Tom's Thoughts and Ideas

I recently went home, to the place where I was born rather than my real home. Upon my arrival there I found out that my favorite childhood burger place was closing the closest and most famous location to me the next day!! I knew it was closing but I had thought that it was going to be at the end of the month. I clearly went there to have a final meal, and it made me think a lot of thoughts. First was a deep and guttural lamentation regarding the inevitable entropy that will consume everything. Everything will slowly die and wither until the world we knew only exists in our memories.

This is a rather dark thought, and one that I am not a fan of personally. I regard myself as an optimist, but these thoughts still pervade my mind sometimes. Unfortunately I am human after all. When I next return home I will not be able to have another experience at this restaurant with my loved ones or family. That is sad, and regrettable. I guess that makes the past ones more important and special, but that feels like something of a cop out. Time is a cruel mistress, but an equal one. As much as I am sad that I will never get to sit with my brother or parents and talk about life while experiencing primal joy in a place of my early life, my brother and I went to a superb Italian restaurant for dinner one night, and that was special.

New things are not evil or impure. It is unfair of me, to myself, to be sad about not being able to experience the same things forever. That is a one way ticket to sadness in life. I think, which is philosophically old news but I am young so its new to me, that taking the new opportunities in life in stride is the way to remain happy. I would be truly content and happy to go back to that Italian place with my brother, and likely will, because it is a new special thing that makes me happy. Being together is more important than the local where that experience is taking place. Also, it is likely healthy for me to change and evolve with time. I can say that if my 13 year old self was in college, he would be long dead. I was unable to take care of myself then.

I have always been someone who has a lot of hobbies and things that I like surrounding me. But, these things have rarely been the same from age to age. In my room back home I have a massive collection of DC comic books, mainly Green Lantern, that I have not really read in bulk for many years. I hope to upon my next return home, but it has not been a part of my life for a while. And that is okay, I am a different person now than I was when I bought them. Both are Tom, and both were happy, but they are not the same by any measure. I think that Tom at age 30 will not have the same proclivities that I do now, and that is probably for the best, though I am a fan of who I am now so I do hope that I am not too different. It is not a failure to change and evolve. Changing a childhood burger place for a divine Italian place and a really good Chinese place is as much a failure as my reading Nabokov now rather than Flash New 52 comics (that is to say, not a failure).

Forgive me for only bringing up food examples, but at my real home there was this noodle place that kept me alive for years and years. It was one of the purest joys in my whole world at the time. But, one day I took a trip to Brussels (incidentally this was at the time when the war in Ukraine became a full scale invasion, so I blame Putin for this) and when I came back the place was “temporarily closed” and never reopened. I spent literal years going by there at least twice or more a week and checking on it on my walk home. It felt as if a part of my soul had been broken away from my body. And while I am still sad about it, (the ramen was out of this world) there are new noodle places and new joys that I have found in the meantime. So a large part of how I view loss and moving on has to do with food and restaurants for this very silly reason. I doubt that it is good to have capitalism and businesses be a main source of grief in my life, but it could be worse. I hope that that remains the case for a while since it being replaced with the loss of people is not something that I want for a long while now.

Being sad about loss is good and healthy, even when it is trivial, but being able to find new quality life experiences is more important I think. Now that it has been a while, I am okay with the burger place closing. They said that they will try and open up somewhere else in the near future. If this does occur then it will be wonderful, but also I think it will neatly match my change in self. Childhood to adulthood, and location to location.

But, new things can also definitely be scary. Recently I took part in a theater production in Russian, and it was nerve breaking for me. Not only is it the first time I have ever used my Russian in the “real world” outside of the little bubble I live in, but also it was my first time doing real theater public speaking in a long long time. I did well, and everyone said that I did a wonderful job: which is nice. Yet, it was a new experience that I tried to embrace rather than be in fear of. I did embrace it and was very excited, but I was also sweating like a pig and my hands shook a bit. I could feel that my heart did not really calm down until near the end of the production (my part was at the beginning).

I feel very accomplished at the moment since putting in so much work and having it pay off is a good feeling. But also, I do feel odd since I am amazingly new at Russian and I was surrounded by native speakers and near-fluent foreigners. One can not help but imagine oneself as a bumbling moron butchering a beautiful language in a situation like that. But it seems that I managed to not be an actively bad member of the cast, which is a win.

I think that the thing that I found most enjoyable beyond being able to use my Russian in an interesting way; was that I now feel closer to my peers. Doing a thing like this with people is a fun thing. I struggle to imagine having a bad time doing fun things with fun people.

At the moment, after a long day of being around people, I am alone again and it is nice. The comfort of my own space in some ways insulates me from the prevailing feelings of entropy that surround everyone in the world. I think that the new experiences in life are what really keep it interesting and keep the fire going. Even new things as small as new books, all the way to major life events. I just ordered a little frame for my script on Amazon, since my part in it is now a milestone that is important to me. The people and experience, among other things, are memories that I want to keep with me for as long as I am able.

I have not done a huge number of crazy things in my college time so far, but the things that I have done have certainly been things that I will look back on fondly. I find myself mostly happy most days. The power of yes is something that I have found to be really amazing here. When asked if I wanted to do the Russian play, my first answer in my head was no since that was scary, but I said yes and then proceeded to fret about it for like three weeks. But I am supremely glad that I did it. And I got a few free meals out of it, which in itself is a major W whichever way you cut it.

Be it restaurants closing, seeing myself get older, being in a play, or finding new restaurants, I think that my outlook on new things is a 7/10 healthy. I still very much need to try more things I dislike, but that is not a thing that garners much joy on my part. But such is life, a bowl of annoying and bad things with gems of happiness sprinkled in, or the other way around if you are a nutcase optimist.

Now I want to go read a book and take a nap.