Crossroads

I don't know. I should go to bed now, so this will be brief. I'm getting married in a week, which is very exciting. But I lost a potential job today, which is less so. I can soothe my frustration with the knowledge that I was a finalist for the position, but once again the reasons for my not getting the job sound horribly similar to the sounds of my scampering away from a PhD, in a fruitless search for more normal pastures.

My dad says I run away from who I am, which is an "intellectual" (a curiously 18th century word, really, more applicable to those amazing female salonieres; to a time when it wasn't pretentious to self-identify as thought-full; a word allocated to Oxford men with pipes and tweeds, and not to me). I don't know. (Again.) I'm not so brilliant. I knew that at school, and so left. There were a few professors who enjoined me to stay, but I never understood why. My writing can be disorganized. I don't always speak articulately. Benjamin and Deleuze and Levinas swam in my brain, pausing for brief moments of clarity and application before getting lost again in their strokes. I am not so brilliant. But then, I am not its opposite, either. There were moments.

So what do I do? My dad says quit the menial job and dedicate myself full time to teaching. Live off my savings for a while and stop exhausting myself with these 70 hour weeks for a pittance. Doing so scares me. I don't like not making money. A big part of me just wants a "grown-up" job like my friends have, where they sit at a desk and have meetings and behave in adult and scheduled ways. But I know, deep in my gut (or maybe this time, it's my brain speaking), that I'm not like my friends. I can't sit at a desk and push (important) papers around; I'm not ultra organized; I don't know and don't care about PowerPoint presentations. I don't ever get the office jobs I apply for, and apparently I've taught "too much college" to teach high school.

Am I failure? Did I run away from the PhD because I fell in love, and because I was lonely, and because I saw brilliance in others and mediocrity in my own ideas and I grew afraid? Yes.
Yes.

I ran away, but there's nothing for me here like I thought there would be. So what do I do?

Pyotr Went to Heaven and Little Chef Went to

Ah, Pyotr.

While Chas and I were in between adolescent grappling I went to Spain, but not before winning the angelic devotion of Pyotr the Protestant. PP was gentle and sweet and afflicted with acne, which formed a sympathetic bond between us. PP was also evangelical, and a great portion of his love letters were devoted to sincerely hoping I would come to Jesus. I didn't know that evangelical Protestantism existed--actually, I still don't, outside of the Puritans--and I sure as hell didn't want to come to Jesus. But I liked being doted on, and he was funny and smart and really cute beneath his pimples.

Our relationship was primarily imaginary because I lived in Spain the entire time, promptly dumping him for Chas a few days after I returned to the States. Pyotr and I came from such different backgrounds. I remember the one and only time I visited his home--where he and his ridiculously pretty and popular, and thus repulsive sister were home-schooled--I was treated like an exotic specimen. "A Jew! Tell us, what is it like to be a Jew?" I was surrounded by a sea of friendly, eager faces, all awaiting tales of who knows what: abstaining from pork, speaking Hebrew, bloodletting little Gentile children to make the Passover matzot. I was stranded in a sea of beaming Protestants; Yentl Phone Home.

But for all the religious culture shock Pyotr and I had a lot in common. Acne, as I said. We liked Blues Traveler and doing theatre. We were both shy, and I think not passionate for each other. His family moved later that year, and I'm sorry that we didn't keep in better touch. I do run into his mother occasionally (his parents relocated), which seems to fill her with an irrational exuberance. I have to say, there's nothing quite like running into the mother of the boy you callously dumped after he wrote you love letters for months, only to have her say, LOUDLY, to her husband (who really couldn't care less): Oh look! It's Pyotr's little Jew! Remember her, honey? The little Jew!

I think we all fantasize to some extent that we leave indelible marks on our former loves, subtle lines of emotion that ride through our veins undetected, until they are recalled by a song or a smell, or someone's mother. And I think we hope that these marks contain essential, but incomplete elements our beauty, just enough to invite nostalgia and the smallest tug of longing.

To think that my mark is Judaism is odd and hilarious (does he hear the word "circumcision" and think of me?). But for Pyotr's world, defined as it was by Jesus and Mary and Joseph, I imagine it's a dark, deep and meaningful mark. A souvenir of his sojourn beyond the known world. And an irrepressible reminder that he made it home safely.

Reader: The final line is for dramatic purposes only. Pyotr is a lovely and open-minded man. And contrary to all indications, his mother is not an anti-Semite.