(In memory of Dr. C)
I know what you’re thinking. “Oh, it’s Nina, delivering another double-shot of pungent revelations about the flavorful ambiguities of our role in the universe” (yes, I was drinking coffee when I wrote this). Well, I hate to disappoint you, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about what the function of my parting words should be, and it seems to me that there are too many speeches made asking us to “be that, do this,” the verdict being that, as a second semester senior, I don’t plan on doing anything in the next few weeks, so you shouldn’t have to either. In fact you may take comfort in my resolve to keep the metaphors to a minimum, and my meaning simple. I won’t be referencing my zany ethnicity, quoting a Russian romance novel, or imploring you to customize your lives to my order for a better world. Instead, I would like to tell you about a battle that has continually characterized my home life: my campaign against the mess in my room.
Ah yes. The arduous ritual of cleaning. Do not underestimate the challenges one encounters after accepting such a dangerous mission. My room is not exactly a spectacle of order and sanity. While I am off pursuing my career as an adolescent, battling integrals and French verb tenses, my dirty socks are staging a coup de living quarters, overthrowing the established order and propagating general chaos. So, when asked to please put away the paperwork populating my desk, I do what every high school student does when faced with an assignment she doesn’t want to complete: I question the validity of the task, as well as the other party’s right to impose it on me. Unfortunately, there are those few times when the confrontation is inevitable, and I must accept my duty as a citizen of the household. So I enlist the vacuum cleaner and get to work dispelling the anarchy.
The terrain is inherently unpredictable, and when the going gets too rough, I occasionally have to blast away stains with a cleaning agent—Windex, the opiate of the messes. I have discovered, over the years, that the best way to weaken the opposition is to plunge the neck of the vacuum deep into impenetratable heart of the darkness that dwells within my bedroom closet. This tricky strategy involves peeling the armor of cardboard boxes off the floor and exposing the soft, defenseless flesh of the carpet. This was keeping me busy a few weeks ago, when a flutter of something crisp and colorful got caught my eye.
Now is as good a time as any to confess that I am a hoarder. I keep, stack, gather, preserve, shift around and forget about absolutely every scrap, snippet, and memorandum that flutters my direction. When I die, my house will become a landfill site, filled with decade-old decomposing graded matter on petroleum-based materials, slowly poisoning the world with a steady influx of C-14 and gamma rays. That said, I wish I could claim to have encountered something uncanny and wonderful in my bedroom closet: a time machine, or perhaps the answer key to the AP Calculus exam. Alas, I was not so lucky. I did however find a draft I had written back in my first grade ESL class, a crumpled little thing that dates back to my days at John Muir Elementary. It is a letter, addressed to my cat. Allow me to read a section out loud.
“Dear Topa—(it begins)
I miss you. I remember the fun days we spent at sweet grandmother’s house. You would like it in sunny California. You could go outside because it never snows. Our neighbors have a cat too. You could be friends and play together. We will bring you to America soon, I promise.
–Love, Nina”
Sadly, this was one promise I never followed up. In the aftermath of Topa’s death, this letter strikes me as ominous: the hopeful penmanship of my childhood is drowned out by the harsh realities of the world. If, in this age of sophisticated air travel, a first grader can’t bring her pet across the Atlantic, what does that say about the fragility, the transience, of humanity’s plans in general I wondered? Are our intentions truly petty enough to be lost amidst the greater thematic trends of the world?
I took a trek down to Leland Stanford’s farm the other day. I gather this was part of my quest to get to know something about myself for this speech, and what better place to look for answers to esoteric questions about humanity than on the premises of a famous academic institution? The tangles of blackberry bushes lining the white picket fences of my childhood welcomed me with a wave of their thorny tentacles. Watching my friends apply to college this year reminded me a lot of watching my old equestrian teammates getting ready to compete—bridling their aspirations, sending them off into the arena to await the decrees of anonymous judges—enduring, palms sweating, jaws clenched tight. I think the word “childish” sums up the college admissions process rather well. First semester senior year we witnessed a Pokémon-like phenomenon transform our campus–“Berkeley, Stanford, UPenn, Yale, gotta catch ‘em all!” There we were, subjugating our lives to a set of unpredictable, churlish procedures, for what? Child’s play. And, if you still cannot fathom my frustration, my grapple with the fruitlessness of expectation, consider this, slightly darker, image: did you know, for instance, that there were cell phones going off on the bodies of the victims of the UVa shootings? People were calling, to make plans probably, can you imagine? How did these callers react to the news when the truth was revealed to them? What is this world coming to?
“Well, Nina, now you’re just depressing us,” you’re thinking, “we’re a smart bunch, we know disappointments are a part of life, and you promised this would be simple, you liar.” All right, but listen to this: I fully believe we all have the ability to deal with plans gone awry. The difficult part, I think, is grappling with the consequences, and welcoming the act of acceptance. So imagine, for a second, that we were to learn someone very close to us is sick, or that someone’s life is in danger—what flavor would our existence take on in the aftermath? This is the greater mystery that brushes across the borders of all our lives, bringing us closer together with just one simple stroke of vibrant color.
You know, if Dr. C were editing this speech, she’d pick up her special purple pen, and, reading my thought progressions aloud very softly, the words just barely audible under her breath, cross out everything miscellaneous, all the parts I feel are indispensable to the exposition–including, most probably, this very sentence, because it’s a run-on. She’d allow to remain, as foundation for further drafts, only the secondary sentiments that my fingers managed to sneak in during moments of introspection, when my eyes weren’t aware and my self-consciousness wasn’t paying attention. Nothing escapes her meticulous discernment. She’d help me to polish my messy stream-of-consciousness, allowing me to see, in the culmination of chosen words, a beautiful idea just barely exposed—a notion purely original and innately mine. And then I’d sit at kitchen table in my bathrobe and thinking cap until 4 in the morning, patching together these unexpected, inspired fragments, bringing to life in the faint glow of the morning the luminous signs and the eloquent symbols (or whatever Ian Watt’s-his-face likes to call them). I write to illuminate the things I had no prior knowledge of knowing, and then I begin to understand—myself, and the world beyond the window. That’s what we must do with the parts of the existence that don’t quite coincide with our expectations, all those jagged bits that claw at our skin like petulant kittens. First we clean, then we edit, until finally we can simply paste these broken bits of sentences onto a quilt of comfortable memories, so that, the colder our days become, the more material we have to toss over our shoulders—for warmth, for strength, for inspiration.
In this way, not everything uncalled for is bad. Every happening is an adventure in and out of itself. As my fellow caffeine enthusiast Voltaire observes in Candide, “If we do not find something pleasant, at least we shall find something new.” I ask you to embrace the following as the corollary to all of the previous advice I’ve given—a tangential notion found by taking the derivative of my previous statements, an undefined point that, oddly enough, comprises an integral part of my solution. As promised, this is not active advice—you don’t actually have to do anything, except remember that sometimes the most disappointing truths leave us with the most valuable lessons, and that the roughest touch of the most difficult reality blesses the skin on our hands with an unprecedented smoothness. Amidst the darker, more painful moments, we develop a sweet tooth, we learn to crave the iced hazelnut lattes of life. We catch a glimpse of that flashing green light beckoning us from across the bay–guiding us, inspiring us, healing us. My friend Asavari once said to me, on the subject of college that it is not where we go that matters; it is what we do with the experience. Similarly, I believe that life is what we do with the experience of living, and I intend to do good things: at the expense, perhaps, of the cleanliness of my room.
My dad just bought a new camera the other day; naturally I had to sit there and listen to him go on forever about how it works. “When you snap the picture,” he begins, “light goes through the lens, right here, and it leaves a print.” I imagine the sensitive silver halide and gelatin mixture on the film soaking up light like a college tuition does a parent’s salary. This infantile footprint of the world is, for a moment after its conception, trapped in darkness, during which an image, solid and unpredictable, materializes—and the organic material of the past becomes the beautiful fossil of the future. In this way, finding happiness in life may be akin to taking that perfect photograph—you know, the kind where the shadows convene at just the perfect angles, the kind that adorns postcards and gallery walls. The variables—weather, setting, location, time, and most importantly, the amount of light you’re getting—these are capricious, these are against us. A good photograph requires great patience and perseverance; beauty takes time to come into its own. But all at once these factors line up and—snap!—you hold a keepsake. The moment is past, but the moment was worth it, And that’s what the all those great photographers do, see—invest, trap, preserve, fight for the moment. They struggle to captivate the loveliness in an image, and I mirror their labor as I agonize over these words and phrases—always luring, always hoping, always waiting. We are always waiting for the light.
~NV (4-07)
Thank you guys.
