Monday, June 1, 2009

I am not type A. I’m messy, not particularly organized, can’t remember where I set things down a lot of the time, and can’t remember what I say to whom or who said what to me. When I clean my room, it takes days, because the mess is so disorganized. I often shove papers from school in my backpack and forget about them for weeks if not months. In fact, there are probably a fair amount of papers in there right now, and my Greek flashcards, long ago having fallen out of the rubber band, have been strewn around the bottom of one of the backpack pockets for over a year. I am not type A. Not in any way. Usually.

But in few and far between places in my life, I am excruciatingly meticulous. My photo files on my external hard drive are organized into files by camera type then year and then by month, and each event I shoot, whether spontaneous or planned, gets its own file and is dated with month, day, and year along with a brief description. If I take pictures at two different times of the day of two entirely separate things, they each get their own folder. The file names I leave as numbered so they stay in the exact order of when I took them.

This weekend, in cleaning my room, I stumbled upon this little piece of type A that managed to sneak into my DNA when someone let their guard down for just a moment. My book shelf is fastidiously organized, so much so that on the shelf where I put my non-fiction minus religion books (they have to have their own shelf), I organized them so that the literature books (which mostly consist of literary criticism books for the moment) effortlessly transition into the philosophy books, moving smoothly from works on Deconstruction, to Derrida himself, to Postmodernism and straight into The Story of Philosophy. It’s a work of art. But it was in spending over eight hours in putting photos up on my wall that I remembered some of the intense ways I organize periphery pieces of my life. Today, I pulled out the tape measure from the tool set (yes, I own a real tool set), found the level, and took a pencil from the desk drawer and after laying photos over my bed and designing just exactly how I wanted them up on my wall, I began measuring and marking so the pictures would be so perfectly placed that it would never irritate me to look at them. I don’t like crooked pictures. On one of my walls, I drew lines, leveled pictures, and then put up strips of masking tape to make sure the spaces between the 4x6 pictures were perfectly symmetrical. And then I realized if my entire life were like this all the time, I would have shot myself long ago.

And yet, my room is still not entirely clean. A few stray items are still strewn across the extra bed, but I worked on the important stuff. I put up pictures! Because of my necessity to measure things out perfectly, I’m not done with the photos, but I’ve stopped for the night and will pick up again tomorrow. Here’s the new room arrangement. You can see the start of one of my photo set-ups on my bed.


I am still enjoying my new room arrangement, and today I had a friend over. Ellen (the professor), it turned out, ran out of bread without realizing it, so the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches didn’t happen. We rescheduled a time to meet and then rescheduled again and finally decided she would simply come to the dorm, and so today I got to enjoy my new room with company. We chatted a little about my year and both agreed that these next two years here need to be better than this one was, but she graciously reminded me that at least I had one bright spot in the year: my sister’s television debut…on Judge Judy. I groaned and said, “On the gift God handed me as this last year, that was simply the ribbon on the whole package.” I want to believe God will grace me with a much better next two years—that this year was simply the transition year, the year I transitioned from Oregon to Kentucky and the year I transitioned from the first half of my degree to the second half. The middle of the program, I’m told, is often the hardest, and I’m going to hang on those words for now. This year I transitioned to a new state, a new time zone, and a new and very foreign culture. I feel like I moved to a new country and have had much of the culture shock that would be expected in such a situation.

But the year is over and summer has begun and I should be relieved, but I’m left with no car, no job, and no money. I won’t see home this summer and I am grieving the fact that I didn’t get to see my good friend Rachel’s wedding in May, that I won’t get to see my friend Amy’s wedding in a few weeks, that I can’t get a birthday present for my mother come the end of the month, and that I don’t get to be a part of the 4th-6th grade girls camp at the Oregon coast which I photographed for last summer and attended as a child nearly two decades ago. It was pictures from that camp last summer that I put up today, and as I stuck them to my wall, I mourned what feels like a loss in not being able to go back this year like I’d hoped. Moving far away is an interesting adventure into loss. I find it is smaller things I grieve the most. It is silly things like Fred Meyer (a one stop shopping place that I never particularly enjoyed while at home) and Burgerville, a local fast food joint with all local Oregon food and great fish and chips. It is familiar street names, library catalogues you’ve known for years, chapel songs you’ve come to enjoy, and a city that knows both good wine and good beer. And it is not so silly things like the lack of expectation for people to be remarkably friendly on the streets, and the loss of favorite places like Powell’s and the Oregon coast, the place where I see God most clearly. Sometimes I feel as if I miss my heart.

And so I end today thinking about these things, and I will allow myself to think about them, because it is okay to grieve over what we have to leave behind and losses we must face in the midst of change. Summer is the most spectacular time of year in Oregon, and Portland calls like the Greek sirens, neglecting to remind you that at other times of the year, the city is not such a dream (though I love it all the time). I will not, this year, get to spend time in the unairconditioned Stumptown Coffehouse on eighty-five degree evenings sipping on the strangest and most amazing iced tea as a fan blows in the window working in vane to cool the sultry room but at least succeeding in making it bearable. I won’t wander around Laurelhurst Park with Amalija, both of us wondering at the most unbelievable yoga moves we’ve ever seen. We won’t walk down Hawthorne Boulevard or eat fish and chips and bread pudding and have a fabulous locally brewed beer at The Horse Brass.

Instead, I will remember what I’ve had. I will look at the pictures on my wall and be reminded each time of the memories of my last few years. I will think about that Fall day a couple friends of mine and I wandered around the back roads of Newberg taking pictures. I will think often of Portland and secretly (or not so secretly) be proud of where I come from. And I will remember that this summer is yet to come, a blank slate, and it’s time to start etching new memories. It is exhausting to be where you are not established, but it’s a new time, still a new place, and adventure is before me. As I grieve what I no longer have, I will look forward with anticipation to what is yet to come. And I know someday I will not forget that one summer where I had to live on almost nothing, and it was foolishly fantastic.