And then Mr. Ben carries on:
"So, sure, I could just close my eyes. Yeah, sure, trace and memorize." -- You Don't Know Me (Ben Folds featuring Regina Spektor)
Ever since I saw Regina Spektor in concert this song passes through my windpipes daily. She didn't actually sing it in her concert--he does in his--but it was hearing her live that locked it in.
I wander around town and putter around my house singing the same lines over and over again. If you know me you've heard me do it, and requested a refrain. The lines must correlate with something going on in my life, so when I sing the chorus "You don't know me no more" in call and response between Ben and Regina (I change pitches for Regina) I'm never sure if I'm declaring the fact to someone else or myself.
Being in a grad school program in a new city with all new people is plainly about forgetting a bit of my old self and getting to know someone new. Escaping a demon or two along the way isn't a bad idea either. Toward the end of my Microsoft reign in Seattle, when I resigned to my manager, I said to him, "I don't like who I am". That was 2002, and for a long time I have liked who I am. I devolved a bit at the end of the California stint but now here in Somerville I find myself liking who I am again. I don't know if it's walking home from a movie down the pedestrian path on a brisk autumn evening, or making a jackass of myself in the company of 20-something-year-old students at a county fair. Maybe it's sitting at a table at a town's Octoberfest trying to tell people about an intersection redevelopment project that we're doing, where they've driven through the intersection for 50 years and I two times. Could it simply be all these crazy little new things swimming around in my own evolutionary stew that might somehow sometime soon spawn a new slime dripping, hairy, unrecognizable version of me, or perhaps create that missing link between what I am and what I should be?
There are now four plants in my room. I think I have room for about four more. Are the plants timing something of which I'm yet unwitting? What magic will transpire when I set #8 down, or when I host my next dinner party for 40, what happens when I start talking to people who aren't in my graduate program? There's a smell of opportunity here; it smells cold and leafy, and the dimension that matters is divided by a clock. Éparpiller -- spread, scatter, prosper.
