sariagray

1. Work -

A week or so ago, I attended a "Management Essentials" training regarding time management. One of the key messages was to remember to balance priorities, that work, while important, should not be the most important thing in your life. I felt like such an outcast, so young and naive, for feeling that work was my main priority. And then I was flat out told by the speaker that I clearly had an addiction to urgency. I spoke to my former boss about it, and he laughed. "Some people," he said, "are just like that. Welcome to the club."

But there is a sense of pride I get from just doing a job. Jared, a friend of mine since high school, once pointed out that he and I have the same work ethic, but different motivations. "You're loyal and I want money," he told me. "You're a soldier and I'm a mercenary." Actually, I think this also sums up everything about us, both as individuals and in our weird love-hate relationship that really borders on abusive at times.

Still, I throw myself into my work because it gives me purpose. It makes me something more than the sum of my parts and it fills me with so much joy, it frightens me. It makes people twitchy that I always check my work email, answering things at 2am on Saturday mornings, or when I'm on vacation, but I need work. I need it to make me whole. As my former boss told me when my coworker said that I was a workaholic, "Work completes some people, and there's nothing wrong with that." And that he admires it, my work ethic, is worth the sleepless nights, really.

2. Music -

I don't know what I'd do without it. I'm especially fond of scores and classical orchestrations (Tchaikovsky, Yo Yo Ma, Ravel, Joseph LoDuca, Clint Mansell, Trevor Morris, Bach, etc), as my iTunes will tell you. And then it branches off from that bass line into 90s alternative, metal, mainstream indie...actually, I have no idea how to classify certain artists. iTunes tries to classify it for me, but I think it gets confused sometimes. More than 25% of my music is, apparently, "alternative." I have yet to determine what it might be an alternative to. (In re-examining my collection, I realize it's mostly...British. Can that be a musical classification?)

My memories are often associated with music; sometimes, I'll hear a certain song and be totally and completely transported. I'll feel each and every emotion that I felt when I first heard that piece of music. It soothes, it energizes, it makes me weep, and laugh, and think, and brood, and celebrate. Despite that musical ability runs very thin in me (as in, I can't play a single instrument and my voice is like that of a dying cat in heat that's being tortured by a hot poker), I don't think we'd have civilization without it. It is the foundation of human feeling - words can only express so much before we run out of them.

3. Words -

(I applaud myself on my ability to segue). Words. Just...words everywhere. The way they're utilized by different writers, their etymologies, their denotations and connotations. I am polarized by words; a love for Hemingway seemingly contending with a love for Wilde that makes people pause and blink at me strangely. Wilde's writing, to me, is thick and sweet like honey-wine. Hemingway is sparse and clean and bright like gin. But there is a smoothness to both of them, a confidence.

Hemingway once said, "Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts." Wilde once said, "A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it." Then I realized that they are really just going about being the same man in different ways, in different times.

The way they sound together, words, is so beautiful. Alliteration accidentally slips into my essays regularly, and I read everything I write out loud just to hear how it sounds. Well, not everything, but every story. I think I've always been a poet at heart, which is why my stories tend toward the emotive, metaphorical, short moments. And also why I seem to have a need to wrap them in actual poetry.

4. Drama -

I grew up on the old black-and-white movies my mother liked, and Disney classics, and found a propensity for soft vaseline-coated lens shots of women on verandas and princesses swaying in ballgowns. Both have sort of followed me into my current viewings. I am no cinematic sycophant. I have never seen The Godfather, I despise It's A Wonderful Life, and on IMDB's Top 250 list, I have only watched 43 (and some of them, I can barely remember seeing, let alone liking). But it's all about preference, isn't it? I would watch Titus or Conspiracy or The Philadelphia Story a thousand times before sitting down to Wall-E and I can't even figure out how Toy Story 3 is even within one million miles of that list. But that's the true beauty of film - there is something for everyone, and for every mood, every slight craving of everyone, to boot. And that's fantastic.

Staged plays, too, fill me with such joy. It's not just acting, just like film is not all about the acting, either. Its stories are told through voice and action and scenery and score and lighting. When all of those pieces come together just right, its stunning. The audience forgets where it is, what its problems are, the world at large. They are all focused on this one moment, this one moment together. I had a director who once told us, "What you're about to do, right now, is entirely unique. At this very moment, all over the world, no one is going to be performing this play the way you're performing it. No one else in the whole, entire world." And I almost cried at the enormity of it, the uniqueness.

5. Language -

I have studied French, Latin, and Italian, and as I've mentioned in previous entries, I remember nothing. And maybe this relates back to my love of words, but there is something so amazing about language. "En masse" is so much more elegant than its English translation, which is clumsy. It conveys greater enormity than "together" or "as one" and brings to mind this whole group of fleeing beings moving like a single organism, like a wave. And I adore sussing out the ways in which other languages have first created English and then, later, infiltrated it. It all makes me ridiculously happy.

6. Research -

Not so much research itself, but the happy path as created by the internet that allows me to touch on various pieces of information before moving to the next. Or, the way in which knowledge of one subject seems to spark a desire for another, and another, until synapses are firing connections too quickly for my conscious mind to keep up. At the end, I couldn't even begin to explain what I know, what I've learned, because I am so dizzy with it all, but knowledge has broadened and the connections are all there. I'm having a hard time explaining it even now.

Here. An example. I will mentally connect Hemingway and Wilde with Absinthe, which I will then look up, just for fun. Wikipedia will say something like, The French word absinthe can refer either to the alcoholic beverage or, less commonly, to the actual wormwood plant (grande absinthe being Artemisia absinthium, and petite absinthe being Artemisia pontica). The Latin name artemisia comes from Artemis, the ancient Greek goddess of the hunt. Absinthe is derived from the Latin absinthium, which in turn is the latinisation of the Greek ἀψίνθιον (apsínthion), "wormwood". The use of Artemisia absinthium in a drink is attested in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, where Lucretius indicates that a drink containing wormwood is given as medicine to children in a cup with honey on the brim to make it drinkable. This was a metaphor for the presentation of complex ideas in poetic form.

Now I've suddenly connected so many things I know and love that my mind is like this strange, constantly growing tree. I look at a drink drunk by writers I adore and get etymological discussions and languages and a metaphor of poetry being the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. And I go on from there, perhaps intrigued by this idea of metaphor. And so on. It is such a beautiful, complex phenomenon that consumes hours of my day.

7. Coffee -

When I was younger, I would spend almost every afternoon-into-evening at the local coffeehouse. Generally, I would go there with a book to read, and throughout the day, people would find me. Cell phones were popular then, of course, but I suppose it was easier to just locate me there. That coffeehouse has seen at least seven different kisses, about twenty broken hearts, and dozens of friendships made, strengthened, and then broken. It became my home, my refuge, my family.

The people who worked there would look out for me. It started with Begonia, I think, who would give me muffins and scones at the end of the night. Bridget would light my cigarettes and slip me extra shots of espresso in my mochas. Cory and Jay (brothers) would provide me with paninis and the soup that Jay crafted daily, and Cory especially would let me sit there by the fire after the shop closed. I would read Oscar Wilde and sip port out of a coffee cup as he cleaned and blasted Death Cab for Cutie over the sound system. Ted would bring me iced caramel macciato after iced caramel macciato until I was practically sick with it, and we'd sit outside and smoke cigarettes and he would tell me what was wrong with my life. Cal would make a special drink for me, something about Endless Sunshine or somesuch, that was so thick with syrup and heavy with strong coffee, no one would drink it but me. Sometimes, I think there was actual crack in it, because there was no reason for me to like it so much.

Then I went to work at a Starbucks café in Barnes & Noble, where I fell in love with a boy who looked like Oscar Wilde and spoke German and called me Miss Sarah and made animals out of cut-up used gift cards. I fell in love with my ex there, too, where I would watch her working on the book floor while I prepared endless grande sugarfree vanilla nonfat lattes. She was terrifying and brilliant and lovely. There was an intensity to her, to even the simple act of watching her, that I still admire. Coffee has become less of substance and more of a fond memory; I drink it every morning not to wake up, but to remember who I am and fall back in on myself.

8. Driving -

It is an escape, and always has been. Some people run, or walk, to sort their minds. I drive. In high school, my best friend and I would drive around our county, getting lost on dark tree-laden roads until the early hours of morning. We would smoke cigarettes and barely talk and drink energy drinks to keep awake. It was the closest I've ever felt to another human, and she was one of the only people who understood that I wanted nothing more than music and the soft hum of the engine, one of the only people who wanted the same thing, too. I lost her when dating my ex, with whom I would also drive. It was different with her, though, because we drove to talk as though conversation between us would never flow if the road weren't also flowing between us. We looked straight ahead, never at each other, which made it easier to say what we wanted.

Now, I drive alone. I take the long road, miles, into farmland and trees and large, old houses with horses, past a man-made pond with Canadian geese, and circle around until I'm back again. Then I push forward down to the beaches along the Sound, and the marsh with its bright cranes and dingy seagulls, the smell of salt. There is a small airport there, where my father would take us on tiny plane rides when we were children. One time, the propeller broke in mid-air, just stopped turning and we had to make an emergency landing. There's also a skating rink where every birthday I'd ever attended from grades 2 through 6 was held. I would be so proud to finally get the hang of having wheels strapped to my feet, only to have the party end. And I'd have to start over every time I went back, reverting to clinging onto the grip nailed into the wall. It was an endless cycle, and so much fun. On the way back, I pass old processing plants and the strange seaside dilapidation that, when bathed in golden sunlight looks pleasant but is really depressing when you think about it. I go through the historic sections of town, sometimes past the old Shakespeare theater in which the likes of Katharine Hepburn once performed. Now it is empty, old, useless. And then I go home, feeling so much better than when I had left.

9. Humanity -

People are awesome, unique and yet exactly the same. Without them, their rough-and-gentle influences, I wouldn't be who I am right now. And I wouldn't have any of these loves in my life.