I listen to Country every Fall. The good kind. In other words, I don't listen to the kind that would make me want to "Garth on my Brookes" (to quote my friend Marc). Fall to me is the most beautiful season. Nature seems to go back to its roots. The whole world seems to go country.
One of my favorite songs is "Unknown Legend," by Neil Young. It's the kind of song girls listen to and pretend it's about them-- or the kind of song I listen to and pretend it's about me.
It always takes me back to something I've forgotten. Inevitbaly though "Helpless," comes on and then the line, "all my changes were there" finds me completely in the moment, revealing how I feel about this place.
This year has been the hardest one I've faced in a group-oriented culture built on formality; where work is number one, where I can't address my co-workers by their names because they're older, where everything is about "face" and making someone lose face is the ultimate crime; where maintaining relationships often means biting your tongue. It's been hard but it's also been rewarding.
I now work with a woman who is 40 years my senior. Understandably, she doesn't like listening to me. She doesn't like that more responsibility falls upon me than her. Unfortunately, we can't work through some of our problems, and the more success I enjoy, the more she dislikes me. Her anger voices itself in hateful attacks on my character.
Recently, I had a conversation with one of my best friends who just spent some time with her mother whom she doesn't always get along with. She said she didn't know whether she was under so much stress or just had so many other things on her mind, but the things that would normally irritate her, didn't. I thought about my situation at work, at feeling constantly attacked and the suprising ease I've had with biting my tongue, and I realized-- there's something to be said for stress. If nothing else, it can prioritize.
While I've had good times equally as intense as the bad, I would lie if I said I wouldn't remember this year as stressful. Waiting for a taxi the other night, I kept being passed up by one after another because I didn't live far enough away. Then a boy shouted out of his window, his buzz-cut leading me to believe he was a US soldier: "You can jump in here if you wanna fuck!" I thought of Kris Kristofferson's, "Just the Other Side of Nowhere" and how "everywhere I try to go here seems to only bring me down."
So I search for meaning, because it helps. I know that I'm becoming well versed in the art of restraint-- a lesson, admittedly I could have used. I'm learning to see things for what they are-- to recognize the truth behind peoples actions; those who love and those who hate because they want to be loved. I'm learning with my students that "the love you make is equal to the love you take." (A Beatles quote outside the genre of Country that I couldn't resist) I see them listening to cd's I've made them, or handing me their art work to put on my wall, or getting an answer right and giving me a high five, and I feel rewarded.
As I balance the tricky reality of office politics, I'm learning when "to hold them... when to fold them... when to walk away...and when to run."
And when I really feel beaten up by circumstance, when one more taxi driver has taken me for a ride because I'm female and alone, when a sleezeball yells something sleezy out of his window, when someone hatefully attacks my character, I turn on Kris Kristofferson and listen to him tell me that "I knew there was something I liked about this town. But it takes more than that to bring me down."
