Wild

A bellow in solitude:

1) The fear of reprimand

2) The surge of freedom

3) The silence of isolation




.

A Trade

I love to see people work at something they've mastered. It's especially enjoyable to watch someone do something that I'm also into, but it's the adeptness that matters. Maybe that's why I didn't get museum fatigue yesterday at Colonial Williamsburg - all those master craftsmen. Whether we were at the Gunsmith or the Joiner, I could have watched any of them work all day. Well, except the Wigmaker.

My admiration for skilled work has increased because of my job in a kitchen, where I'm surely the least experienced and skilled. The gym, too, has made me appreciate the fluidity and sureness that comes with mastered technique, especially when it means a kick in the ribs or an armbar. In fact, my generalist tendencies seem to keep me from any real mastery. So maybe it's an appreciation born from envy. Or just straight-up envy.

Rebel Rebel

I clearly remember the first time I fully considered my mortality, my death. My eighth grade math teacher walked by my desk to see if I needed help with a worksheet, but when she looked at me and said "is everything alright?", she wasn't talking about arithmetic. I was either twelve or thirteen. Because of this, I would brush off the suggestion that teenagers think they're invincible, that they'll live forever. Maybe I didn't calculate risk as an adult would, but I certainly felt the full weight of my mortality.

This all sounds grave to me now, overly-dramatic, but those are also apt descriptions for most of my adolescence. And it's not as though I became obsessed with death as a figure or concept, earnestly drawing skulls and macabre scenes, nor with my own death in the way that some people fantasize about their funerals. I just remember thinking: this isn't permanent, and eventually all that I know and am will cease to exist for me.

It's silly to assume that I was alone in this realization. And now it seems a natural and crucial part of developing a sense of self, a period in a process that psychologists have probably laid out neatly. But those models of individual development always seemed like challenges to me. As though psychologists dared me to defy their predictions, like the freshmen orientation at college when they tell you to look to your right and left because only a certain percentage of you will graduate. When you say, "Not me, but I bet this homely-looking dude next to me won't make it."