February 13, 2013 12:03 AM
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I'm hellbent to integrate, happily meeting folks at any opportunity. But I still hold dear my distant, digitally-compressed friends. Never have I spent so much time on Facebook, how embarrassing! But I think I understand it a little better now, being displaced. I feel like a landlocked swimmer with nothing but 8-bit video games to virtually stimulate that part of my brain. It's stupid, but somehow you make that bad facsimile work for you. Real friendships aren't something you can force, and take time. The world is impenetrable without them, and so goddamn boring. So I virtualize a lot, practice my insular, self-reflective music, grooming my protective patchwork of past, present, and prescient identities, at least for a little while. Olympia truly is a special place. I miss it. I don't think I realized how deeply talented people are there until I moved. I'm baffled by folks I meet here who don't know how to make fresh pasta, tune a drum, and use a multimeter. Not everyone in the world is an amateur polymath; living in Olympia made me presumptuous. Moving was a philosophical decision, a personal imperative without the faintest sense of romanticism -- I moved to do more of the things that I love, and grow. I still believe this can happen in the Bay. It's been easy and hard in unexpected measures. The hardest part is allowing the naturalization process to happen, letting my body and mind assimilate to the new surroundings, and not get aggrevated by its necessarily unhurried, meandering pace. |
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