A Very Specific Part of Kansas

On Turning Twenty-Eight

I celebrated my first anniversary on the seventh. It feels strange to not be a newlywed anymore. Marriage is still relatively new to us of course, but now it no longer feels weird to be married. The first few months of marriage were pretty surreal. Whenever I said, "You are my wife. I am your husband," I couldn't be super confident that it was true. The fact that I am someone's husband still gets me every once in a while, but for the most part I'm used to that fact. What gets me now is how I continue to fall in love. It's shocking, really. Which seems weird to say because I knew I would love her more today, than I did on 1/07/10, but there are these moments where I look at her, or tell my keyboard about her, and I say to myself I just fell more in love and I am amazed all over again.

I will say that my favorite thing about the last year has been our opportunity to comfortably and confidently fall in love.

Another shocking thing is that my life actually seems easier. I expected life to be better, but not easier necessarily. There was going to be more bills, more decisions, more complications, etc., but I didn't realize how complicated my single life was. I mean, there isn't a lot in life that is as complicated as dating; stupid people and geniuses alike struggle with it. I have a great family and group of friends, but being able to talk to someone about your life isn't the same thing as having someone who is going through it with you. Chelsea knows my problems, fears, weaknesses, and so on, but not because I have told her about them (as that is the case most of the time), but because she experiences them with me. That is a huge difference, and having someone like that in your life makes it easier. Not to mention having a person there to take care of you when you are sick, and who doesn't care if you might be embellishing your illness a tad for a little extra attention, because for some damn reason they just like taking care of you. That's much easier than when I got pnuemonia a while ago and stayed in my room all alone for five days.

I now don't have to look for comfort or relief. For the most part both are right next to me; even more so with our tiny apartment.

I don't mean to say that life is a cakewalk now. Life was a kick in the drawers before and continues to be; it just doesn't hurt as much these days.

While we are talking about shocking things: I was worried that my writing would suffer after getting married. You know, the plight of the happy artist. So much of what I am interested in is what it is like to be human, and I suppose my main interest is in love. It seems like it can create more happiness than anything else in life, but also can be more destructive than hate or fear. Not revelation, I know, but that's the basis for my interest in it as a subject.

When I write I like to think about it as acting. I have spent a good portion of life watching my brother on stage. There have been times when I was little where I was scared or nervous about the person on stage because he was doing or saying something horrible and I believed that he meant it. It didn't seem like he was faking it.

I still have these moments. He's currently in Born Yesterday at Hale Center Theater, and he plays an intimidating A-hole. There is a moment where he walks on stage very angry with his girlfriend. He doesn't say anything. He stands there looking at her. It made me, and I'm sure everyone else in the theater, nervous.

The difference between those moments now and when I was little is that now I know that when I feel discomfort or unease it is a sign as to how succesful he is at acting his part. And although he doesn't say anything in the above mentioned moment, I think it may be his most succesful moment in the play. I don't think I have ever expressed what his acting has taught me about writing and art in general, because I am not a very good talker and I didn't want him to think that I believed it because I actually thought him capable of the things some of his characters do or say. He has taught me that the point to good art is not to provide an escape for the audience/reader/viewer, but it is a study of the real, and what we felt in that moment and so many others while watching him on stage is real. Even though he may be faking it, the result is not. Pretty cool.

There are people who think what I studied for a bachelors degree is awesome, and those who think that studying literature is an irresponsible use of the college years. What the people who don't get it are missing is that I was not studying fanciful fake worlds. I was studying this one.

And I am pleased with my education.

What I am trying to get at with all of this is that if I am writing a character who does or believes things I don't, the idea is not to dismiss them as evil or vulgar or wrong, but to understand them and learn from them because that is what I will want the reader to do. The world is a lot of things, and I don't believe that any of it should simply be escaped from (at least not permanently), but dealt with openly. I want to study what it is like to be that way, and then act that way while I'm writing so that when I type it I mean it. Whether it works or not, I don't know, but that is my desire.

The point is that being in a loving relationship and happy made me worry that I would lose touch with the other aspects of love and life, and be doomed to write gooey stories where dudes just gush about the person they love because that was all I knew. I thought I might lose the ability to act some parts. But it turns out that imagining life without Chelsea brings up all those feelings I was scared I would lose touch with so easily that I needn't have worried.

Writing a character that is lonely while I am in love is so much easier than writing a character that is in love while I am lonely.

I still don't like birthdays much. Hence the focus on my anniversary, probably. Chelsea decided to call it "Jeremy Day" instead to take the emphasis off of getting older and put it on the fact that I can do whatever I want today. It helps. I am not sure if there is a secret to life, but it is possible that it is finding something that makes you want to look forward. While I'd prefer to be celebrating many prior birthdays instead of my twenty-eighth, all I really want in this world is Chelsea. She wasn't there when I turned eighteen or twenty-one, so I tend to look toward the future more often these days. As long as she is with me, I don't care how hold I am.