I’m back home in Marietta, Georgia after three months abroad in France and Italy.  And yes, it was life-changing in all kinds of ways.  And I will relish in and indulge in all those ways for probably ever, but right now I’m cast back into reality, where I have bills to pay and people to make proud, and myself to take care of.

I need satisfying employment.  I’m open to suggestions, but people always tell me I should be different things…teacher, tour guide, life coach, artist, entrepreneur, writer.  Recently this Panamanian visual artist named Antonio Jose Guzman, whom I met in Paris, told me “I can see it!  You are a visual artist!  What you see and how you think–go to art school, please go to art school!” Last night my cousin Wes, who has a degree in something smart from Georgia Tech, like most of my family, asked me if I’d thought about marketing and that he was tempted to suggest that I get an MBA. Other people have also suggested that I be a nurse, a flight attendant, a high school teacher, a kindergarten teacher, a college professor, an actress, a lawyer, and a docent.

I can’t tell you how many times someone has listened to me wax about an interest I’ve passionately been obsessed with in the past–everything from homeopathy to selling banners on Etsy to blogging about food and travel and pop culture to photography to cooking to being a counselor to taking care of kids–and people tell me “You have a calling! You’re supposed to do that!”  A calling is supposed to be a one-time kinda thing.  It’s supposed to show an encompassing, narrowed passion for a single subject.  And I don’t have that.  It’s as if I’ve been saved by God many times, but it’s always by a different God.  Multiple enlightenments end up cancelling each other out and I’m once again ruled by the looming agnosticism of my soul!!  Woe is me!!

Since we are on the subject of education, I have an English degree from Kennesaw State University and 4 credits of graduate classes from KSU, completed during a Master of Arts in Teaching program which I abandoned with extreme haste upon student teaching a bunch of satan-spawned 12-year-olds.  I soaked up everything like a sponge in that short amount of time, though, and I learned about myself, pedagogy, children, bureaucracy, behavior, creative writing, blogging, web skills, and a myriad of other subtle things which can only be learned by trying something new.  So I’m glad I tried.

I’m frustrated because while I love being a student and would be interested in taking classes in things like photography, stock market analysis, Italian, acting, writing, communications, I need a job.  I’m tired of borrowing money.  I want to make money.  I’ve incurred enough debt in the form of student loans and it feels wrong to acquire anymore.  I want to work.  And I can always take night classes.

I’m looking for jobs on Monster.com, but I don’t know what to look for and I get so easily discouraged when I feel unqualified (or over-qualified).  I feel like I’m not skilled in all the ways I want to be skilled yet.  My skills are writing (which is stupidly broad and which I don’t have much professional experience in) and customer service/sales (which puts me at a desk or behind a counter or on a phone, again, as I do have many years of professional experience).

In the past 14 years, since I started working at 14, I’ve worked at a 3 chain restaurants, a coffee shop, a tea room, a bar, a pet store, a daycare center, a movie theater, 3 bookstores (two of which closed while I was working there, or I would have stayed longer, probably), as an ESL teacher/tutor, a nanny, an au pair in France, done translating/localization services for an Italy-based website, cooking and serving at a catering company, done interviews and photos as a freelancer for Nerve.com, worked at Whole Foods, Borders, and J. Crew, and done phone sales and customer service for an herbal supplement company, phone sales for season tickets to Georgia Shakespeare Festival, had a booth at a vintage shop, and had my own shop on Etsy were I sold crafts and vintage clothing.

These are some things that I’ve come to learn that I’m good at, not necessarily at work, but in life: I’m good at inspiring people.  I’m good at giving people a deep and different perspective that changes their way of thinking.  I’m creative, smart, quick, funny.  I have a lot of ideas.  I am good at seeing beauty, detail.  I can problem solve, but I’m better at identifying the problem and making things work despite being imperfect–I’m not necessarily great at solving the problem.  I can talk a lot about why something is special, poignant, ironic, coincidental, or powerful.  I’m interested in pain, sadness, death, recovery, happiness, love, and the spirit.  I see infinite connections between things like spider webs strung every which way.  I’m kind of manically observant and interested.  I’m extremely passionate about my subject of interest.  I’m know how to travel.  I know how to see and how to tell. I’m also generally good at talking to people, analyzing, explaining, helping, psychoanalyzing, and understanding the human condition.  I’m pretty good at sales if I like the product.

I like people. I like to share feelings of understanding with people.  I like feeling simpatico with people about ideas and concepts.  I like to share stories.  I like kids and adults and individuals more than groups.  I like cooking, and making people feel good, taken care of, and happy.  I like to fix situations and make them something we can all deal with.  I like doing something different from day-to-day, being able to see and do different things, and to have meaningful interactions with people.  And to create and share.

But I don’t know how any of that fits in with anyone’s company.  I hope it can.  I’m begging the universe to let me know where and how.

To help clarify my thoughts, I’m going to start reading The Artist’s Way soon and see if that leads to some realizations.  My dear friend Janina in New York bought it for me recently and my friend Aurora in Paris raved about it.

Another note on jobs: I’m willing to move.  I’d like to work somewhere warm or at least not freezing cold and grey.  Other than that, I prefer places with some history and good architecture, with some forethought.  And color.

One last thing, perhaps the most important: In the past, I’ve sold myself short.  And I don’t want to do that anymore.

So that’s that.

They are all true, either symbolically or otherwise, in one way or another.  But I keep defining, defining, defining, editing, isolating, analyzing.  I have this image in my head of someone carving a violin out of wood…fighting the nature of something which is one shape into another shape, which you can’t see yet, but you can visualize…

Right now I would describe myself as a communicator above all other things, or perhaps encompassing all other things.  It’s simple and it’s complex.  But my purpose is not just to create or explain or express or to facilitate learning, my purpose–as a person who exists–is fueled by an overwhelming drive to understand.

And then I think, is it also to know?  Do I strive to know?  But it’s not that, really…especially being a bit of an existentialist, how can one know?  How can one know she knows?

So, it’s not so much a strive to know, as if to possess an idea or information.

I just want to understand.  I’m okay in some purgatory, some halfway point between not knowing and knowing.

You can’t know every experience…but you can understand it.

You can understand something that you don’t know because it’s like something else, something that you do know.

And how do we understand something?  We understand through communicating. (Naturally, reflection fits into that process as well.)

You’d be right if you said I’m a little manic in this moment.  I’m flying back home to Atlanta from Naples in a few hours after three months on my own in Europe, so you know, gimmie a break and hop on board my crazy train.

I didn’t “find something” necessarily physical on this trip like it’s fun to fantasize about finding.  Sometimes it feels as if I haven’t accomplished that much, in the sense that my day-to-day life is still pretty much the same–I’m single, I’m technically unemployed, I have debt and no fiscal income to speak of.  I don’t know where I belong exactly, although now I feel like belong many places.  And in a strange way, I actually have a life here, in Europe.  I do, a bit.

When I look back, I’ve communicated a lot in these past 3 months.  I started thinking about this when I noticed how, in Italy, communication is so open–people are always talking, singing, arguing, philosophizing, analyzing, proclaiming.  Even just physically you can see communication in the open, telephone wires crossing all across the sky and across buildings and in and out of walls like veins, connecting voices and homes and streets and cities and regions.

You can see and sense a whole circulatory system at work: Phones and trams and internets and televisions.  Sounds and images and ideas. Different dialects and accents and languages.  Overcoming distance and separation with metal wires and fiber-optics.  Wirelessness, even, the invisible bonds going on over our heads as we sleep at night.  Hums of devices keeping us awake in what was once the silence of the night; the buzz of technology, like a gnat that you swat at, but can’t bring yourself to kill.  Noise and white noise.  Loud talking and deafening silences.  Over-sharing, the pouring of emotion.  Reception, receiving a communication.  And contrarily, the absence, the lack, the feeling of being alone, the quiet brings a craving for communication, understanding.

On the phone, when there’s no one on the other end, we say the line is dead.  Not it’s gone, not it’s broken, we say the line is dead.

When the line is available, we say the line is open, like a vein, like a floodgate, like a faucet.

To communicate is the opposite of death–death is to be closed off, to be stifled.

When we communicate, we are letting go, purging, getting something out…

In Latin, communicare means to impart or to share or to make common.

The Latin word munus refers to gift-giving.

When we share, impart, and tell, we are alive, and when we communicate, we give someone else the gift of life.

I walk away from Italy thinking in Italian, and I don’t mean in the language or with the words necessarily–I mean it changes your brain, like the impressions of a map.  It rewires everything.  You think like an Italian thinks.  Communicate like an Italian communicates. Now I use English, my own native tongue, like an Italian uses English–which is to say, I now use English as if it’s Italian.  And I try to understand like an Italian tries to understand.  And you feel the passion and intensity and the sadness, the despair.  You feel death and life in everything. You’re the vulture and you’re the meat.  You and the world are everything all at once. 

I know who understands because they say Capito with their eyes.  You feel Capito even in silence.  You know that it is there.  And sometimes that’s all you can have.

Naples, Italy

There’s something about embarking on a trip away from home that makes you feel alive, and something about coming home that makes you feel like you’re dying.

I don’t like to explain photos too much, but I’m going to tell you some things.  It’s not so much to explain my vision as an amazing photographer–the things I see in the last photo are purely after-the-fact, meaning I didn’t notice them at the time of capture.

Anyway, there’s this lovely parallel between the red light on the motorcycle and the same red beneath the feet of the skeleton.  And then the motorcycle has that bar, smooth and white like a bone, curved like the skeleton’s femur.  And then, on the bike, is a piece of trash, white and blue, the exact blue on the wall. And the exhaust pipe–ridges like a spine, or like ribs.  The phalanx-like handles, like fingers.  And while it is out of shot, the crucifix-like T of the front of the bike, mirroring the angel on the wall.  And while you sit on a motorbike, you are almost in a prayer like position, leaning forward on your deathtrap.  Oh, the ways we forget that we are made of bones.

And as I said, I point these things out not to attempt to point to my own skill as a photographer–as initially I was not happy that the bike was even in front of wall.  I point this out because I’m just in awe of the entirely organic coincidence of juxtaposition.  The world does this on it’s own and it just slays me.

In Italy, whenever I order food, I have to speak like a child.  I don’t speak Italian.  So I say, Per favore, una baba.  Per favore, una brioche.  Per favore, una pizza.  And I smile a dumb, ashamed, Americano smile.  And the cashiers always say, in the exact same tone and inflection and with raised eyebrows, TAKE A-WAY?

And I’m just really gonna miss that.

There’s this funny phenomenon of speaking to someone in their language, but your accent gives away your language, and then they speak back to you in your native language, but in a way which gives away their native language.  I mean, you know?

Also, is there anything prettier than a woman with beautiful hair carrying a pizza box in Naples?  Purely rhetorical, that question.

“Everybody’s dying;

They’re all trying to feel it, I know they are.

Everybody’s dancing;

They’re singing romance and they want to feel more.”

-Janis Joplin, The Combination of the 2

Napoli, Italia

This dog looks exactly like my dog.