absolutely obvious things that take forever to learn

Ok, so I have spent fall quarter taking writing courses and indulging my soul, both academic and creative. In both realms the wisdom acquired boils down to the same key point:
DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND DO IT AS BRILLIANTLY AS YOU CAN!!!!
Oh and don't get too bogged down with politics about what's the thing to do to get a certain kind of job or to please a certain kind of audience or to fit into a certain kind of category. Because that's all bullshit and it will slow down this incredible gift of life and opportunity.
With my creative work the message was...if it's good, ultimately it will get picked up by a publisher. With my academic work it was...if it's interesting and relevant someone will value it and you will find a job.
Does it sound like I'm high? I really don't think I am. I think hard work and using your talents to their fullest capacity can and does pay off and ultimately I'm a believer, baby.
If this sounds too American dreamy, I don't care. The best part about the American Dream is owning the damn thing. OWN IT.

Wow, world, wow.

Say I to you world. um. I have had an amazing first two weeks back in Chicago. My mother knocks on wood in my head, superstitiously as I say this and so do I. Why be so superstitious about the good things btw? Is it post-Soviet Jewish fear that everything nice will be taken away from you by Big Brother or some kind of looming omniscient totalitarian force? When a people have been terrorized the scars show even in the minds of their children. Fear is a contagious thing we can learn and learn to live with and breathe with...inhalation and exhalation laced with it. If there is no trace, you must be doing something wrong, indulging too much, they're about to take it away from you...knock on wood!

Ha. Happiness like a tap, tap, tap. I just discovered it inside of me, this ability to be happy. Is that weird? Yes. Better late than never? Absolutely.

Not that I've never been happy...of course I have, oh so many glorious times that I have poeticized about. But that was just the problem, there was languish and pain and emptiness between those spaces of goodness and it was as if I did not know how to sustain it. I do now, somehow.

Maybe all the pushing and pulling of myself like taffy across the crevices of the universe have finally paid off. I like to think so. I like to think that my open mouth finally found itself.
:) The lips closed and smiling, like the dog who finally stopped chasing her own tail.

Salut from the Regenstein

I'm happy in the library. Does that sound like an unlikely sentence? I don't really care. I am. 

Not only in the library, but in my apartment (which incidentally has many practical issues that I have neglected, it is time to call my lovely Croatian maintenance mafia again,) in Hyde Park, Chicago, the University of Chicago, here, today, now hello. Happy. 

I'm working on a midterm paper, the topic is Ebonics. Language, identity, nationalism, culture, self issues - questions that interest me. 

Reading over my last entry, it was soaked with Michael Silversteinian linguistic anthropology language(I mentioned deixis which is a linguistic term for locatability in time and space)...whew, last quarter was tough but I have come out smarter. Now I have to keep getting smarter, sharper, full of the intellectual tools that will allow me to probe the questions that stir souls. That may sound corny, but like the Mexican spoken word artist I saw tonight, I don't care. It's like Hogwarts but much more intense. Magical, powerful forces, spells, modern witchcraft that self-reflects. I used to secretly dream of knowing every language, of knowing everything really, of stirring the world with insight, it's like this super nerdy idea of paradise where knowledge penetrates, validates, harmonizes and connects everything. My paradise is knowing and learning. Understanding.

Omniscience is not possible, if it were, if there were some knowable limit, then it would all be so much less exciting. It's limitless, and that's fun. There is no end, there is an end to a human life but there is no end to the learnable, the knowable. There is an endless drive that connects us. Maybe this was part of that connection, that transnational, all-encompassing pantheism-like feeling, that I've had at times, the way I imagined it, my sense of spirituality.

Yep, I'm in a super corny, humanity-loving mood, and it's all good. Be a Jesus, an Anne Frank, be nice people, it does go around.