A Fond Farewell

I have been sitting on this post for two months, maybe more, and now it is time to end the chapter. No use making the poor old hag suffer!

Madivision, something that started out as a window into a high school graduation trip to NYC under a Shakespearean title, is ending as something beyond a bachelor's degree. I'm not sure what the best way to keep in touch with old friends is, but this medium has long since reached its climax. Some of you are emailing types, others prefer snail mail. If you want to talk to me and know about my silly life (and believe me, I usually do really want to hear about yours!) please do send a line to madi.dear@gmail.com.

This has been fun. It has been a wonderful exercise in writing, in finding a voice, in knowing a good limit for sharing and telling. Thank you so much for following. Thank you for your kind words, for your laughter, for stories and inspiration.

23 January is a new day! I'm sure I'll see you then.

a minha paixão

My hands and feet are both freezing but I can't go put on socks or else my roommate will know I was lying when I said I wasn't cold and I don't want to look like a pansy. I can handle this.

I'm supposed to be writing a short essay in portuguese about one of my passions but all I can think about is the song Passion Play by William Fitzsimmons and the sweatshirt facebook was advertising to me that I really want now (dash it all, facebook, and your sneaky spy cookies). Neither of those are my passion. If I was going to take the easy route I could talk about traveling and living in new places. I have lots of experience and that is definitely a passion of mine.

But when I think about something I love, no matter what, no matter when or where (because living in Provo even when it was a new place basically sucked the joy out of my life for a while), I would say this:

Walking into a bright, white-walled museum gallery. No one else is in it. Just me and the stuff. And maybe I wouldn't gravitate to that gallery on my own. Maybe it's baseball cards, or very contemporary videos, or early modern Catholic icons, or basically anything that's not cubism or impressionism or period clothing or ancient artefacts (my great favorites), but when it is just me and them... Oh. My heart is beating faster just thinking about it.

When it is just me and them I am in them. I am in all of them at once. I am in the bronzes and the arrowheads. I am touching and smelling and tasting all of the textures and shapes and sizes. It is even better when I don't know the artist or understand the purpose. I mean, I enjoy that too. But there is something about museum galleries that my soul loves; it comes out of me and into the gallery and I am so much larger and older and brighter than I am anywhere else. Maybe it's just the lighting and the archive glass. Maybe it's the mystery of everything else. Or the silence. Maybe it's the air conditioning.

A curator I greatly admire told me once that the things in his museum were his life. And I can see how that happens. I think curating is in my blood and my nature, and things are addictive. The collecting aspect of possession is a large part of any small or large investment that I make. I look at things and wonder if I would want to pose with them in Vogue. Everything I wear has to have my name on it. I try to take my own small gallery with me everywhere I go. Earrings. Tissues from Carrefour. Screensavers.

If I wasn't so driven to be a doctor of philosophy you better believe I would have spent the summer trying to bust my way into a museum career. But it wasn't in the cards. Or if it was, I didn't notice. Someday I will either go back to a museum and stay forever or I will get that dream position at a university and build my own gallery. White walls. Archive glass. Humidifiers, if necessary.

Tonight, that's my passion.

2015

New Years Resolutions, more often than not, seem to be about general improvement. I'm really not into NYRs on account of feeling like every day is the start of the rest of my life and why save important changes for one season? but at the very strike of midnight on January 1, I wanted to start living a little differently.

I made some good first moves. I bought a lot of lettuce and ate most of it. I got in contact with some old friends. I was making spiritual improvements. But at 1 AM on January 6, when I got a car towed from my assigned spot at my complex after grumpily sitting in my stalling car for 1 hour, I felt like I was initiating 2015 off to the worst possible start.

So what, right? It was a big bill for someone who should have known better than parking in someone else's assigned spot. And in the grand scheme of things, I could've been a bigger jerk... I could've scratched an inappropriate body part onto the hood of their car before calling the tow truck. I could have done that, and then called three different people and told them I was tired of them being in my life and I never want to see them again. I could have tried to seduce the tow truck guy and then break his heart two months later. And I did none (nor will I ever do any) of those things!

But now it's 11 January and I still feel like things are looking sluggish and disappointing. Maybe because of the inversion. Constantly breathing in toxins is the most depressing thing since the stock market crash of the 1940s. (lol i'm hilarious) So to really start over, and make this year a little different, I am going to make some confessions and some goals and move the freak on.

1. I do not like being set up on dates. I do not like knowing that someone has told someone else to be interested in me. What am I, a daily vitamin? So I officially declare that I do not want anyone to set me up.
2. Looking at the candy bar selection at any given American grocery store makes me feel disappointed in my nation. We can get to the moon, but we can't make a chocolate that doesn't taste partially like candle wax.
3. (Ironically) I love plain food. I am a complete baby when it comes to trying new things and I am pretty prejudiced against anything that is not plain.
4. Traveling is my life right now. That's what I dream about. That's what I live for.
5. I am a complete cleanliness snob.

1. I want to get rid of the fat on my back. It's gross. I hate feeling like I look like a diagram of the effects of a sedentary life style.
2. I want to really feel comfortable holding conversations in Spanish and Portuguese. What that really means: memorizing the conditional tenses and how to use them.
3. I want to read books that I have been meaning to read but not reading. Bring Up The Bodies, I'm looking at you.
4. I want to be a better pen-pal. Sorry, every pen-pal I had last year.
5. I want to find a place to call my own for a season. Not in Utah. Preferably a place I have never been before.

And that's that. Let the new year BEGIN!

complete thought dump

My mom told me tonight, "It seems like you are split. Half of you wants this grad school thing, wants to teach. The other half just wants to get on a jet and go."

It's true. It's true. It's true. It's so true and I hate saying that! I wish I was a little more committed one way or the other but I've made the lists and I am just so stuck on this very wide lane towards... The future... And I'm just staying on it until I'm struck by lightening or something.

The thing is that I am in love with the suitcase, on-the-go life when it means I am seeing the world. The world outside of American suburbs and fast food. People that I can't meet anywhere else. I am so obsessed with learning the streets of cities that I don't know and that nobody I know knows. I get weak in the knees, light-headed, high-pitched-sigh-excited looking at plane tickets to anywhere and everywhere.

But I am also very in love with my family. My mom is my best friend and I can't seem to get her to go anywhere. On top of that, my mom's parents, who I am also in love with, are not in good health; that means no traveling and limited time left with them in this life. I am watching my closest friends fall in love and get married and sign themselves up for things like mortgages and jobs and kids; I know you can't have anything if you don't work at it, but at what point do I leave the "meeting guys" up to fate? And all of this doesn't even touch on the issue of money. All systems say I'm at the place in life where I should be looking for a salary. A job. A home. Stability and security.

As of two weeks ago, ten grad school applications are waiting in the balance.

I love history and I love research. My network of professors that I have been blessed to work with for the past few years has made me feel more accepted, appreciated and hopeful than any other group of people in my life. Academia has always had an important place in my heart and really I've lived for nothing else. Teaching is important to me, and I can see myself doing that, especially at a university level that would also require college group work, writing, etc. A life in academia could afford me the security I need to be an independent adult (even if it takes ten years to find a place that will have me) and the flexibility of someone who wants to raise a family. In addition to this, if I am good at what I do, I could eventually earn the ability to travel abroad for both professional and personal purposes.

I can't see myself doing something as flimsy as guiding tours, travel writing, or straight-up Ernest Hemingwaying my way through Europe. An American job would keep me relatively close to family. I could even get a house someday, maybe.

Oh, but tonight, I couldn't care less about whether or not I ever own my own house. I know that anywhere is just a flight away. I am so used to falling back on my parents, especially for financial assistance, that I am (foolishly) willing to give into my heart's greatest desire to teach English in any country for any amount of time and then pack up and do it all over again somewhere else. If I meet a guy I meet the guy! I can't stop anyone from living or dying. Do what makes you happy! Who knows what could happen?

If I was the kind to use inappropriate language I would use it all right HERE.

Why, why do these months drag and beg these questions that I can't answer and that no one can answer because nobody has seen my life play out in all the ways it could and knows the choices I should make for the most optimal experience why why why why why why why why why

when i miss an application deadline because it closed three hours ago at 5 PM eastern time and not midnight like every other school in america

didn't want to go to your high-maintenance hippie school anyways.

peanut m&m's

When I was 12 I became incredibly conscious of how much food each side of my jaw chewed. I would purposefully divide it equally. I was terrified that half of my teeth would wear out before the others, or that my jaw would somehow start to hang on one side if I used it too much. During this time period I began to eat peanut m&m's thus: bite off the chocolate, chew it with one side of mouth. Swallow. Chew peanut with other side of mouth. Swallow.

Ten years later, I only think about this at Christmas; the only time of the year I eat peanut m&m's in a notable quantity, because they are Christmas colors (and obviously 23948 times more enticing than usual). I can't stop myself from eating them this way. And when I do consciously try to eat them differently, it tastes wrong.

Here's to personal diagnoses of OCD and all of their manifestations.

i have something sticky on my right palm

November came with light snow and cold wind and some whisper of a feeling I haven't had since March: come on, it's ok, you can do this.

Comparing this fall to last fall is like standing in front of a Pollock, for me. But made backwards. Last fall (two jobs, one internship, one student leadership position, one calling at church, six classes to attend, living with friends, trying to form lasting relationships with new friends, planning the coming months with precision) was the strikes and cascades and shrapnel of color and movement; this fall (one class, one part-time job I've been particularly undutiful to, 12 graduate school applications, nothing else) is the dirty, hazy background.

I should have done so much more than I have over the past six months. Thinking about that, as much as I do, is useless. But the big picture provokes. And I wonder what happened inside, what turned off, why it's proving so hard to turn back on. Why can't I make what I made before? Why is everything so cloudy, so comparably passionless?

When you stand back from a Pollock, all you see and all you remember is the foreground. The excitement and texture of something made with action and purpose. Close up, you see through the spaces and into the smudged fog of a canvas that does hold up the paint it is known for, but is painfully less enticing.

And now I stand between the two, as if there was a hollowed-out hall under those contrasting layers of pigment, and I am ready to lift my hands to the top of the canvas and pull myself up and out. I can see into the gallery and I know there are other works to fall into and fall in love with. For the first time in months, I have the courage to leave behind what is finished and move into something new.

How absolutely good.