Lately I’ve been reading a lot about William Shakespeare. I recently finished Anthony Burgess’ imaginative biography and I’m now well into Stephen Greenblatt's own award-nominated study on the life of The Bard. It’s been fascinating. Throughout my formal education, I’ve had a guiltily unoriginal obsession (when people find out I’m a Literature major, I always feel like they want me to have a more unique response to the inevitable conversation provoker: “Who’s your favorite author?”) with Shakespeare. So I felt that now—over a year out of college and currently without full-time employment—was as good a time as any to make an invested effort in learning more about him as a person.
Despite being widely accepted as the greatest playwright of all time, Shakespeare “the man” remains largely an impenetrably equivocal figure. There just isn’t a lot of hard historical evidence about his personal life. As Burgess put it, “Infuriatingly, whenever Shakespeare does something other than buy a lease or write a play, history shuts her jaws with a snap.” As my recent readings have led me to discover, any detailed biography of the glover’s son from Stratford must rely heavily on speculation.
For instance, there is a period of Shakespeare’s life, between his leaving Latin Grammar School in the 1670s to his appearance in the London theatre scene in the early 1690s, about which we know close to nothing. Plenty of scholars like to speculate that he worked as a schoolteacher or a lawyer’s clerk (which would account for the professional familiarity with legal vernacular that he demonstrates in several of his plays), but we do know this much: he didn’t attend university, produce plays, or do anything of historical notability for over a decade.
Suddenly I feel an intimate connection with this mysterious genius from the past. It’s possible that, if anyone would forgive my lack of tangible productivity at this point in my life, Shakespeare would. I like to imagine him at my age: working odd jobs; studying up on classic literature, recent history, or whatever seemed to tickle his fancy; living with his parents (yes, Shakespeare likely lived with his parents following his shotgun marriage to Anne Hathaway and before moving to London); listening to a lot of Mirah and Damien Rice on his iPod; looking forward to something greater.
I guess if Shakespeare had an awkward transitional phase in life, then I can have one, too. It has been all too easy to become frustrated by the books that warn me that no respectable graduate program will want to take me if I’ve spent more than a year or two out of college, or to see my peers already locked into life paths that I’ve yet to find the trailhead for; but at least I’m in good company.
Showing posts with label aging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aging. Show all posts
17 February 2008
13 February 2008
happy new year...seriously
One week ago I sat in an Ash Wednesday service at my church, Mountainside Communion in Monrovia, and I felt sad. Yes, the somber nature of the event was undoubtedly influential in my realization of this emotion, and the solemnity of Jesus’ incomparable sacrifice might have had something to do with it too, but, moreover, I was sad because, for the first time, surrounded by fellow church members, it fully occurred to me just how much I was going to miss being a part of that community.
You see, I’ve moved. For two whole days now I’ve named the residence of my dear parents, Wes and Nancy Janssen, my own. And this would be a largely positive thing were it not for the miserably unconquerable detail that they, indeed, live neither in Azusa nor in any of the neighboring cities in the San Gabriel Valley nor even in Los Angeles County, for that matter. They live (and I, too, now) in San Diego. Which is too far from my former and beloved roommate, too far from the overwhelming majority of those I call my friends, and generally outside the feasible realm of consistent Sunday commuting to my (former…sigh) church.
The move wasn’t heavily premeditated. And the actual date and time of the moving quite spontaneously selected, the hastiness of it all merely a reflection of my pesky bank account’s ever-increasing pressure on me to find a job. The move came, strangely enough, almost exactly one year to date from my decision, as a recently college-graduated young adult, to leave the nest for what I then assumed would be once-and-for-all and pursue the lifestyle of a fully independent young professional.
As the story goes, I was sometimes miserable in this situation, but mostly incredibly happy. I hated the job that I got. It was demanding and stressful and in no way remotely related to anything I wanted to be doing with my life. But I had a lot of freedom. And I had a conglomeration of my peers close by, however much my recent emancipation from the local educational community acted as a barrier to my feeling completely at home there. Thanks to my unsatisfying job, I was able to save up enough money to spend the whole summer relaxing and accomplished a notable feat in the completion of my first novel. No matter how depressed I might work myself up to feel about the fact that I’m still not in graduate school or at least somewhere abroad, comically struggling to adjust to the affectations of a foreign culture, I cannot deny this: 2007 was significant.
It has taken me a while to come around to this optimistic conclusion, and so I think it might be an appropriate time to start pinning a similarly positive expectation on 2008. Altogether, I find it hard to believe that I will finish up the year still living with my parents. I still have that jocularly cavalier New Year’s resolution that I now suppose I ought to make an effort to live up to: to live in Japan. And there was that sad but knowing look my former boss gave me when I told her I was quitting and she responded affectionately that she always knew I wouldn’t be a long-term employee.
I’m going to do exciting things this year. The world is my goddamn oyster and—sitting on a guestroom bed surrounded by the redecorated remnants of a room I used to call my own—I can’t say that I’ve ever believed it more. It’s not as though God gave me a mind and body that could be content working ad infinitum in a job that requires no more than a bachelor’s degree and my drudgingly apathetic loyalty. I think I genuinely like life; the logical response would be for me to live it.
You see, I’ve moved. For two whole days now I’ve named the residence of my dear parents, Wes and Nancy Janssen, my own. And this would be a largely positive thing were it not for the miserably unconquerable detail that they, indeed, live neither in Azusa nor in any of the neighboring cities in the San Gabriel Valley nor even in Los Angeles County, for that matter. They live (and I, too, now) in San Diego. Which is too far from my former and beloved roommate, too far from the overwhelming majority of those I call my friends, and generally outside the feasible realm of consistent Sunday commuting to my (former…sigh) church.
The move wasn’t heavily premeditated. And the actual date and time of the moving quite spontaneously selected, the hastiness of it all merely a reflection of my pesky bank account’s ever-increasing pressure on me to find a job. The move came, strangely enough, almost exactly one year to date from my decision, as a recently college-graduated young adult, to leave the nest for what I then assumed would be once-and-for-all and pursue the lifestyle of a fully independent young professional.
As the story goes, I was sometimes miserable in this situation, but mostly incredibly happy. I hated the job that I got. It was demanding and stressful and in no way remotely related to anything I wanted to be doing with my life. But I had a lot of freedom. And I had a conglomeration of my peers close by, however much my recent emancipation from the local educational community acted as a barrier to my feeling completely at home there. Thanks to my unsatisfying job, I was able to save up enough money to spend the whole summer relaxing and accomplished a notable feat in the completion of my first novel. No matter how depressed I might work myself up to feel about the fact that I’m still not in graduate school or at least somewhere abroad, comically struggling to adjust to the affectations of a foreign culture, I cannot deny this: 2007 was significant.
It has taken me a while to come around to this optimistic conclusion, and so I think it might be an appropriate time to start pinning a similarly positive expectation on 2008. Altogether, I find it hard to believe that I will finish up the year still living with my parents. I still have that jocularly cavalier New Year’s resolution that I now suppose I ought to make an effort to live up to: to live in Japan. And there was that sad but knowing look my former boss gave me when I told her I was quitting and she responded affectionately that she always knew I wouldn’t be a long-term employee.
I’m going to do exciting things this year. The world is my goddamn oyster and—sitting on a guestroom bed surrounded by the redecorated remnants of a room I used to call my own—I can’t say that I’ve ever believed it more. It’s not as though God gave me a mind and body that could be content working ad infinitum in a job that requires no more than a bachelor’s degree and my drudgingly apathetic loyalty. I think I genuinely like life; the logical response would be for me to live it.
17 September 2007
growing up
means I went a whole day without wearing a unitard. It means that I felt like exercising today, so I went for a walk around the neighborhood because I knew my joints wouldn't want to handle the strain of a run or a jog. It means I spent several hours researching graduate schools and when my eyes started to burn from staring and the computer screen and my mind started to feel like it was going to burst, I calmed myself down again by repeating the word "zipper" over and over again in my head, rather than saying it out loud. Growing up means that I still had more dessert than I should have ("should" have), only this time I felt guilty about it. It means I am cleaning my dishes up right after I use them. It means that I am going to bed now, at a reasonable hour, so that I can get up early for work.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
