Thought Number One: Crossroads

Decision-making is such a strange and fate-filled process. I’ve never been very good at decisions, whether it’s deciding what to wear in the morning, what to eat for lunch, or what to do with the next five years of my life. I am always afraid that one small decision – one small turn on the highway of life – will lead me down a path I shouldn’t really be taking. My decision to process copy before taking a stack of letters down to the mailroom – I decision I weighed for longer than the average person – results, for example, in me being in my cubicle when an editor stops by to collect something from the printer, which results in a short and unexpected conversation, which results in a trip to Memphis – something significant. Had I mailed those letters, I may not be going to Memphis.

If such little events can have such large consequences (okay, Memphis may not be that large of a consequence, but we’re considering the size of the outcome in relation to the significance of the initial decision here, and mailing letters is not something to which I usually have to give too much thought), then the big decisions are made so much more difficult.

I have decided to go to Duke. Perhaps it was inevitable. But with such a large decision, I can’t help wondering what the Sliding-Doors-me-that-takes-the-train will be doing in five years. The Sliding Doors thought process can get you twisted, since it inevitably involves looking forwards in the same way we usually look backwards. If I hadn’t found a certain Web-board online one day I would have never met Lori, and I would have never moved to Mississippi, which would mean I would have never met Rachel or heard about Southern Progress, so I would have never heard of this internship. Where would I be? What would I be doing? Looking back, you see yourself standing at innumerable cross-roads: a confused stick-person version of you, sliding somewhat inevitably along the route toward your current place in space and time, but pausing ever so slightly at each decision. When you approach a cross-road, no matter how small, you can’t help wondering if this is the missed subway train.

If you haven’t seen Sliding Doors, that paragraph made no sense. And you need to watch the movie. John Hannah is great.

Thought Number Two: Pages

There are so many pages in my life. There are the glossy pages at work – turning them to find a phone number for a reader, a story on file for an editor. The pages and pages of paper wasted each day that appears in the huge recycle bins in the copy room: three giant bins. There are the pages of the books we gleefully submitted to LibraryThing.com, a gem of a Web site that allows you to catalog all the books you own, add your own tags, comment, rate, and label. There are the pages of the books in England I can’t yet upload to LibraryThing. There are the hundreds of hundreds of pages of the books I have to begin reading for my PhD – the Descent of Man and Bleak House (!), and “the tell-tale compression of the pages” in Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature, the book Lori and I are reading in the evenings in an attempt to find career-minded inspiration. There are web-pages: These, which haven’t been updated in ages, and Destination Elsewhere, which has – shockingly – been updated twice in the last month.

Sometimes I long for that first blank page of a new notebook, one of the blue-covered ones from school with the wide lines. You had to bend the front card cover back just a little when you first began, after filling in your name and the subject on the front. Then you took your favourite fountain pen and began to write in your best handwriting, and there was so much hope and promise for that new book, which was going to be your neatest yet, and filled with your best work. I want to start a new book and write an inspirational subject on its cover. Perhaps I’ll write just “Inspiration.”

Thought Number Three: The Songs of Our Lives

We tend to commodify music, a bit like books. Entering my books into LibraryThing made me cognizant of the way books as possessions can sometimes overrule their content. When I hold my iPod in the palm of my hand, knowing that it’s shiny smooth body holds the soundtrack to my life, I couldn’t help feeling possessive of the tiny files inside: they are mine. They describe me.

I made a CD this week for a friend at work who copied me some music earlier in the week. Playing his CDs in the car on the way home, I tried to pick out the sounds that might be familiar, so I could find something somewhere in my iTunes library to properly reciprocate. At home, picking my way through my playlists, I seemed to be panning through a musical history of my life, song by song.

The more I tried to find music he would like, the harder it became. I was listening for a certain style, but all I could hear were memories, little melodies of my life that were impossible to disconnect from myself. Whenever I latch on to a new song I like, I tend to analyze the process by which it becomes a part of me like that. I suppose it’s a bit like making new friends. At first, people may really like you – they think you’re funny and great to be around. They anticipate becoming close. It takes a while to be comfortable enough to relax around each other completely; you don’t yet know each others’ lines. But that’s sometimes the most fun part. You surprise each other. You hum a tune in your head incessantly, but can’t quite remember the words. Then there is the turning point. You either drift apart – you might learn the words too well, and then you just become another well-known “friend” – or you become part of each other’s inner circle. The songs in my inner circle are inseparable from me. If I heard them for the first time now, who knows whether I would even like them or not? But each one stood by me during a part of my life, and they will always be there, like friends you can call up after years and still find a way of clicking. I still remember all the lines.

There’s Stuck On You and sitting in the backseat of the car, singing along with Mum and watching raindrops flash across the windows, Dad at the wheel. There’s Le Monde Est Stone, learning lyrics in my bedroom, when my bedroom was upstairs and had purple walls. Other old French lyrics, Plamondon of course, accompanied an art exam at Rookwood – they had the blues of businessmen. Until I Find You Again was my 14-year-old daydreaming self. The Reason and I Would were being part of a big group of friends – all older than me, all with their own “grown up” lives that weren’t perhaps as grown up as I imagined them to be at the time. Call The Man was trips to the hospital. You Belong To Me and Break Your Heart were played through headphones, starting to find a different style, one that needed the lights turned off and a lonely silence. Happy? –the whole album-- was played so much I had to buy a new CD at 16 to replace the scratched and battered copy. I don’t think I ever took it out of the player. I Never Saw Blue Like That Before was finding a friend. Si’l Suffisait D’Aimer was millennium midnight. Do What You Have to Do was driving alone. Mary (the live version) was the train from London. The Promise was sitting at the third-story window of an ancient Benedictine Abbey in France. Et Je T’aime Encore is driving through Provence. For a While was driving Mississippi roads, as were countless others. Something’s Gotta Give & French Kiss were soundtracks for playing cards on the floor. Winding Road and Let Go were driving to IKEA in Bristol for furniture, driving to Exeter to set up a new home. Collide, Landing in London, Here by Me, If Only, Wish For You… these are the songs of Exeter roads, dismal and cold, but full of thinking and a different life, friends and good times. Better Together and Banana Pancakes were Lori’s birthday in the apartment with its white walls and white furniture. They were also finishing the dissertation. Come Back Down was driving from Atlanta in a rental car to my interview in Birmingham. Castles was applying for a PhD during a cold English Christmas season. Scratch is my fears. Colors is in my head. I suspect Ray Lamontagne will play a significant part in my internship soundtrack – Trouble and Shelter.

Our lives have soundtracks. Perhaps the way to really get to know someone is to make them a mixed tape of your soundtrack, but I suspect it wouldn’t really work. To understand that soundtrack you would need to understand the context. Otherwise, the songs are just disconnected chapter titles, disparate, removed. If you were to look up all those songs listed above and make a CD of them, you would probably think I have a terrible taste in music. They wouldn’t make up my current list of favorite songs. That would be quite different. But they would be the accompaniment to the movie of my life, a movie that could only make sense in my head.

It excites me to think that there will be so many more songs.