Garden State...

True to form, I spent my Friday night at home watching Garden State on my couch, rather than watching Jackass with my roomie. It's amazing on just so many levels, and I find that it expresses the angst I feel in my life without having to say anything.

I love the theme of home. Zach Graf sits in the pool with Natalie Portman and talks about how he misses the notion of home. He has returned home, but it doesn't feel like home again. The journey symbolizes his search for home...the abyss is perfect. We don't know where we're going, and we don't always know where we're going to end up. Yelling at the abyss in a sense mocks and challenges the unknown. In medicine, it's really easy to forget how this whole thing got started and to get bogged down in patients that yell at you about things outside of your control. Albeit the movie is romanticized, but he finds it. He finds the pieces in his life that fit together and give him peace, and that is home.

Joe is like the friend who they tag along with. He seems insane, but he has the best interests of his friend in mind. He is a good, albeit misguided guy.

The scene where natatlie portman starts tap dancing in front of the fireplace is pure gold. How I miss that feeling. That complete and utter vulnerability...the knowledge that I and she are both incredibly fucked up in our heads, but we spin well together.

Crying at the airport...

Joe, I don't know if I told you all of this.

There is a girl that will always be near and dear to my heart and soul named Jenn Yue. She literally stopped time the first time I met her my freshman year at Stanford. I never got over her. At the end of my sophomore year, I applied to study abroad at Oxford so that I could be near her. When she bailed after the whole 9/11 thing erupted, I hoped that I would eventually get over her. I never did, but I did meet someone there.

I met her during the orientation week at Oxford. I ran into her at the pub at St. Catz. She was a bubbly thing that was running around with a mixed Norweigian group. God, I should've known then that she'd get me into trouble. Anyhow, she slipped my mind for a while, then I ran into her again because of a mutual friend that I practiced kendo with. One night I decided to go talk to her, so I got a shot of vodka and went to talk to her. It was golden. We went out for a drink and I had my first Tetley's and got some chips. She asked me if I'd ever date someone like her, and I couldn't resist her. Arm in arm, we walked home.

I fell for her pretty quickly. I remember staying up all night and dancing cheek to cheek to Ella and Louis. We'd go watch the stars and it was game over from then. The funny thing is, I was getting played, but I just could not care less. I went to visit her one day and one of her friends was hanging out with her. She asked me to stay in the hallway and finish cooking up some dinner...overheard her conversation in the stairway. The gestalt of the conversation was that she was picking me over him...didn't realize that he was in the picture. It was a messed up kind of relationship, but absolutely intoxicating.

She was a geography major. That means a lot more at oxford...it is much more akin to sociology/anthropology than geography. Anyhow, it was quite a trip. We went out to jazz clubs, comedy clubs and dressed up for formals. I learned how sweet wine tastes on someone else's lips. She was a blast. She'd sing for me on open mic nights at the local clubs, we went to all the plays in town and all the new art galleries in London. All of my classmates from Stanford thought I was dodgy because I never hung out with them and they always saw me slipping out in the middle of the night from the house.

I can't forget the times I spent there. Incriminating pictures of us at CS Lewis and JR Tolkien's favorite pub, the white horse. Walks in the parks and canals of oxford. It was always picture perfect, because the parks were specifically designed that way. Ice Cream never tasted so good as when we ate it in the pouring rain and full moon, shiver cold, under the cover of a closed storefront. Both of our grades plummeted, but that just fed the madness...absolutely intoxicating.

I'd never felt so alive in my life.

Winter break came, and I knew that I'd never see her again. Took her to the airport, balled the whole way home. My professors were shocked when they saw me, because they thought I had a death in the family. In a way I did. I became an alcoholic for a while...Drank wine for breakfast, was smashed by lunch time and went out to get completely shitfaced in the pubs at night. This went on for quite a while. I didn't know my classmates at all. Suddenly, England became a very cold and dark place. Somehow my hallmates dragged me through the weeks and got me on a plane to Spain to stop the bleeding. My evals from my professors commented most politely, as only the British can, that conclusions are appropriate endings for papers.

Things were also complicated by a slight romance with a hallmate...

I came back home to camp Stanford. Maureen was supposed to be rebound. I didn't pick as carefully as I should have and now I'm paying my dues. I guess I'm a little bit more careful now. At that stage of my life, the greatest thing in life was to love and be loved...

-bender