bears

In the past week, I have watched the same episode of "Bear in the Big Blue House" five times. I am sure I will watch it again on Thursday. The 2-year-old boy I babysit sits enthralled on the couch while Bear plays with his friends Ojo, Tree-lo, Shadow, Luna, the Otters, and the mouse Tuttle (my favorite because he's so frenetic and always worked up about something). I find Bear and company far less creepy than the Wiggles, adult men who wear a rainbow spectrum of turtlenecks and dance awkwardly and seem not to realize that they are, in fact, adults.

The central conflict of this episode is that Bear can't find Tree-lo to explain what fall is about. He finally finds him at the end trying to glue the leaves back on the trees to "fix" them (assist goes to the purple otters) and explains that the trees are okay, that the leaves are supposed to fall off to make room for new leaves come spring. Tree-lo, satisfied with this new information, joyously exclaims that the trees are okay and that he loves spring, and Bear retreats to go sing a song with the moon.

I am nostalgic for the days when knowledge was a panacea for troubles of any kind, when any problem could be remedied by information handed down to me by an adult, which I accepted as the gospel truth simply because an adult said it. Note: this didn't even have to be a legal adult, simply someone who seemed old enough to know what they're talking about, for instance, the average twelve-year-old.

Now, I am one of those "adults," and while I thought I would have all the answers by now by virtue of having a college degree, I am left with more questions than ever. So many times, I'm even one step behind that, not even knowing what the question is. There's a sense of unsettled uncertainty, but I can't even formulate it into words. In a world where encyclopedic amounts of knowledge are accessible through a simple google search, there is no solution for those who don't even know what they don't know. You can't google "I'm confused" and expect an explanation or type in "Where should I go" to mapquest and find step-by-step directions from your driveway to your future.

If, however, you were tempted and did google "I'm confused," this is the first image that would pop up.

From one of my favorite books:


"When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you’ve just wandered off the path, that you’ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and its time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you dont even know from which direction the sun rises anymore." – Elizabeth Gilbert

getting out of the car and moments like these

Well, it's been a while since I updated. Life has been moving pretty quickly. I've been in nursing school for three weeks now. While the studying is a drag, the information is really interesting, and I find myself really able to connect the new things I'm learning with things from past courses and with future applications. Also, reading about all the different ways in which people can become sick makes me marvel at the fact that anybody is healthy. It seems like we should all be walking around infested with bacteria and with kidney and liver failure and one arm falling off, and yet our bodies have this amazing restorative capacity and incredible resilience. It's really given me an appreciation for how blessed I am, but there is always that moment when I'm reading a set of symptoms and begin to worry that my tiredness is really a symptom of "insert dramatic illness here" rather than a result of staying up too late the night before. It definitely can make your head spin if you're not careful.

I've been babysitting for three boys, who are 10, 7, and 2, a couple days a week, and they're completely adorable and yet exhausting. The two-year-old is who I watch the most, since the other boys spend a lot of time at school or in activities, and he's the cutest thing ever but incredibly curious and active and always asking "why." Whenever something isn't right to him, he looks at me and says, "It's broken," whether it's that his sandwich has fallen apart or he's just noticed my nose ring for the first time.

And I've been building up my mileage to prepare for the Marine Corps Marathon, which is in late October in D.C. Today was the Philly half marathon, so my dad and I trekked up there at 5:30. It was mentally challenging, and I had a lot of difficulty breathing, which wasn't helped much by my inhaler, but I set a PR by a minute, so I was really happy with it. I'm sure that tomorrow I will be cursing every muscle in my legs, but for now I'm pleased.

All this has left me little time for reflection, and I'm much happier for it. It's an odd sensation, though. For most of my life, I've felt as though the days have dragged by. But for the past six months or a year, time has just flown. I've felt each day when I get out of my car in the parking garage that it was really just moments ago that I was shutting the car door the morning before. It seems like the twenty-four hours that have gone by in between could collapse into a single breath and just vanish. And so looking back on a week just seems like a montage of this me-getting-out-of-the-car scene, with nothing changing except my clothes.

This makes me think of the scene in The Bell Jar when Esther describes how each day is a white box with a black curtain separating it from the next day until suddenly someone has drawn up all the curtains and all that's left is a blinding white stream. Except for her, it's an incredibly depressing and overwhelming sensation, and for me, it's disorienting and dizzying but not really a negative thing at all.

So, that's it. Life is good.