Restarting

I used this blog initially as a tool for class. I blogged when it was required of me, and sometimes not even then. Once, in an act of self-deprecation, I deleted all of the posts that had been on here. Now I feel a little sad about that. Which is why I am restarting. I'm living in Alaska right now after a few upheavals in my personal life. I'm not going to go into that unless it becomes related to what is happening here and now in a way that I view is relevant, because I am going to attempt some content control here (hopefully David Sedaris style). In fact, this blog is about my life as it unfolds now:

Today I realized that being in Alaska has caused me to reconsider many things, one of them being the strangeness of the world. I realized that if I tried to stop and think of all the enormous oddities I would never start up again. These thoughts really started when I flew for the first time. It was an experience I can't say I'll ever forget. To me the idea of a giant metal tube attached to two big metal triangles and a hell of a lot of jet fuel should not culminate in being lifted from the earth. And yet with a little extra push, hollow metal spaces do as well in the air as they do in the sea. What I found most strange was the commonplaceness of it all, the easy way the other passengers pulled down the plastic shades on their windows, leaned their heads back, and ignored the roar of the engine and the pull of gravity as it resisted our crazy burst into the air. I watched out the window as the airport I had found so large shrank down, a carpet square on the surface of the earth. I found that everything was this way. A river seemed no larger than a spilled cup of water, the houses were carefully laid, glass mosaic tiles. The feeling of these things combined with my constant dreams of flying nearly brought me to tears. I held back. Because this smallness was such a microscopic portion of the whole.

I suddenly realized why I had not become an astronaut. Seeing the earth fade out as others have done would surely be too much for me to handle.

But being in Alaska is strange in its own ways. The thought of the encroaching dark, the cold, the cold being so intense that it couldn't snow and ice sculptures wouldn't melt for months. The bigness of this place against the idea that the world is so small; the horizons and clouds which seem endless. None of these are new ideas, and yet for the first time they feel as if they are new.

Perhaps I am the one becoming new.