew up, which I knew and loved, is fading fast. It'll always be my home geographically, but I don't think I could move back to Virginia Beach and settle there anymore. The whole area is so much at the mercy of the developers, who are building these huge, ugly, useless things just because they can (which is why I was so appalled at the recent Supreme Court decision on eminent domain - they just handed whole cities to developers, particularly cities like Virginia Beach where the City Council is totally in the developers' back pocket, and I don't even think they realized they were doing it).

It hurts my heart to be there, and drive around, and say "Oh, there used to be tracts of tall pine trees there," or "This was a perfectly good field before they built that monstrosity," or "They demolished a bunch of mom-and-pop stores to build this soulless shopping center," or "There's a local landmark they're going to knock down to build some more damn condos." They can say all they want about the area needing to "grow" and people demanding all this new sprawl, but I know there are plenty of people who don't want it. We're just not organized properly to fight the greedy bastards. It seems like a hopeless struggle anyway, so people just give up. All I know is, being there makes me feel like crying just as often as it makes me exult in what's great about that place. My hometown isn't just a place anymore - it's a place and time. And that time is just about gone.

I've always understood the old "you can never go home again" saw, but that doesn't make it hurt any less when it's your hometown that's disappearing. So I honestly spent most of August in sort of a mourning period. It wasn't the kind of specific grief you feel when someone you love dies, but it wasn't entirely dissimilar either. It was just sort of a low-level background bummed-out feeling that I couldn't shake. So perhaps you can understand why I didn't feel too much like writing for a while there. It's not really all that easy even posting this truncated, glossed-over version of what I was feeling. And I was just coming back from that when all this hurricane business started up, and really, it's the same thing happening there. Gulfport, Biloxi, but especially New Orleans - they're not just places anymore. They're a place and time. And that time is over. Sure, they can rebuild, and maybe the spirit of the people will be largely the same, eventually, and things will seem to get back to normal. But there is no way to truly recover from this. The New Orleans we knew is gone. I've only been there once, but I feel its loss acutely, because it's one of those places (like Austin, TX) where, if I were from there, I know I'd love it with all my heart and soul. Just like I loved my hometown. And all those people who loved New Orleans, who are coming to the realization that their town as they knew it is gone, and that even if they rebuild it'll never really be the way it was, ever again... I feel it.

I know - I take the news too hard. It was the same way after all the recent big tragic events: the tsunami, the London bombings, the 2004 presidential election. I get depressed, and I know I should just turn it all off, but I can't make myself stick my head in the sand. I almost feel worse when I'm out of touch and don't know what's going on. The big, horrible things, tho', they just give me this feeling like I'm watching the end of humanity starting to unfold - or at the very least, the end of American civilization. I just see no way out of the mistakes the Bush administration has made. It's hopeless - we're doomed. Fleeing to another country won't help, because this is a global crisis. Nobody else has any answers, either, and there are so many other bad governments out there destroying things and making people's lives miserable. There's no escaping human fear and greed. We're all in the same boat, sinking into this mess together. It's like the end of the Roman Empire - there's going to be chaos until someone else steps in to restore order. And who knows how long that'll take? We could have a modern-day Dark Ages on our hands in a decade or two. I wouldn't be too surprised.

Portishead didn't write their song about shit like this, but I can't think of a better term than "Sour Times" to describe right now.

Wow - this post really degenerated into some depressing territory. I'm not like this all the time, seriously! Obviously, I wouldn't be able to function if I dwelled on this stuff too much. But these thoughts are always sort of there in the back of my mind, fluttering like a moth at the edge of my consciousness (thank you for that metaphor, Richard and Wendy Pini), or like an Edward-Gorey-sort of nameless dread. Sometimes things just seem so bleak, y'know? That's especially true when it's way past one's bedtime and she's got an 8:52 bus to catch in the morning.