Je me presente. . .

Hello, my name is Steve, and I am a (fairly) recent college graduate with artistic aspirations and an addiction to change. *applause, Hello, Steve* I live in France teaching English and told myself before I moved here that I would have written a book by the time my contract was through (in a little less than a month now), I would have learned to play the guitar, and I would have mastered the French language. I have not written a page of anything particularly book-like, my guitar repertoire is limited to simple chords and the opening chords of Rufus Wainwrights "Gay Messiah" and Zeppelin's "Tangerine". My French is pretty good, and so far I'm not bored by anything here, but I'm already making plans to move to a crowded and polluted corner of ther earth called Jogyakarta. So what is it really that has gotten me here? What keeps me here? Where am I going from here?

I moved here mostly because of someone I was attached to, whose love for me manifested in the hard lessons of non-attachment he dished out for me. After that I cut myself loose from my own problems and went on single, and discovered the people that surrounded me. That alone I am blessed by their company and they are inspirations to me. The people are what keep me here... yeah sure, France is about wine and cheese and fashion, blah blah blah, but lets be real, those things are only worth the taste when you have people to share them with. I'm staying on next year to get a masters degree (thanks France for offering affordable education) because rather than being a "lost boy" in this land, so often dreamed of by hopeful, fashionable vagabonds in love with the 1930's Parisian cliche, I'd rather make my brain do some work. This year of 12 hour work weeks is nothing if not leisurely, but it feels uninspiring (this could just be some American neurosis for productivity that sleeps deep inside me somewhere)... I need a fire under my butt, and the utopian universe of the university is like a nursery for me. This baby's goin back to school!

Since this blog is subtitled as an online bookclub, I'll leave with a quote that felt true to me from Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, a 1930's Parisian cliche itself:

. . . [T]he monstrous thing is not that men [sic] have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured - disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui - in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.

He concludes this passage by saying quite literally that life is shit. While that is true, he ignores that very miracle he says we are waiting for, it is right in front of our eyes, that is, that there are roses in the midst of all this shit. Depending on your situation in the quagmire, this is either monstrous or miraculous. I'm a lucky one I guess, where do you stand?