Albertson's

My family and I are currently on holiday. My grandparents, aunt and uncle, cousin, and I have all gone to Ashland, Oregon, for the Shakespeare festival. We didn't go to see a Shakespeare play; we actually went to see a play adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time (which is my favorite book and which was adapted so brilliantly). In addition to seeing the play, we've gone around the town and to places in towns nearby. It's been nice. We've done fun things, the sort of things that don't happen at home.

But today, we did something that we don't normally do on holidays.

We went to Albertson's.

Now, this normally doesn't happen to me when I'm on holiday. Going to Albertson's, I mean. We don't normally find ourselves needing to get anything at the grocery store. But we needed one of those giant packages of bottled water, so we went to Albertson's to get it.

When we walked in, I just had to stand at the front of the store and process my situation. For reference - we had just come from the site of a Shakespeare festival, which had been preceded by a scenic drive through some farmland, which itself had been preceded by walking around a small town with old buildings and beautiful architecture and antique shops and suchlike. You know. Cool stuff. The sort of stuff you go on holiday for.

And here we were. At the most mundane place I can possibly think of.

Albertson's.

I wasn't disappointed. Truth be told, I was actually pretty entertained by the whole situation. I have a tendency to notice ironies and strange juxtapositions and...well, that's what the whole thing felt like. Stuff like this is what my life is all about. And I don't mean like it's the meaning of my life or what my goal in life is. I mean it's what the gist of my life's events are like. Basically, my life consists of me getting myself into things that are mostly mundane but have some sort of unusual quality that makes them amusing and a little bit surreal, and I just roll with it and have a good time while I'm at it.

I occupied myself by wandering off from the rest of the group to look at laundry detergent and window spray and stare at it and examine it like it was the most fascinating, amazing stuff ever. I was hoping that someone might come by and think, "Who is this person and why are they so fascinated by the laundry detergent and window spray?" I like making other people's lives a little more surreal. 

The others bought water bottles and some things that weren't water bottles. My aunt took a curiously long time ordering a Starbucks. My grandma suggested we get frozen dinners and my uncle suggested we not because this is our vacation and we eat frozen dinners at home all the time, vacation is the time to do things you don't normally do. He ended up ordering us pizza when we got back to our hotel.

I'm sitting here thinking about the fact that, of all the memories I'm going to have of this trip, the fact that we went to an Albertson's is one of them. I'm more than okay with that.

Four tubes of Chapstick.

I have four tubes of Chapstick in one pocket.

I am irrationally happy about this situation. It is bringing me great satisfaction and I'm currently of the mindset that nothing short of truly insurmountable tragedy could make me unhappy right now, because of the fact that I have four tubes of Chapstick in one pocket.

I don't understand this reaction to having four tubes of Chapstick in one pocket, but I'm not going to question it, because I have a history of responding strangely to small and/or ridiculous things like this.

It's sort of a paradox because I'm a naturally very depressive person when it comes to the large things (sometimes in a way that makes sense when the large things are viewed from a realistic standpoint, sometimes in a way that only makes sense when you factor in that I am in fact clinically depressive). But when it comes to the small things, I get happier than makes any degree of sense and it makes my whole mood one of indomitable joy. Like a feeling that the world is a good and happy place (or at least has a lot of potential to be) and that everything is right with the universe.

I learned long ago not to question happiness and to take it when I can get it.

Therefore, I will not question why having four tubes of Chapstick in one pocket makes me so happy.

Relationships, the past, and uncertainty.

I miss the way my friendships and relationships used to be, and I'm not sure if they aren't that way anymore because I just currently don't have around me the right people or if it's to do with the fact that I've gotten older and whatever made the old friendships so special is age-specific, one of those things you can't get back when you get older.

I'm okay if it's something I can't get back because I've grown up, I'll accept that if that's the case, and I'll accept it with grace. It's just not knowing that terrifies me. If and when I know, I'll be able to correctly understand and predict the nature of whatever future relationships I might have. I'll know if there's something in particular to look forward to. If I can expect things to be as they were in the past. Because things don't happen the same way twice, but sometimes certain events are repeated just because they're events that happen to people with a relative degree of frequency, so it makes sense it should happen to you again.

It's making me a bit nervous due to some writing projects that I've gotten myself into that rely upon the premise that I understand friendship and relationships well enough to write a fictional example of one that 1. reads fairly realistically (i.e. you can imagine it being real without a whole lot of suspension of disbelief), and 2. says some things about the nature of friendships and human interactions in general. It's because - and I think a lot of writers do the same - I tend to write examples of things to say something about the thing of which they're an example. A character serves as a reflection of humanity, a situation proves something about how humans react to things, a relationship says something about how people interact with and in relation to each other. It's based on relationships I've had in the past, which is all well and good (sensible, I should think), but I realized that I was much younger than I am now and much younger than the characters in the story when those took place, so...were they like the way they were just because I happened to be lucky enough to meet certain people? Was it because I was young and certain things happen to you only when you're young? Was it because I was young and thus not as jaded about interpersonal interactions as experience and time have made me, and that someone whose experience wasn't the same as mine might be able to experience something much like I did at a different time in my life?

What is realistic for me to imagine for the future and what has been lost with time?

I just wish I knew.

None of this would even be a thing if I didn't think of myself in terms of a case study.

Sometimes I think about how the way I think and the way my thought processes/emotions work are apparently so different from everyone else's that anything i learn that may be true of me is not necessarily true (actually, almost certainly not true) about humanity in general and that I'll never be able to use self-observation and self-analysis (which is one of the few things I'm actually very good at) to understand the species I live in (i.e. one of the things I want to understand and that I think is most important to me to understand - really, most important for any human to understand).

Sometimes I think about how my ability to understand myself will not help me understand the species of which I am by all appearances a part.

Sometimes I think about how one of the things I'm best at will not help me understand anything about anything but myself - i.e. the most selfish thing I could hope to understand, which helps no one but myself and maybe the few people who actually think I'm interesting enough to hear me explain in great depth. (No one is that interested in me as a case study to let me do that, to ask for that. No one.)

Sometimes I think about this fact. I got stuck with a human whose nature wouldn't tell me anything about human nature. I got stuck with such an outlier that I can't learn anything from it. The only thing it will teach me is about itself. And that's not important or vast enough for me to find this knowledge sufficient.

And when I say I got stuck with this human, what I mean is I got stuck being this human.

I don't like it.

Symbolism.

You know what? I as a writer have a tendency to keep putting bits of imagery or vaguely symbolic things in my stories, with no idea HOW exactly they're symbolic. But I don't do it to be pretentious. I do it because I like looking at my story halfway through writing it and then realizing that I'd been doing something clever all along without realizing it.

My mind works in a way that likes patterns. It likes seeing patterns in other things, and it likes working in terms of patterns. It likes working in terms of patterns to the point where it creates patterns without me consciously realizing it. And symbolism is a kind of pattern, really - a phrase or image repeated, meaning the same thing each time. That's a pattern, though I don't suppose most people realize that's what it is. People who look for such things realize it.

It's more exciting that way, anyway. It's like finding something that way. It's kind of like reading tea leaves or something; looking at what is and what wasn't consciously made that way with a meaning in mind, and finding a shape in it from which you extract meaning. Although in my case I'm placing the tea leaves on purpose without knowing what they're going to look like or what it's going to make. Finding images in places where they aren't. Seeing patterns in places when they aren't there. Making meaning. Like an existential reading of what I'm doing, like taking something initially apparently meaningless and then giving it meaning.

I don't know but that's what I like to do.