Category: personal

Home again, home again

I have returned from my Rural Retreat vacation a little bit sun burnt but in one piece. I had a fantastic week but I’m not sure I can even begin to describe it without sounding like a hippie, which makes me not sure I should even try. I’m feeling centered, relaxed, inspired, and, now that I’ve been home long enough to take a shower, clean. I’ll have pictures up later (though, unfortunately, no breathtaking mountainscapes), but for now I’m going to go put lotion on my nose and call Johanna. Time to reconnect with the real world.

I can always change my name

I spent this weekend in western Massachusetts, visiting friends I made at Hampshire College. I left Hampshire after one year and haven’t seen anyone from there in four years, but half a dozen or so of the people I met during that time have remained close to my heart, even as we fell out of touch. Most of the friends I remember graduated within the last year or so and have scattered to different areas but Jared and Justin are still living in western Mass, for now. When Jared called a few weeks ago to invite me to come see them before Justin moves to Boston, I was thrilled to be able to do so. The time I was there was very brief, but I had time to sample some good local beer, hear some cool music, and have a great conversation with the two of them covering life since Hampshire, plans for the future, and political beliefs.

As we said goodbye on Sunday afternoon Jared said, “I’m glad you’re the same Julia I remember.” I didn’t know what to say because I feel like I’ve grown immensely in the last four years, but at the same time I recognized the truth in what he was saying. He and Justin have grown and matured, but they too are still fundamentally unchanged. We were young and idealistic in our first year of college and we are young and idealistic now. We are all, however, more informed than we were then, as well as more contemplative and articulate.

I wonder, though, if ten years from now will find us equally unchanged but growing. The story of growing up often seems to be one of abandonment of ideals in favor of jobs, families, houses, and cars. I see many of my peers, chronological and otherwise, struggling to find a balance, with varying degrees of success.

Some ideals seem to be inherently more compatible with the “real world.” Jared spoke a little bit about thinking that he will never have the money for many of the things he wants to do unless he compromises his ideals. Aside from my feelings about the malleability of our world and a belief that it can be possible to make a decent living without that kind of compromise (unless of those ideals is that money is evil), I wonder if eventually he, like so many of my parents’ generation (sidenote: one of the things I most admire about my parents is that they have always tried to live to their highest truths, and, I think, done well at it) will re-evaluate their priorities in favor of family, comfort, and stability. And I wonder if we make those decisions we are fundamentally changed. I arrived home in the midst of all this wondering and awoke this morning to an email from Kevin about the Enneagram.

I have seen books about the Enneagram in the Self-Help and (pseudo-)Spiritual sections of bookstores and have always dismissed it as hand-wavy crap without knowing anything about it. I have, however, always been interested in personality typing, including the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (I’m an INTP), so I followed the link in the email and took their free test. It told me that I am a Type 5, which, after reading the descriptions, is where I would have put myself. That intrigued me enough to keep reading.

While some of the philosophy behind it still does seem a little hand-wavy to me, other aspects rang true. There’s a lot I don’t know about it, having just visited their website this morning for the first time, but one thing that struch me was the way in which it analyzed motivation, rather than just behavioral personality. For example, the “Key Motivation” for my type is knowledge. Other types might list beauty, joy, generosity, or truth. The site also includes the following discussion of personality:

The personality has the function of closing us down so that we can feel more defended against a threatening and uncertain world. At one time in our lives, in childhood, this response was adaptive and necessary. We had to identify with whatever qualities we found in ourselves in order to defend ourselves more efficiently and to find our place in the world.

But if we were able to stop identifying with our personality right now, who would we be? What would guide our actions? Who or what would be speaking in us? If, all of a sudden, the “autopilot” that directs many of our actions is no longer in charge, how would we be able to live?


This idea of personality as almost a contrivance of the ego is one that’s always held truth for me, but I’ve also always felt that there was still something fundamental that wasn’t contrived. While Myers-Briggs is an interesting personality inventory, it doesn’t concern itself with the more fundamental things that the Enneagram does. I don’t plan to run out and buy any of their books, but pseudo-spiritualist bullshit or not, what I’ve read so far fits fairly cleanly with other beliefs that I already have, adding a dimension to my ideas about psychology and spirituality.

Dancing for twenty years

This weekend we celebrated The Circle School’s 20th Anniversary. We had a big potluck on Friday, and then yesterday was the big event, with an Open House, guest speakers flown in from Massachusetts, a fabulous talent show, and a spectacular dinner for 150 current and past students and their families, as well as friends of the school. I chaired the committee responsible for the weekend, and planning of the celebration has consumed my life for the last few weeks, which is why I haven’t updated recently. It went better than I had ever dreamed it could, but the best part, for me, was dancing under the tent after the public had left and we could relax.

I am grateful for The Circle School’s existence in a way that I cannot ever hope to express. It is an inextricable part of me, of my family, of everything I will ever be. But one of the things that I wanted during my high school years was just to be a normal teenager, as do, I think, many long time TCS students. We *want* all that stupid adolescent drama and the crushes and the falling in love and the school dances celebrating that adolescence. Especially, we want to celebrate the end of all that stupid glorious shit with the very specific event known as PROM.

In planning this event, Johanna kept talking about dancing after dinner and I scoffed and said it would never happen, that TCS people just don’t dance, that we would never get that prom we had always hoped for, even tried to have during my final year at TCS, but never did. I mean, how do you have that kind of event at a school where not only are all ages treated equally, but also where the the lines between students, staff, and parents are often blurred? How do you have that event when some years there is, as there was in my final year, only one graduate? It’s something we’ve all wrestled with, and we’ve never come up with an answer.

I graduated from The Circle School six years ago, though it feels like only a few months since I left. I guess there are parts of me that never let go of that desire for a prom, even though I have left the rest of adolscence long behind. While we were dancing our hearts out last night, Johanna turned to me and said simply, “The prom we never had.” And it was. It was our celebration, the end of The Circle School’s adolescence, in true TCS fashion, with students, staff, and parents all joyfully bouncing to amazingly fun music.

Of course it was even sweeter because of the success of the other events of the day, because it was the first time in weeks that I felt truly able to relax, and because the people who stayed until the end are the ones who have been, and always will be, my family. Of all the things The Circle School has given me, the community is what I cherish most.

But a couple hours of dancing in the pouring rain until my feet hurt so much I can barely walk is pretty good too.

Election Day

Yesterday was the Pennsylvania primary election. I knew it was, but I didn’t think about it until Mike Daniel IMed me at 7:30 in the evening to remind me that I had half an hour left in which to vote. I didn’t vote.

I’ve never voted, which I guess is not that unusual, especially for someone my age, but it is sometimes a source of guilt for me. I think about politics a lot. Sometimes I go weeks obsessing over a single issue, struggling to find a solution I’ll feel comfortable with. I enjoy arguing politics with people. And, perhaps most relevantly, I can’t stand our current administration and spend a lot of time and energy complaining about it. To then not vote feels hypocritical to me.

The problem is that I don’t know who I’d put in office instead of Bush. Not only isn’t there one politician with whom I agree on most issues, but the vast majority of politicians today stand for things that I am vehemently opposed to. Historically I’ve identified myself as Libertarian, but over the last few months I’ve started to drift away from even that. I worry that one of these days I’ll wake up and find myself ready to vote Green, just out of desperation to believe in someone.

I recently read The Radical Center, which views this as a widespread issue and attempts to address the problem. Written by Ted Halstead and Michael Lind soon after September 11th in 2001, the book cites low voter turnout and recent survey results as evidence that a majority of Americans are dissatisfied with their options and that new solutions to existing problems are necessary. Citizens, they argue, don’t want to have to choose between reproductive choice and school choice, or between a free market and a sustainable environmental policy, just to name a few.

To remedy the situation, the authors propose a shift in our social contract, as well as novel approaches to partial Social Security privatization, school vouchers, universal healthcare, and more. Their aim is to maximize personal responsibility and choice, while still doing their best to insure that all Americans will be able to maintain a basic standard of living.

To my surprise, I found myself moved by their arguments. I believe the Libertarian line that the only innate rights are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness (I’m actually not sure about this one — how is this different from liberty?), but I also hate the idea of living in a society with a huge class division. Even if it’s not wrong on the most basic level that the deprivation of the three aforementioned rights is, isn’t it still morally questionable? And yet, is it the government’s job to determine morals, beyond the protection of those first three?

I keep coming at these questions from every angle I can think of, and all I can come up with is that I don’t know, and I don’t even know how to figure it out, but I do know that every option presented to me feels wrong to an extent that I don’t feel good about casting my vote for any of them. So for now I vote my conscience by not voting at all, and hope that one of these days I’ll figure it all out so that I can run for office myself. In the meantime, I think everyone should read The Radical Center and tell me what they think.

Idle hands

I don’t think I’ve mentioned how much I’m enjoying being unemployed. Somehow, my life feels more full than it did when I spent 45 hours each week at work. I have a million things I want to do, none of them are getting done, and yet I’m never bored. If you’re filthy rich and want to support my unemployment indefinitely, please email me, I’m sure we can work something out.

Anyway, while I was randomly surfing tonight, I found this site that will take your words and put them on a church sign. A few months ago, one of the churches near EarthLink had a sign that looked something like this:

I kept meaning to take a picture of it and post it above the caption, “Sticky, yes, but sweet and delicious.” I was too lazy to actually take the picture. Now I can show you how clever I am without leaving my chair.