Finding Momentum

It comes like a beau­ti­ful blow to the head, a thun­der­ous, laugh­ter­ous cathar­sis. It’s a hammer-blow to your rose-colored world; you fall with it and you laugh as you pick up pieces. The laugh­ter con­trols you, it is from you but not of you.

So it is, you learn to love the shards; they’re more beau­ti­ful that way. They are evi­dence of entropy: the uni­verse grow­ing more ran­dom, less ordered, less per­fect with every second.

Laugh­ing through tears is much harder than it sounds. Your tear ducts say one thing while your heart throbs with errors, blun­ders; they speak won­der­ful sto­ries of toes you have stepped on, mis­un­der­stand­ings, deal­ings with ones you love, games (against) fate and chance. They are Life’s lit­tle entropic surprises.

Hey lit­tle boy, why are you cry­ing? Don’t you know, what once was is no longer and He loves you and your bro­ken jars, ambi­tions, desires, fail­ures. You are beau­ti­ful, you are my beloved one. I adore you, I love you. Do you under­stand [1+1=2] that?

It makes sense.
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I’m real­iz­ing how lit­tle of my life can be con­trolled by myself, but how hard (!) I fight against that fact.

I have a lot of pathetic ways I use to hold onto ves­tiges of my old (more-perfect) self (I like to think that some­times). I sac­ri­ficed my health and sleep for these past three weeks to sur­vive paper/project/pset/midterm sea­son. I lis­tened and prayed for and served peo­ple. I didn’t com­plain, God. I DID WHAT I COULD. I DID GOOD STUFF. I DESERVE SO MUCH. And it doesn’t work out, like 1+1=2 should, and I’m just left to laugh at myself and the absur­dity of my tread­mill self???a hard thing to do.

I feel dumb say­ing this, but I wrote this after meet­ing Mar­shawn Lynch tonight in Unit 3. Or rather, walk­ing past him and a group of his friends and blow­ing him off (inad­ver­tently) as he called out to get me to take a pic­ture of his group. Justin Hong got the cam­era, and I turned around and real­ized who he was, my jaw dropped ten inches.

And I was torn apart walk­ing away from that encounter (after receiv­ing a good-natured rib­bing from his crew), first of all because that was an Awkward-Superstar-Fan moment, sec­ondly because it was a bad deal for the whole racial-reconciliation thing. But more than every­thing else, I was so rocked because I had offended him with­out mean­ing to, but he would never know that. To him, I’d just be another guy who Doesn’t Care About Black Peo­ple (quot­ing Kanye). I was to blame, and I couldn’t help but replay­ing it in my mind at a mil­lion miles an hour, replay­ing it from every angle, half-laughing and half-torn-up about it all the way back home.

I’m still laugh­ing, and I still don’t know what to do. In so many ways, this encounter sums up this awk­ward and unpre­dictable sea­son of my life. One moment I’m feel­ing solid as ever, the next I’m reel­ing with inse­cu­ri­ties. I don’t want to end this post with neat and tidy answers. I want it to end with uneasy feel­ings and an open invi­ta­tion to some­thing or Some­one to come.

One love,
Andrew