shifty paradigms

Why hello, new blog! Perhaps with no real names of people or companies or other identifying details, I can actually keep you without screwing up my life. That would be delightful.

I'm dealing quite well with my recent sudden unemployment. I'm actually applying to go back and finish my bachelors degree. My untimely dismissal from the world of teaching was the push I needed to decide I am first and foremost a writer and I should get myself some training and a degree in my genre. Conveniently, there is a college nearby with programs in creative non-fiction and magazine writing. I'm ready to take classes again, too, which I wasn't sure would happen ever let alone so soonish, but my brain is restless and craves more direction and stimulation than I can offer on my own.
And I'm not going back to school to make my parents happy, which is very important because it's way too easy for me to default to that as my motivation and then realize how miserable I am part way in. It's just a hard combination for me to have both an overdeveloped eagerness to please and parents who are very vocal in their opinionatedness.

Despite losing my jobs last Monday, it's actually been a surprisingly fun week. Thursday night I went out drinking with a person I've known since first grade (we'll call him "M"), his friend ("T"), his friend's girlfriend, and his friend's girlfriend's friend. M was never one of the mean evil kids, and by junior high and high school we were always friendly and ran in circles that crossed Venn diagram-like. I always assumed he was kind of shallow, maybe because when we were younger he actually was kind of shallow, but more likely because he's Model Gorgeous and obviously beautiful people have to be stupid. Obviously. Interesting to note, he is is probably the most gorgeous person I've known personally in my entire life, and yet I am not now nor have I ever been attracted to him. Not that he has an unattractive personality, either. I think it must have more to do with knowing him forever and having never thought of him "like that" that the platonicness sticks with me now.
So that's a short explanation of M. T, on the other hand, is a person I barely remember existing in high school. I think he hung out some with the girls I didn't like or the party crew or something, and he may or may not have ever been in a class with me. I feel bad forgetting people, especially since my memory is usually very good with that kind of thing. My newly 21-year-old sister has been going out to bars with her friends and having people she remembers from high school think they're meeting her for the first time. She wasn't happy to have made no impression. I at least remembered T's first name and face without having to get out the yearbook. I'd actually recently come across him on MySpace when I was looking through people from my high school class. His blog annoyed the living crap out of me. It reminded me of the stuff I would write in eighth grade when I thought I was "deep" and was starting to realize myself as a writer. I was so pleased with the ideas in my head and hyper-verbose hyper-descriptive language that everything came out like Charles Dickens with 13-year-old girl angst. I didn't like the fact that it annoyed me so much, since intellectual writer-types in the area aren't so easy to come by, but I have no patience for former versions of myself, so I had no patience with Ts blog.
That being said, I had a fabulous time. M has this incredible excitement and optimism about the world and the good things he's doing. Drunk and recently fired, I was on the argumentative nay-saying bitterbus. T joined me in my skepticism while his girlfriend was optimistic but slightly more realistic, and we debated and argued the status of existence and other fun lofty things. I kept saying how I hoped M was right and that we can change the world in the ways we want, but that I was trying to do and say the things M says now a solid 10-15 years ago and people and reality just burnt me out.
Because I was trying to effect change when I was 8. I petitioned my elementary school principal to start a student counsel in like third grade. I product-tested and wrote for Consumer Reports for Kids for five years in grade school. I was in sixth grade when I joined a youth art advocacy group. I was a rampant feminist in junior high. I organized my high school's AIDS walk team and passed out condoms starting my sophomore year. I got involved in the school paper my junior year. I created and organized every detail a benefit concert my senior year. And every step of the way people told me to shut up and that I was just being contrary for the attention and that I was annoying and full of shit. And then I went to college where a very large vocal group was just being contrary for the attention and was annoying and full of shit. They would argue over who was the most oppressed. They'd fight for things they didn't understand, get arrested at protests because they thought it was cool, and yell with the self-righteous indignation that has nothing to do with any "cause."
Is that what I looked like? Is that how I sounded? Only with the added ridiculousness of being a pipsqueak kid? So I stopped. I shut up.
I alluded to all this in my conversation with M and T and T's girlfriend. M's known me all along and was never particularly malicious or supportive of anything I did or said. And this was much of my drunken frustration: that I'd said all these things he was now saying, but nobody ever listened.
But M surprised me. He remembered. He remembered my pipsqueak self trying to change the world and yelling these things from my soap box before puberty set in. And while at the time nobody cared for my idealism and political ramblings, apparently at least one person heard, and years later, it meant something to him.
Wow. Paradigm shift.
My little kid struggles that felt (and still retrospectively feel) so big actually had an effect. It wasn't for nothing. That's amazing. I always wanted to matter (not just as a friend, but in a more huge, global, "I want to be Shakespeare" sort of way) to someone other than myself. I'd come to assume that all those things I did and wanted were immature because I was immature when I did and wanted them. But maybe they're not. Maybe I was just (un?)fortunate enough to see and understand things when I was too young to be able to do anything about them. The relativist in me knows I probably don't have the "right" answers and ideas, but anything that seems to work for the general betterment of society shouldn't hurt too much. And I'm older now; there are people who are willing to listen. I'm still not sure if there are enough people out there who are of sufficiently similar intelligence, mind, and heart, but maybe it's at least safe to poke my head out of my shell and look for them.

That was Thursday.