palace of winds

I pendulum regulary between a base material wanting and a wanting not — a desire for bare essentials, cleanness, a life of less. All the things start to encroach. They spill from drawers and shelves, over the floor, push at the edges of contentment until I’m all hard and knotted up inside, having to remember how to breathe while so hemmed in. But I want want want: a new camera, better speakers, new furniture, pictures, shoes, a wardrobe update. A house, a horse, a new car. I’m in one of those weird turning phases when I simultaneously want things and want to get rid of things. Probably a good dose of the latter would take care of the former. Usually it is very simple: I want few things, and I want them to be good quality. I feel like that should be a calm, exact system. There should be rules, ways of measuring. Everything tagged with its cost/benefit number. But most often it’s just an impossible mess of wanting and worrying and guessing at trade-offs.

I’m not sure where that tangent came from, really. I guess I’m just thinking about money a lot lately — too much, I expect. Mostly trying to decide what to do with this last chance to contribute to my retirement account. It’s stupid, I know, not to put in all I can as early as I can — an extra thousand now becomes a quarter million when I retire — but the thought of dipping into savings trips me all up. Maybe because that money’s all set aside for a nameless something. Down payment on a house. A car. A few big trips. Emergencies.

Even working in finance I feel so lost when it comes down to this, my own tiny personal stash. I keep wanting to know what’s usual even though I know it’s the wrong question. I want to know what enough is — but enough for what? I’ve never been on good terms with that idea, with enough. (And it doesn’t even look like a word any more now. Certainly not a word that sounds like it does. Cruel, being so near nougat but so very not.)

This year I’ve managed to put nearly 20% of my salary away for retirement (and god what a foreign word that feels, retirement, here from the vantage of twenty-four). What does that mean? I don’t know. Am I spending too much in other areas? Not enough? What can I afford? And so I fret and whittle away at this problem that is not actually a problem, my mind run ragged with worry. A small, distant belief that a gym membership could put me in the poor house one day. Today’s cable internet turn into tomorrow’s run-down nursing home, all peeling linoleum and stale urine smell and endless plates of grey paste. A sweater, put aside, might one day blossom into a trek through Tibet.

Well, nothing quite so grand. And nothing quite so neurotic as I think that last bit makes me sound. I don’t worry about it so much, really. Just go through infrequent spates of hard thinking, and some hand-wringing. I just want to do this right, this whole life thing.

These days the Peace Corps, the idea of the Peace Corps, is my quiet shadow. Waxing and waning. My little whispering ghost.

I sit in my beautiful apartment, on my lovely old hardwood floor surrounded by third-hand but sturdy furniture, all my expensive little gadgets, a closetful of shoes, car out sleeping in the garage, bed of down waiting a wall away. And ER is about Darfur again this week, and here I am weeping in my wealth. There is so much to be done, so much I might do, but I am in love with my life. My comforts, my little world, the way the late-afternoon light comes big and gentle into the bedroom; the freedom to wander up the road for a fresh smoothie, too lazy to make my own; my bookshelves and end tables full of books about anything, books about religion and love and murder and magic, books with titles like The Miracle of Mindfulness and Cunt. I have so much. So much I don’t know what to do with it all. Paralysed by having and wanting and wanting to keep.

And wanting to help. Not knowing how, how much, when, where. And it’s so much easier to just keep on keeping on, making the same motions through this same golden little life. All this bounty salve against the part of me that is sick and sad and guilty and longing, dreaming, wanting. Believing desperately, against everything, in the possibility of a world that is clean and kind and fed and whole.

Oh how spectacular! Neil Gaiman writes here about the opportunity to have your name appear in his own work, or the work of such as John Grisham, Stephen King, Dave Eggers, & etc. The whole of which gives me hope and warm feelings for the world at large.

Lately I’ve been in pretty much full-on freaking-out mode, which I’m sure is a delight to all of you poor, kind souls who have to put up with listening to me go on endlessly. I’m eternally moments away from committing the next three years of my life to working in Botswana or Jordan or Armenia or something. So we’ll see. Maybe I’ll be back in touch in 2008. More likely tomorrow, or next week, or next month perhaps.

I’ve been listening to the Goo Goo Dolls’ ‘Two Days in February’ on loop all afternoon. It’s soothing, full of mellow guitar and the easy tin shiver of cymbals, and over and over the lead singer soothes ‘everything’s wrong / well it’s all right.’ Which helps me feel like maybe it will be.

I’m heading out for Chicago tomorrow morning and returning Sunday, so I’ll have nice long drives there and back to think, and in between Bren and Beth and the con, which will be fantastic fun.

So it’s all right.

Maybe I’ll join the Peace Corps.