all is optional

I saw the best smile I’ve ever seen today.

Upon seeing this photograph (facebook login required),

Tyler Davis: OOOOOOOOOHHHHH. I’m going to drown you.

To see photographs full size, check out flickr

RELATED:
A Picture is Worth 2005 Words

For keeping me sane.
For making me laugh perpetually and unabashedly.
For constantly (and kindly) guiding my reflections on love, life and the universe.
For making me French-pressed coffee, even though I’m always late meeting you for it.
For bitchslapping me with beans when I need it; for allowing space and silence, when needed, but hugs and laughter, too.

Would rather not be
constrained to five seven five.
Simply: I love you.

In three words, I can sum up everything I have learned about life:

it goes on

- Robert Frost

This winter vacation sealed the deal on so much of the past truly showing how all of us have changed and the lives we used to know are nothing more than photographs in a scrapbook.

Sure, people I graduated high school with got married in the years past but this time, someone I knew pretty well got married: my big sis from Junior Social - a noble foray into the stereotypical middle America culture of catty girl fights, gossiping, and boys. People I’m much more closer to are in similar places in their lives whereas I go induce an anxiety attack (like a true commitment phobe) when I think of my brief, three week interaction with a decidely adorable fellow.

My brother and I haven’t fought, not even once in the near four weeks I’ve been home. This must be some kind of new record for us.

I was in Memphis and I didn’t call Brianne or even call her back when she called a few months ago. I was in Pine Bluff one day a couple of weeks ago and didn’t call any one under the auspice of spending time with family, promising that I’d return at some later date in January. I’m not going maybe because I’m lazy, maybe because I’m not ready to face my friends and see near-strangers in their place.

When I look toward the future, there’s graduate school and surprisingly there are only two New York schools: Columbia (begrudgingly) and Fordham. My top three (States-side) are:

1. Brown University
2. American University
3. University of Southern California

USC is a reach program because they don’t really accept Masters-level candidates unless you intend to follow through with the doctoral program. Frankly, I don’t think I have the CV to be accepted into that kind of a program. Granted, I might have the fortune to swallow those words if my G.R.E. scores are through the roof but I’m really not holding out hope in that department either.

Before I go galavanting eighteen months ahead into my academic career, I should probably figure out what I really want to study and hope that the Honors thesis I produce will be a viable candidate for a writing sample.

New York, I’m coming back with a clear conscience. Even better, I’m looking forward to coming home, which is all that really matters.

Recommended listening: Elliot Smith’s “Somebody I Used to Know”

I watched you deal in a dying day.
And throw a living past away.
So, you can be sure that you’re in control.
You’re just somebody I used to know.

Related entries: Won’t Forget the Way You Love Me

I left my square space in the same hurried fashion in which I first arrived. After writing my last timed final, French, I rushed back to shower before heading off to Park Slope to say goodbye for nine months.

There was a Social Movements short story waiting to be written and a playlist to summarise. There were books, clothes, and toiletries to be packed. There was a room to be cleaned, keys to be given away. All to be done before a plane at 03:46 p.m. or so I thought.

The Social Movements final was not mailed in until Wednesday night after I had gotten home. The packing was done at 9:00 a.m. and it happened rather quickly. I suprised even myself.

But, there was a transit strike. I had $39 to my name and no way to get to the airport.

All of them entirely unnecessary when put against saying goodbye to Tyler Davis. It’s hard to fathom that someone who I barely knew before February would end up inducing one of the worst separation anxiety attacks I’ve experienced to date. I can be entirely too apologetic to the two boys who had the (un)lucky fortune of coping with that or be grateful that somewhere beneath the hardened cynic, I do care about people. I haven’t quite decided which side of the fence I’m on.

Neverthelesss, the goodbye wasn’t tearful and it wasn’t goodbye either as I saw him the next afternoon before running away to the airport.

Davis arrived in Brooklyn Heights via a gypsy cab and thrust a copy of Oh, the Places You’ll Go my way. It was my second Dr. Seuss book of the last 24 hours (as Cat had given me I Am Not Going to Get Up Today the night before).

Who would’ve thought that I’d buy into motivational speak from someone I’d known less than a year? But, it’s true. I trust Tyler Davis. He’ll tell me the truth, good or bad, when I need to hear it so, if I want to believe the ugly, I better sign up to believe the opposite, too. Thanks, Tyler Davis.

The brilliant boy he is suggested I check my flight status as I lamenting about getting to the airport on time.

“Maybe, your flight is delayed,” he said, “a lot of people won’t be able to make it to the airport today.”

So, I checked. Time of departure: 3:00 not 3:46. Oops!

Some optimistic fool once said, “If it’s not okay, then it’s not the end.”

Every now and then, fools are right.

Bundled into my jacket with my backpack over my shoulder, my bags in the hallway, I hugged goodbye the boys in my life and raced down Henry Street to the car service that rushed me to LaGuardia Airport in less than thirty minutes.

My scratchy throat and I boarded an Atlanta-Hartsfield International flight at 2:30, drank the worst coffee of my life, read the International Fiction issue of The New Yorker, napped alongside minor passive-aggressive indulgement on the War on Christmas. The second leg of my journey included more of the same, sans the coffee and War on Christmas. I was terrified after the first time. However, I did see a budding Buddhist check his e-mail near the restrooms in Atlanta (pictured below).

I apologise on behalf of the dipshit mayor of New York City, who allowed various media and the NYPD swarm Strawberry Fields on the 25th anniversary of your death. The helicopter hovering above the Dakota and the barricades that made animals out of us. I wanted to tell the obnoxious NYPD’s Finest to fuck off when he told us “to keep moving.” It was every thing you hated and I hated being a part of it.

“When the guns boom, the arts die.” - Arthur Miller, when he refused to attend a White House function at the height of the Vietnam conflict.

Laura Senkevitch: Business has too many numbers… and, capitalists.

Vitaliy Piltser: They’ll be lucky if I wear pants. on his place of employment, Beach Bums: a tanning salon, following a conversation about Lubin students in years 3 and 4 normally wear suits for their internships.