Big news: I found a place to live!

While the hotel was nice (having someone else clean and make the bed every day is a luxury), it was getting old. The night that I woke up to the sound of two drunken men speaking in Russian and fighting with an ironing board served as an extra special incentive to get a move on.* Luckily, Craigslist was my friend.

The house is nice. It’s a mid-sized (1900 sq. ft. or so) A-frame. The exposed sloping roof throughout is cozy. The kitchen, eating area, and den are all one large, connected space. There are good appliances in the kitchen and a killer entertainment system (surround sound, big plasma flat screen, HD-DVD, Xbox 360). The yard is good fire pit fodder, I think; it’s hard to tell under all the snow. Best of all, the owner, Luke, is a really nice guy. He’s young (26) and has been good to talk to and kind so far. I haven’t met my other roommate yet, but Luke says she is great, and I trust his opinion.

Now, the only thing I’m lacking is a bed. I’m borrowing a twin mattress that Luke had in an extra room. It’s fine with me, actually, but I guess I shouldn’t bum for too long.

I’ll provide pictures once I’ve found a place for everything and cleaned up a few things from the way that I found them.

Unpacking everything makes me feel nervous, somehow. It seems like I should be getting a feeling of relief, but… no. If I were to play psychologist on myself, I would say that I have a fear of attachment from moving so much as a child. After being very hurt after a few moves, I learned to never fully settle in so that the leaving would be easier. This tendency was further enforced when the one person I let myself become very attached to and comfortable with destroyed my sense of security and trust. So now unpacking a box of dishes makes me want to weep.

Oh Human Mind, why so fragile? Sometimes I wonder why we can respond to hurt and danger in such unnecessary ways. For example, I have food allergies. When I have a reaction to, say, a speck of a pecan, my body’s immediate response is to start shutting down my respiratory system. I don’t feel like things are swollen, blocking my airways. No. I just feel like my brain isn’t letting the “breathe now” messages get to my lungs. But this makes no sense. How is not breathing at all going to help me with a speck of pecan that I just ate? Yeah, yeah, I know that it’s probably some cross-wired response to breathing in something that normally would be really bad for me, but still I have to ask: how is not breathing ever going to really help? It just seems like an unnecessary response.

The mind does the same thing, it seems. My mom got me a new, purple, microplush (or whatever the hell you call it) blanket for Christmas. It is soft and warm like a mother’s love. But two nights ago, sitting on the couch, I looked down and thought it had tassels coming from the bottom. And then I realized it was the exact same color and texture as the blanket that was on Mary’s bed throughout college. I lost it. I threw the blanket off of me and felt like I had to burn it or throw it in a shredder or something, NOW. Right after I threw it, I realized that it didn’t have tassels, that another blanket had gotten tangled up in it and gave it that appearance. But it made me realize: if this blanket did have those tassels, if it was the same, all my memories and hurt would never let me be comfortable with it around. Even though it was from my mom with love. I don’t know what to make of that. It disturbs me. Deeply.

Awe before memory and the inability to escape forces that we cannot understand are both feelings evoked by No Country for Old Men, which I’ve watched twice in the past day.* Many reviews I’ve read have tried to sum up the themes, the symbols — Llewelyn as post-Vietnam American cowboy misplaced in the modern world; Anton as the embodiment of skilled and incomprehensible violence; Ed Tom Bell as a bastion of the old way. It’s all there of course, and it’s shocking in its unassuming complexity.

But what really makes the movie, what makes it beautiful, frightening, real, fairy tale, is the subtlety. It is slow. Killer’s track slowly. Everyone talks slowly. The wind blows, footsteps come, time is spent staring into reflections in TV screens and drinking milk. Even among all this violence and these changing times and this death, there’s still the mystery of clouds glinting off the water.

Same thing at Wendy’s today.

I brought a sandwich for lunch, but I didn’t feel like eating that sandwich. So I went to Wendy’s.

I was alone. Eating alone is often the saddest part of my day. Growing up, I always ate dinner with the whole family. In college, I always ate dinner with my new family there. Now, I feel thrust into a vacuum.

But a peculiar thing today. Sitting, eating, I looked out the window. The sky was half-cloudy, the type of clouds that seem like big versions of the spray that forms around your car when you wash it with the hose in summer. All the ice and snow on the streets was turning to slush, melting away in puddles and miniature rivers. Cars, dirty with sand and salt, where driving by, running errands, getting food.

And I just sat. And I just looked. Cool, calm, like all my favorite directors. No hurry. Plenty of lunch break left. Nowhere to go. No one to talk to. Nothing to do. Just look. And I was greeted with more beauty and complexity than I’ll every have the ability to appreciate.

I haven’t felt that good in a long time.

• Just to elaborate a bit on that story… One of the guys was beating the other one mercilessly with an ironing board, which seemed to be heavy and solid. I was clued in to this by:

1. The large holes it was leaving in the wall.
2. The blood it was causing to gush from the other man’s skull.
3. The “this is a heavy piece of metal” sound every time it struck said man’s skull.

• I missed the movie in the theaters and it’s not out on DVD, so I pirated it. It was incredible, and I plan to buy it as soon as possible. How does that set of circumstances and chain of events fit into your sense of the world, RIAA?