Time travel.

Hell, I'm convinced, is not a physical place.  It is a customer service hotline.

The vein-throbbingly maddening call I made to my mobile carrier today was the culmination of a series of vein-throbblingly maddening interactions I had with various customer service representatives over the last few weeks.  This must be part of phone companies' strategy -- each employee is trained to mislead you in a different way, and to inform you that whatever the previous employee told you was wrong.  As the wrong turns build up and twist in on themselves, they constitute a labyrinth of policies and fine print and exceptions, and as you try to explain your way through it to the representative on the other end of the line, you feel like a mental patient, and decide to cut your losses and hang up before you lose what little sanity you have left.  They're dastardly.  Their schemes are masterly.

But today I made it past that threshold, out into the insane realm on the other side.  Throwing prudence to the wind, I stayed on the line, using stronger and stronger profanities until I was transferred to "John".  And then a miracle happened.  John listened.  John responded.  As I carefully walked John back along the convoluted trail of bread crumbs detailing my blind struggle against the customer service hydra, one fee after another fell away like scales from my eyes.  It felt good.  A past-due bill of $121.60 became (over the course of 29 minutes and many soothing, faintly accent-inflected words from John) a non-past-due bill of $38.

By the end of the call, I was brimming with such gratitude that I had to know more about my angelic benefactor.  I asked John where he was from.

John: "To be honest, we're in a different century."

me: "You're in a different century??"
John: "Yes, a different century.  We're in the Philippines."

I told him he had excellent English (which had been emphatically true for the first 28 minutes of our conversation), hung up, and praised God.

Spit and sweat.

My shoes are still squelching, my hair is still sopping, Rooney’s earnest, hormonal guitar riffs still jangle in my ears. I just got back from another running date with the river in the rain at night, and before anything else I just have to record that the alluvial world is rich and fertile and wet and just lends itself to being alive in. Being alive in it, in fact, feels great.

Put the ghost in my sail.

Here's one of the days when happy endings seem like a foregone conclusion.  The ice is breaking up over the Charles in gorgeous fractals.  Café Pamplona serves Spanish tortilla.  Brainy youths walk around talking to each other about Hebrew and Math and the Baldini sisters, one of whom butchers fish for Legal -- that was the exact word this youth used, who I overheard talking about the Baldini sisters.

Do you love Boston, I was asked recently.  I hemmed, I hawed, and I answered that I like it.  I like it more and more, such that falling in love seems likely but not certain.  Today, though, I've been lofted by a potent gale of breathtaking infatuation, to which the L-bomb seems the only possible response.  Love.  There, Boston, I said it.  Love love love love love love.  And I mean it.  

Here's one of the days when everyone I meet seems brave and beautiful.  I know a girl who loves Boston so much she wants to have twin girls so she can name them Wellesley and Waverley.  Okay, let's not get carried away, but still: the immutable fact is that it's 60 degrees in Boston on 30 January 2013.  Did you hear that?  Twenty thirteen.  I know it's arbitrary, but this year has a different air than the one I just lived in, a different smell.  It fits better in the sleeves and in the shoulders.  There is a manageable number of people who I know well enough to learn, say, what they want to name their twin girls.  Gentle reader, I'm naming mine Georgia and Wren.  People are good.  Christ plays in ten thousand places.  Here's one of the days when the world begins.

December 4th.

If there is a deeper symbol of "being successful with the cards life deals you" than sampling your own mother, I have yet to see it. Happy birthday to Hova, and thanks to Gloria.

Terra incognita.

The brain is such a fickle and mysterious organism.  I mean I have reason to believe this statement is true in general, but it's abundantly and profoundly true for the only brain I have ever used.

Lately I've been writing this honors thesis which I will defend at BYU this Monday -- circumstance which has provided the occasion for me to fly home this weekend.  Yes, most people write an honors thesis before they leave college.  I can take a long time to get to things.  I'm working on that.

So for most of the past month, maybe a little more, this paper has been occupying tons of space in my head.  Do other brains work like this?  It's like other interesting thoughts couldn't move in until the lease expired for this nightmare tenant who was renting out every room.  Not even non-interesting thoughts could move in.  I would have liked to use some of that space to figure out what smartphone to buy, which credit card to apply for.  Heck, I could have used some of it to cook myself meals.  Sorry!  No vacancy!  So most of the month I ate bagels and burritos.  I was lucky to remember to apply for a passport just barely in time to get it (fingers crossed!) before I go abroad with my family later this month.  I was not lucky enough to remember to apply early enough to avoid the hefty expediting fee.

And it's not like this tenant used the space productively.  That would be great: I could have one room making connections with existing literature, another room configuring code for maximum efficiency, and one in which to just sit with the sun streaming through the blinds and craft gorgeous sentences.  Alas.  Most of the rooms in the house were devoted to the single-minded production of worry, distraction, and worry about distraction.  This takes up a lot of storage space; new concerns pile on top of old ones, leaving little room for productive work on the paper.  And of course I would worry about how little space there seemed to be in my head for productive work, and the cycle would perpetuate itself.

The closer the deadline got, the more time and space were consumed on the paper.  I even stayed up all night a few times in a subterranean computer lab on campus.  Over the past week especially, fun things started happening to my mind.  Once, in the aforementioned underground lab, I fell asleep sitting up in my chair and had a really hard time figuring out where or who I was when I woke up.  I don't know how long I was out.  Another time I dreamt I had forgotten about my thesis defense and it was the next day, and I was freaking out.  There were a lot of weird data dreams that I won't get into.

Maybe the weirdest thing my brain did was to apparently clear out the room normally used for appreciating a wide variety of music.  I was stressed, so I wanted to listen to soothing music, but I simply had no patience for it.  I couldn't focus on NPR or the podcasts that had been teaching me Portuguese either. There was only one thing I could stand to listen to: Auto-Tune the News.  And I wanted it ALL THE TIME.

Maybe my brain was pregnant?

Well, my brain delivered.  I sent off the paper this morning.  And suddenly the smelly hard-partying coke addict who was renting out all the space in my mind for his industrial worry-cooking kitchen, driving away the nicer tenants -- he's gone, and I can peer out the windows, recall that the world is big and brave and good, and invite in some fresh air.

I turned on Fleet Foxes and almost cried.

***

I have a friend who is of the class of people who get invited to conferences for teenage savant entrepreneurs.  She told me she thinks these people are really good at viewing their brain as a tool, which does what they tell it to do.  "My brain is mine," they seem to understand, whether intuitively or through long practice I don't know.  But it can't be very long practice because a lot of them just graduated from high school three or four years ago.  At age 12.  Somehow they're able to go sit in a coffee shop and work at their computer for 36 hours on a problem they're interested in until they fall asleep, and then wake up and say things like "I don't know what's wrong with me; I've been sleeping way more than usual.  I bet I slept for 20 hours this week."  These are the people.  Their brain is theirs.

And my brain is mine.  But not really in the sense of "My table saw is mine" or "My Camaro is mine" or even "My grasp of econometrics is mine."  Not something I have built or acquired through my own efforts, or over which I exert total control.  I could probably stand to learn to exert more control over my brain.  But I think one of my life's biggest and most interesting challenges so far has been developing a relationship with my brain.  I've learned more about what makes it tick and what it just won't stand for.  My brain is mine, maybe, in the same sense that "My dog is mine" or "My girlfriend is mine" or "My kid is mine."  I don't have any of those things, so I guess my brain presents me a with a good chance to practice learning how to respect and care for and learn from a living creature for which I have some responsibility.   My brain is mine. To paraphrase Stephen Crane:

It is fickle -- fickle.
But I like it
Because it is fickle
And because it is my brain.

Provincial.

Boston's tallest building, if it moved to New York (like so many other people born in the 70s have done), would be #18.  Just behind the Woolworth building, completed 1913.

This is my little town.  So friendly.

Lento.

I'm listening to this song by Julieta Venegas which I first heard in a McDonald's in Morón on a p-day, and feeling the same sensation of nascent possibility and delicate abundance.  Something about the gentle persistence of that drum machine, the easy coexistence of organic accoridons and saccharine synthesizers, the unexpected spaciness of the harmonies on the chorus.  Above all it's the newness of it: the song still feels like something fresh off the plane, like the first day of summer, like sunrise.  It still wears the fragrance of the magic era in which I met it.  I had lived in Buenos Aires for about a year -- just starting to feel like I was part of the fabric of the place, able to move around, familiar but not accustomed.  Julieta sang this song on the radio and seemed to murmur in my ear that I stood at the new door of a world which would open itself to me as my care for it grew.  Where I could navigate the web of buses and trains moving among 14 million people, could hear their stories and tell them mine.  Where I could be surprised and delighted in dimensions I hadn't even been aware existed.

Sé delicado y esperá.
Dame tiempo para darte todo lo que tengo.

It was the word or the look or the smile that suggests things are coming.  It was whatever rare ether occupies the fleeting space between crush and girlfriend.  It was the city fluttering lashes at me, her dark eyes shining like stars.