nostalgia...

Busy week at work... took on a project that unexpectedly took more time and energy, and had less help, than I had expected. I think it's finished now... or at least one phase of it is finished... enough that I can bow out of the rest of it I think without seeming to drop it in the middle.

We are supposed to be finishing up the year with our service learning projects. I don't think I can manage the two that I had planned - just one, maybe. I feel tired and the end is in sight and I just want to coast on the wind and slip sweetly into the hangar... but I've promised to create children's books about immigrant children's experiences, and a museum-quality display about the Black Panthers; I need to follow through on at least one of them.

I think the students I'd selected to do the books are not mature enough for the interviews or careful enough for piecing together the finished products, so I won't follow through on that. I'm nervous about holding the older students' attention for the Black Panther piece, but hopefully that will happen of its own accord because the material is really very compelling.

The translator I mentioned in the previous blog entry seems to be becoming a friend and has touched off other things for me... or re-awakened I should say... perhaps due to hearing him quote Persian poetry, I uploaded a new stack of my Iran photos (that's me with the flying lions at left... aka the Gate of All Nations, where all the subject nations' representatives brought their gifts to Darius on New Year's Day...) And definitely due to hearing him quote Chinese poetry, I've been thinking about all my Chinese and Japanese studies, my poetry... I've looked up my favorite poems online, of which I could only remember a few words - found them in their entirety and enjoyed that I can still read them and delight in them. I found my dear old Genji Monogatari online, with multiple modern Japanese translations side-by-side so that you can compare them, no less (you can even check which ones you want, and what commentary, and the page will reload exactly to your specifications - heh). I have thought about my thesis, and marveled that you were actually willing to read it for me, Amy n Nadine! What great friends I had and not sure I barely appreciated it at the time! Only as time passes do I realize how rare and precious those friendships are, and how little I deserved them, young and stupid as I was... I remember our trip to Cape Cod, Nadine, where I did a good chunk of proof-reading; I remember happy things from that trip (when for so long I've only thought about one negative event) - snow on the beach and stars at night, and sitting by the fire marking up my draft... I wonder where my thesis is... my Japanese books are still packed away in boxes and I sprang out of bed this morning fully intending to disinter them, but other things distracted me (such as uploading Iran pix to Flickr). I wrote Sylvia and it amused me to note the difference between this note and my previous epistle to her - it's like the Harvard student in me has been re-awakened and I used words like "epistle"... that oh-so-ironic language, with perfect grammar and elaborate vocabulary... self-mocking and showing off at the same time.

I've been hoping to make an East Coast trip this summer, though it looks relatively unlikely; that was one reason for contacting Sylvia. I have friends and/or relatives in DC, NY, Boston... and I miss the East Coast... I am trying and trying to find Chicago homelike, particularly as it's so much cheaper than back East, but if I could wave a magic wand and transport us to NYC or even Boston - job and housing of course being equal or better - I would do it, I would do it, I would do it in a nanosecond.

So I'm being nostalgic for a former life. I need to shake it off and get on with my day. But it's interesting to remember who I once was, what once engaged me and took all my time... and how I used to be, as I bragged to impress my translating friend, one of the best translators of Heian period Japanese prose in the country (maybe the world). I didn't even think of it like that at the time but it must have been true, thanks in large part to the fact that there are so few of us and that I was trained by the best. What happened to that life? I know what happened to it but... life's twists and turns are so strange, and one throws away or disregards pearls when one is young... I should have just at least finished up my Master's at Columbia... at the time I thought I just couldn't, but... I think back over all the turning points and wonder what would have happened if I'd gone another way... I don't wish that I were an academic, not at all, that life is painfully circumscribed, particularly in the field to which I would have devoted myself... but I wish I had finished my Master's and that I had finished more of the projects I had going at the time, whose fragments are also packed away in boxes that I've not opened since our 2007 move.

Well, maybe when I retire...