This weekend was one of those rare, magical weekends that don’t come too often. Excitement, happiness, contentment and fufillment filled the air…and also fear, uncertainty and doubt as well. Odd that all of this could be wrapped up in one tight 36-hour commercial-free marathon…

The roomate and I had several friends from undergrad come to visit. Seth is in medical school as well, in Toledo. His wife Laura is also on the path to academic righteousness, pursuing a grad degree in special education. Their friend of two years, Albert (again, another intellectual and future doctor) came to join the fun as well. Kate made the trip up from Louisville. The weather was indescribable…the perfect pre-autumn setting. Warm days, cool nights. Trees on the verge of exploding into color. We hit some favorite local attractions, ate some wonderful ethnic food and induldged in some hardworking craftsmanship and labor on Saturday. The problem is, it scared the hell out of me.

As we lay on the front porch on Sunday afternoon after church, bellies full of Indian goodness, I was struck with the panic and saddness that usually accompanies The Sunday Blues. Everyone would be leaving soon, none of us knowing when we’d see our northern-bound friends again. Adult life and responsibility keeps us all apart for far too long. Involved with clinical internships, student teaching, freelance projects and every day bustle…we’re lucky to see each other twice a year. It’s like losing a limb each time, and it never gets easier. The seperation cripples me.

I don’t understand adulthood. Friendships are routinely ripped apart by distance and kept apart by responsibility. The time in our lives when we have the funds and means to enjoy being together, we’re forced to be away from each other. I long for the days of undergrad again, sitting on the front porch at 3am talking. I miss taking a break from a project to horse around and play NBA 2k. Instead, I now turn around to an empty room, dirty dishes, and a porch that needs to be swept. I share funny experiences with my notebook and creative inspirations with a machine. I watch the videos to remember what it was all like.

High school was the same, if not worse. And I’m sure future periods of my life will be as well. I hold my friends too close, I guess. They are extensions of me and I place much of my happiness on their involvement in my life. I do not feel whole without them, and yet I only get rare occassions to be with them. To me, this is tragedy.

As they packed up to leave, we made the routine jokes of “see you in a year!” — but all of us hoped it wasn’t true. It can’t be. But it never gets any easier.

I never used to get headaches. Ever. Not even the smallest pangs would arise, despite hockey or soccer mishaps. I never got headaches, and I always took it for granted.

However, as my life tumbled into it’s most unsteady and self-indulgent phase my freshman year of college, everthing changed. It could have been the odd sleep patters (up til 5am, 3 hour naps daily) or the constant exposure to chemicals in the print studio. I could have been my diet or lack of exercise. Nonetheless, I hit a wall.

I reluctantly trucked home for the summer to Toledo-armpit-of-the-midwest-Ohio. I got a big-boy job at Xerox’s only graphic design division, but was mostly happy that I wasn’t hauling drywall for a third straight summer. As the oppresively warm days of summer decended, I had my first migraine. Or at least I assume it was. A pain unknown to me in any other capacity hit me in my temporal region. I was completely incapacitated, and for those that know me, that is quite a feat. Accompanied by visual fuzziness and severe nausea, I was on the verge of declaring that I had, in fact, an inflatible innertube in my head that was expanding at an alarming rate.

A few hours passed, and it faded. I thought that I’d rather die than go through that again. Little did I know.

That summer I began to experience the most blindingly painful and debilitating headaches ever. Regardless of where I was, what time of day, or just about every other possible factor…I was having 2-3 full-blown migraines a week. Sometimes twice a day.

Trips to the doctors yielded little but shrugging shoulders and pointless (yet terrifying) MRIs. The only meds I got were trial-sized migraine pills and a presciprtion for an anti-depressant (to help regulate my sleep?). While they didn’t alleviate my headaches, they effectively knocked me into a catatonic state for a few hours, which usually when I awoke seemed to have fixed the problem. The self-injections did nothing either, except provide an awesome display of instantaneous vomiting.

No one knows why I had these. The lasted a year and a half, and then they slowly left. I haven’t had one in three years.

No one can ever understand the pain and ugliness of migraines until they have them. Even as someone who has empathetic abilities…I just never got it until it happened to me. There’s something about an uncontrollable event “inside your head” that frightens me to the core. Break my bones, punch my face but the inside of my head (which is how it loosely feels) is sacred to me. An unknown and intangible force acting in my head makes me feel like I’m certifiably insane, like I’ve lost control. It’s like having a room with no doors, yet knowing that somehow, someway someone else broke in, and there’s no way to kick them out. You’re stuck hovering in the corner, praying for them to leave. My heart aches for people who have mental diseases where this is common. I truly cannot fathom living a life with this strange companion in your conscience.

So a note to myself: today, as I internally bitch and/or moan about a bruised muscle, a cut on my hand or being overtired, let me not forget the lesson that I learned all to well three years ago.

I’m always childishly amused by personality tests. I see them as both wonton and mildly accurate. Half-and-half, part fiction part psychology, these qualitative exams make me chuckle nonetheless.

It’s been awhile since I took one, but fairly unceasingly I’m categorized (on the Meiers-Briggs scale) as an INFP - introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving. While I think I sometimes express a bit of INTJ (thinking, judging), I believe that these are forced qualities, brought out by my “work personality.”

One the things that I get a kick out of is a certain “definition” of an INFP. It involves the inner struggle between good/evil, sacred/profane. This could not be more true with me:

“Deeply committed to the positive and the good, yet taught to believe there is evil in them, Healers can come to develop a certain fascination with the problem of good and evil, sacred and profane. Healers are drawn toward purity, but can become engrossed with the profane, continuously on the lookout for the wickedness that lurks within them. Then, when Healers believe thay have yielded to an impure temptation, they may be given to acts of self-sacrifice in atonement. Others seldom detect this inner turmoil, however, for the struggle between good and evil is within the Healer, who does not feel compelled to make the issue public.”

My art seems to be the most profound exploration of this within my life. For some reason I turn toward my art to express this inner struggle. My senior thesis included a series of 12 collograph prints that explored my struggle with my sins and impurities. I can remember standing in front of my class, once again the lone male in the studio, and only upper classman, trying to explain the concept behind my prints. Lost on everyone but my professor, the rest of the students just blinked. For some reason, trying to express this interior Armegeddon on paper was too much for them. I can’t blame them really. I hadn’t shown anything in any of the prior critiques for the semester, and then at the final crit i showed my semester of work. I tend to keep things private and hidden, until they are done (to avoid bias on pieces as they are in development). How I explained my series:

“These 12 pieces were taken from a series entitled “Peccavis.” In the latin rite, this term refers to a “confession of sin.” This series of collographs is based off of the idea of purging oneself, stripping down insecurities and shortcomings. The series is intended to be an abstraction. Not based on form, and only slightly abstracted in color, the collection is an abstraction of emotion. Between each piece, more layers are pulled off, sometimes revealing familiar forms, sometimes showing impressions from previous layers, often revealing color remnants from the preceding layer. While each piece is based off of the previous and following prints in the series, each individual piece is also a new and often raw entity in itself. While the first several prints seem awkwardly handled, they are in fact intetionally overprinted. The process of sin and transgression builds up in one’s soul, often times blurring out the original, beautiful form. The last several prints also seem underdeveloped. Again, this is meant to reflect the nakedness and vulnerability of one’s soul after confession.”

To the rest of the studio, who was pulling prints depicting pine cones or the running shoes from their cross country season, I can easily see why this didn’t fly well.

To this day, however, I’m still obsessed with this trait, which is why MB analysis intruiges me: it puts it’s finger on a few (some are dead wrong) traits that I have that run like a silk thread through my life. I doubt that my struggle with this will ever die out, and that the majority of my art will continue to explore this. At least that gives me material to work with.

I have found, as of late, a great desire to discuss with a true friend, to converse and dialogue. So rather than bog down his site with unfocused, rambling comments, I’ll instead learn to post here as my side of the discussion. I hope he is fine with it.

I too have always gotten irked by the notion of being labeled “a hard worker,” or a “good worker.” It does seem both common and even underacheiving to be tagged as such. As if, “Hey, good job Steve, way to keep walking in a straight line.” I feel as if every human has this capacity, and how absolutely trite it is to turn this concept into a compliment. I do sometimes shudder with repulsion.

But Andrew makes me wonder. I’ve given this much thought over the years, and I’ve come to realize that hard workers, true laborers are not that prevalant in society. Or not at least to the extent of the times of Marx and his socialist theories.

In undergraduate, one of the more difficult courses that I idiotically signed up for (under my own accord) was a political revolution and change course. Besides assinine amounts of reading (of which, one page would take an hour to digest), the concepts were rather elevated. However, one granual of theory that I was able to pull down from the academic stratosphere was that the world has indeed been Westernized. We’ve developed the majority of civilizations (and dominated those that haven’t) to where we’ve moved from the laborer/landowner struggle to one of postmodernism. Now, back then, I didn’t get this. However by the time I wrote my senior thesis I think I had begun to understand it.

We now live in a world that we’ve moved beyond ourselves. Instead of focusing on the hearth and the factory, the daily grind, we focus on our humanity. As my professor put it, we live in a world that now values sitting under a tree and contemplating ourselves, as illustrated by all of the self-help books, interest in new age materials, relaxation techniques, etc. Hard work is nice, but where are we in the “journey of ourselves?” We’ve truly begun the shift from industrialization to postmodernism.

So I think I can now comfortably say that it isn’t commonplace to be a good worker. Being in an office for two years now, I really find a bunch of mediocre workers who are out for themselves, not the good of the company. They’re out to fatten their pockets, but more importantly to just “not work too hard.” They’re not bad people in the slightest…in fact, they’re as normal as normal can be. The truly odd and out of place individuals are those that work long hours soley for the good of the company. Because they believe in it, and value hard work (not sloth).

So I have begun to celebrate those compliments of being a hard worker. I enjoy knowing that I work 2-4 hours longer than anyone else…and not because I’m angling for a raise or promotion, but rather because that’s what it takes to do a good job.

So to you, Andrew, I say revel in this label. Think of it not as a common tag or misplaced compliment, but rather an increasingly rare acclaimation in this postmodern world.

While I have yet to see the movie Garden State, I know the basic premise that Zac Braff is trying to explore is the concept of finding beauty in the breakdown. Odd, because this is something that I’ve always been facinated with.

In my 24 years I have yet to fully grasp why it is that we never appreciate what we have until it’s gone. Only in chaos or a state or loss do we truly value what once was previously held by us without acknowledgement. It’s almost as if the human psyche is unable to wrap itself around the “goodness” of a thing until we’ve seen the other side. Like plucking a toy off the shelf, looking for the pricetag on the back, we can’t fully judge the worth of something until we’ve seen all angles.

The catch of all of this is that due to our humanity, and finite position in time, it’s virtually impossible to see all “angles” of a situation at once. So we never get a true, unaltered, unobstructed view at things in our lives. We just get MTV-style, 5-second flashy glimpses. We’re happy when we get a puppy to play with, but that happiness fades in the passing days until the dog is hurt or missing.

Is it that we can’t hold onto a shiny object for too long without becoming distracted by the next shiny object to pass by? Is it that we’ve been trained to only value something based on what immediate gratification is being derived from it? Is this a generational symptom, plaguing only those in the recent media-saturated culture that preaches the gospel of Skin Deep Beauty and Materialism? Or were our ancestors just as burdened by our inability to consistantly and regularly appreciate everything we have?

Recently I’ve been catching glimpses of my appreciation for things. Like a passing silouette in a window or outside headlights bending around a dark bedroom wall, it’s a fleeting and temporal calming. “Everything’s good…” passes through my head.

And then it’s gone.

It makes me wonder if this is just me, that I’m the only one who has issue with appreciating things fully. Perhaps I’m just dead emotionally, in this respect, and these intermittant sprinklings of happiness or gratitude for all the blessings in my life are reminders that somewhere deep inside, the ability to recognize such is still alive.

All in all, i feel less human, poor in soul because I embody the phrase of “not knowing what you’ve got till it’s gone.” And I don’t want to. I want to learn to be different, whatever that means.

Whatever that means.