My friend Beilin introduced me to the term "graduation goggles," which she heard from the show How I Met Your Mother. According to a HIMYM wiki, "Graduation goggles is the nostalgic feeling one has about a time or someone in their life when it is about to end, even if the time was completely miserable." As my first year in the professional world, away from friends and family, away from my comfortable university bubble, and living within a culture and language I didn't understand, it's no surprise this year was one of the hardest of my life, but I certainly wasn't completely miserable. The isolation I sometimes felt my first semester (mostly due to location and a bad homestay match) was pretty painful, but my second semester has more than made up for it. Anyway...
*note* as I sit writing this entry in my apartment family room, my host mom just ran over with a huge jar filled with a thick, golden substance, plunged a tablespoon in and promptly shoved it in my mouth. It was honey. A tablespoon of sticky, ultra-sweet honey. I'm going to miss this insanity!
...the g. goggles are on in full effect, with each fractured, hallway conversation with a student and each potential last meeting with an ETA friend leaving me prematurely nostalgic and projecting forced "meaning" and finality all over the place. My host family is all goggled up as well - Ohma is teaching me how to make every dish in her repertoir in preparation for a time in America when I miss her and her cooking, and Minnie got choked up when I gave her an English copy of To Kill a Mockingbird with a note to her written on the title page for her birthday.
The second lense is more of a purgatory view: I know what I have ahead of me in America *more on that in a minute* and my "to do" list for getting settled once I'm there is already trailing down 10 of the 17 floors of my apartment building, but I'm stuck here for another 17 days with this tearful "goodbye" permenantly on my lips.
In short, I never want to leave, and I can't leave fast enough.
As narrative-loving creatures, we crave finality - the denouement, the "happily-ever-after," or, for the indie film lover, the "gritty and not-so-happy but still well-filmed ending with a killer soundtrack" often mislabeled as realistic. I've been thinking about this since I read a great review of the documentary The Swell Season (about a band of the same name) in which NPR entertainment blogger Linda Holmes addressed this obsession with endings. In this case, the issue was with viewers accepting the ending of the romantic relationship between the band's two members, as depicted in the film. Holmes says, "it's very hard to get an audience to accept the detachment of a successful ending ... from a happy ending ...." Holmes seems satisfied with the documentary's honest portrayal of the ending of the romance, but even in this case, the "end" moves over to make room for the continuation of a friendship and musical partnership.
In the past few weeks, when I attended Fulbright Korea's farewell gathering, parted with my fellow ETAs and the KAEC office staff for the last time, and began to psychologically prepare myself to say goodbye to the rest of my family and friends in Korea, I've discovered both my own heavy dependence on neatly tied-up endings, and how little my expectations - of relationships sustained despite growing distance and of smooth transitions from one phase of my life neatly to the next - resemble the reality of leaving.
Now and in my future, I will leave people and places that I care about, I will vow to keep in touch, and meet up again, and return, and despite my attempts and promises, I will lose a great many of those people and places forever. (Perhaps this inability to acknowledge an end is why a few of my relationships have had tumultuously dragged-on endings....)
This idea reminds of some people and places I lost upon leaving Harlaxton College in the winter of 2007. As a parting gesture, the seven members of my British Poetry Since the Rennaissance class went to the Angel and Royal Inn for some whiskey and wine and poetry. We sat in the fire-lit pub, warmed within by the spirits and good company, and read our favorite poems from the class. I read Tennyson's Ulysses, but right now I am remembering lines from the piece that Dr. Janice Fuller, a wonderful professor and friend, read that night, T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding:
"What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right ... is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph."
***
Another excerpt from the poem ties nicely into this next bit:
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
Indeed, I will return to America, Kentucky, and my family and know them in a much different way having lived in Korea with two Korean families for a year. I will also return to the location of the last phase of my life in order to begin the next; I was recently hired as the new admissions counselor for the Honors College at WKU! I am so excited to return to Bowling Green, but I know my new life there will be much different from my college years. As a recent college grad, I count myself lucky as all get out to have a job like this so soon! I get to work with people in an academic setting, frequently in and out of the office, and at my beloved alma mater!
***
I'm going to tie this entry up in yet another "goodbye." I never did write about Thailand, or any of 1,000 other fascinating things I did or experienced, but I want to concentrate on relishing these last moments and understanding what they mean - an end. Not a neatly tied-up end, but a messy bundle of emotions, necessarily unsatisfying goodbyes, and some promises made with hope but doubtful realities attached. I am so happy I kept this blog and posted so many pictures on my picasa account. I know having it later will make my imminent nostalgia more poignant for better or worse. To anyone who followed my journey through the year, thank you for reading and for your support!
Goodbye!
Eileen, It was a great year, and every posting we saw or read expanded our universe ... in a very personal way. Knowing you from my knowledge of your Dad and Mom, understanding a bit of where you come from, I enjoyed sharing the feelings of exhiliration, strangeness, and confusion as we encountered the "otherness" of unfamiliar culture. You captured much of it in your writing, and you are just too generous, appreciative, and kind to vent the terror and anger parts that hide underneath. God speed. Safe trip home. See you at the beach!
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