Peter Pan

This morning I received an email from my friend Chris. We met in the Army and more than nine years later he is now a lieutenant in the Air Force and on his second marriage. He is also a new father. Since he has been busy juggling training with new domestic duties, I don't get to hear from him as often but when I do a new domestic issue about life at home invariably snakes its way into the email and I feel obliged to josh him about this. He's beginning to participate in a once-a-week lunch series about being a good parent and his wife is attending some sort of counseling and the baby is in daycare. The last email was a string of jokes that could be expected from a bachelor.

However, I don't feel like eeking out a bachelor existence for the rest of my days and ever since having graduated from Indiana University, I have felt a bit uneasy about the direction of my life. I spoke with several professors and asked them to write letters of recommendation and when we talked about my plans they would tell me that I have everything to offer; however, I feel that I still haven't found my niche. I felt that way a little more than nine years ago.

Senior year of high school had rolled up on the scene without much fanfare and one of the things it brought with it was a recruiter named Davis who rang me up one late afternoon and asked whether or not I'd like to talk to him about options with the military. Unbeknownst to me at that point, I was a catch. I figured I'd go to IU the next year, study Political Science and History. Ha. The winds of dying summer also dropped a bombshell. I would have to go to IUPUI the first two years. I was not going to live at home for another two years, no matter what. Just wasn't going to happen. My mom didn't have enough money to send me to IU to live in dorms and party it up and most likely, I wasn't really ready for University life anyway. It would have been disastrous. So while 50% of my graduating class knew that the endless partying of summer 1996 would only be the preparty that would be college, I irked out a few shameful dollars scrubbing floors at a Hardee's restaurant before I shipped off to another eye-opening life experience: Basic Training.

Without being too harsh and getting too distracted by smaller details, I will say that my mom and stepdad didn't give me much guidance when I was growing up. I suspect that many children's parents do what they can to provide the greatest amount of exposure to the widest bearth of experience as possible for their children in order that they will have the greatest chance to find their niche as possible. I didn't have that luck. I grew up mostly raising myself and was responsible for most of what I came to enjoy. I was an awkward kid who never found a niche in high school and so I think that living in the dorms would have been a lot more frustrating than I could have imagined. Yet, I was smart but just didn't apply myself. The military was the best option for me. For the first time in my life, I realized that I could be damn good at something if only I tried. And I succeeded. I had my exposure and knew that there was a path there for me that would take me to success. Yet, I think that I have been forging along this path far too long. Whereas this gave me success in the military and other related employment, I am pretty sure this isn't my calling. Now, knowing a few foreign languages is obviously helpful and no doubt increases my marketabilitiy, yet, I feel as if I have shorted myself and what I could have gotten out of my undergraduate education.

When I first arrived at IUB, I realized that I was leagues ahead of the average freshman. I knew I had a lot to offer. I was more mature, older, worldly-wise, and knew what I wanted. It seems that many of those same kids have now blossomed and moved on past where I am now. In some respects, I wonder if I haven't taken a few steps back. The depression over three semesters did that for sure, but I am not sure if that was the only thing that set me back. Now this is where my little self-reflection post becomes a bit blurry, simply because I do not know what else to say.

Law school. Am I sure? I don't know. I know that I don't want to settle for my life being something that I don't feel at home with.

Knjige

Pročitao sam puno knjiga poslije diplomiranja.

Prije polaska u Europu, pročitao sam ove knjige:

The Things They Carried
Slowness
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
Choke
Lullaby
Survivor
Identity

Počeo sam knjigu, Fight Club (Klub Boraca) kad sam bio u Americi, ali sam završio je u Italiji.

Diary
A Personal Matter
The Master and Margarita
Shopgirl
The Heart of a Dog
Slapstick
Jitterbug Perfume
Still Life With Woodpecker
Perfume
Half-Asleep in Frog Pajamas
Invisible Monsters
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
The Last Man
The Fatal Eggs
Angels and Demons
The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

Sada, čitam knjigu, The Da Vinci Code (Davinčevi Kod), napisan D. Brownom.
Još ima jednu knjigu da znam je pročitao, ali zaboravio što je ova.

Dobro, završio sam Davinčevi kod. Nije bila sjajna, ali zanimljiva.

Pjesme

Imaju puno pjesama koje su moje omiljene.

Story of My Life - Kristian C.
High - James Blunt
Sick and Tired - Anastacia
Around the Sun album - REM
Angelo - Taljanksa pjesma, koju je pjevana nekoliko taljancima za vrijeme EuroStar kontesta

Jos i imaju druge pjesme, ali ne mogu se pamti one.

back to hrvatska

and yet it rains...

am i a person overly obsessed with symbols and the repetition of things in this world, or is it just that my mind is obsessed?

back here in croatia. tried to make it albania. the ferries are booked full until august 16th. the day after my birthday.

i've been wondering about music lyrics while i have been here. i have been hearing quite a few songs that have meant a lot to me over the years. now, hearing music all the time, one is going to hear a lot of the songs that have meant something or another to them when they heard them. however, and sad to say, music hasn't been all that big a part of my life. reading, writing, traveling, yes. music...more an desert than a main course. and yet i have heard many songs that have meant a lot to me. that take me back to a time where those memories would, if you were a sort of neural archivist, would say they were lost. where you would fail at rediscovery, the music proves to be an adept excavater.

i just heard james blunt's High the other day, which took me to damn near the beginning of this particular journey, to a bar in Bologna, where Amanda (who is leaving the continent tomorrow) and I went to go dancing. It was a Wednesday night, I believe, or was it Tuesday. The journal has it recorded, but the actual day of the week fails me. Not fully excavated, I see. However, the music didn't worry about that. It was a moment of serendipity that was of note. Bologna is a large city in the north of Italy. The fact that this was the second bar/club that we went to and found Bobby there (Bobby is known to both of us. I know him through the Bloomington Playwrights Project and she through Theatre at IU) was something completely unexpected. At the back of the club, he saw Amanda and then there I was. It was great. He, his friends, and the two of us mingled. He's down in the center of Italy teaching English, as far as I know. Of course, many more details about that bar, and everything, float through my head. The surface of my mind has been brushed and all sorts of memory floats around and back into visibility.

There are many other songs. I can't seem to think of them right now. Not enough excavation...

rain, rain, come to take me away

no point in saying, "go away."

Italy's shut her trains down after raiding a sleeper cell, Britain's recovering, and Russia's getting bombed everyday.

So maybe the fact that Croatia is flooding all along her coast doesn't really make much difference to too many people; however, I am here and that is what counts right now. I just wrote someone that I should have probably invested in some snorkeling equipment earlier, yet, I didn't. Good thing I know how to swim.

london bombings

it wasn't just two weeks ago, in sighisoara, that i was speaking with a couple of brits about potential for terror attacks on the underground...and now. i just hope no one i know and care about was among the injured or dead. take care out there.

leaving netherlands

my time here in the low country has seen more inside time than any other country that i have visited. i have felt really unproductive and such inactivity usually makes me feel a little uneasy and is accompanied with guilty feelings; however, i don't suffer from any kind of feeling such as that but what i do feel is regret for having come here at a time when at it has done is rain and be cold and windy. my third time to amsterdam and still no pictures of that place. for me, it is a sort of strange mystery.

with all her ominous arches and ancient facades
so aptly named; chimes and smoke snake
their way along the interminable cobblestone -
what did you expect to find when you came here?

with all her famous artists and canals and smokeshops and the infamous red light district where all of our collective shame is brought to bear and made tangible.

like last time, i say i will never return; however, with no pictures, how can i not? perhaps there is something still here for me to find but the rain is a sign that says "not yet." so, i do not venture back there but croatia-ward once more for the islands and rocky beaches and happiness that will be found there. much has transpired but internally and externally and well, i do not wish to jinx myself for the last hours to be spent here in Den Haag, so i will not say anymore.

another big event

today my sister get's married. i'm still in Den Haag and she's across the world's second largest body of water. i'm not going to make it. she told me about this when i was in bucharest (let's be fair, she hinted at the potential when i visited her last time in Greenwood. that was the day after Christmas), which was in early May. she told the rest of the family about it during this past week, inviting them to Garfield Park. i barely know the guy, Ben, but this should not come as a surprise as i really do not know my sister very well, either. we haven't really spoken much since our mother died. that was nearly five years ago. she's 19 now, the same age our brother was when he married.

when i think about this, i wonder how things have changed since mom passed away. however, this goes back about five months prior to that, late June 2000, when I arrived back home on terminal leave, with about two weeks left of my active duty committment. the last three months that i had spent at Ft. Carson were amazing and there was no shortage of fun and friendship. the next ten months would see a major overturn in all that. when i had arrived home i was told that mom had a small lump in her lung. we didn't know what to think about that, but things were being checked out. things were much worse than a small lump. the "small" lump had made some new brothers and sisters in her brain and lymph nodes.

my mom and i weren't close, either. sure, we had our conversations when i came back home but there was always this distance between us, some sort of unseen and misunderstood barrier that had been raised long ago. i always knew it was there but it just seemed that she and i couldn't bring that down together. thus, my going to germany may not have been difficult for which to give her blessing. after about a month at home, in late july, i jumped onto a plane and flew out to Fairfax, VA (i had been there once earlier in the month for an interview) to begin training/inprocessing for my new career.

in september, i got the call. mark nisbet had died. annie, jim's wife, was the one who called me. i didn't know what to say. i had only known him for a few years. a sixteen-year slice had been taken out of my life when it came to knowing about the paternal side of the family. i had only visited him four times between mid-April 1998 and June 2000, when, after leaving Carson, i made my way to Phoenix to visit family down there. Nana had found him. she had been laid up with going through chemotherapy for lung cancer, of which my own mom was dying. Mark didn't take it too well. at this point, he started declining and, suffering from Type II Diabetes, it wouldn't be too long before i was halfway to being orphaned.

between parental deaths, i did some work in Bosnia with some very unfavorable people and thus my mental predicaments worsened and began to drink profusely and with total abandon, far beyond reckless. the army physique, though never exquisite and sculpted, fell apart and gave way to near-obesity. in short time, even with circumstances as they were, i would have few friends and really no one to speak with about what was going on in my life.

the expected, though not really, call came during the evening of 29 november 2000. two days later, i was back home.

and this brings me back to my sister...with whom i haven't had too good of a relationship with since this time. i was home only two weeks and for the most part, we got along, a few words here and there. when i would return home again in mid-August 2001, the time passed between us was very similar to the previous December. However, we had a huge fight but we talked about it i thought that things would be better soon. no. i won't go into all the problems, but i will say that that time was really the last time we ever laughed together or joked or could really speak with one another.

and now she's getting married. she's 19 and she's getting married. i don't know how this is going to play out, if it's going to work out. Jake, our brother, who's also two years younger than me, and his wife are still together. maybe things will bring us together at some point, but then again all of this seems like we are following our own trajectories which lead us to territories completely alien to one another. this seems more like two friends than family members.

and now this all seems like i can keep going and almost whine about the situation. but i won't. like i said, today my sister is getting married.