middle schmiddle

Jet black jungle bunny...

I'm keeping that one.

I'm sitting in my apartment drinking Jasmine tea and listening to Brandi Carlyle. My skin is so dry, my lips are dry, my body misses Austin's humidity.

My own understanding of "middleness" relates to my experiences with travel. I often feel as though I'm in the middle of a variety of things, like: two places (the place I just left and the place I'll go to next), two identities (the person I was in the old place and the person I'll become through my experiences in the new place), and two other identities (how I feel myself most intimately vs. how I'm trying to relate to the culture of the place I'm in <--I find myself between those identities).

Sometimes the feeling of middleness, or in-between-ness, is liberating; I'm not bound to the rules of a single place, to the culture based group-mentality that many of its long-term dwellers come to occupy. Sometimes middleness feels isolating; when I want things, like a sure community or a stable lover, and rules start to look like the way to go (i.e. do this, or act this way, and you'll get this).

I think that ultimately I'm in between two natural human desires, though maybe I'm more sensitive to the tension than some. These two are a desire for variety and change and a longing for reassurance (stability, constancy and balance). Elena, you've told me about your wish to reconcile the two.

I want to be at peace with this kind of middleness; to not feel as though one thing--constancy vs. variety--is better than another. My mom stayed with me for four days, and she spent a lot of time dreaming about my future. To her, Arkansas is only a middle-place: the gap between college and the rest of my life. To her telling, this is how it'll go: after this brief stint in the south, during which I'll learn valuable job skills at my internship, I'll move to NYC or San Francisco, get a job, apply to graduate school, meet my true love (according to her I'll only ever have a normal dating life when I decide to move to an intellectual community. All I have to do is give in and go to Columbia). "Then you can stop this gypsy lifestyle," she says.

I understand all the appeal of her dream. Some of it sounds attractive to me. But I don't know if I can do it. Even if I do go to New York, it'll be with gypsy intention--to live an exciting, unrooted life. Maybe what I'm referring to as "middleness" is a seed deeply sewn, one that all my actions & outlook grow from (in which case it shouldn't be called middleness at all: it's more a beginning, middle and end).

I met this guy at a film screening I attended alone in Little Rock two nights ago. He was from Arkansas, moved to L.A. to attend film school, lived in a bus for a while, then moved back to Arkansas five years ago. He was open, frank, warm and funny. Those are qualities I respect and want to emulate. I think I see them most in modern "gypsies."