Of Nodes and C Underscore.

I finally got in touch with C_ yesterday about the keys of his I’ve intended to return for the last six months since we parted as roommates. Everyone in San Francisco lives with roommates. It’s just how it works. C_ was my first one. He’s 27 and from the hills of California and drinks Whiskey out of a dispenser that looks like a mini fuel pump. I lived for two months in a Quaint Little Neighborhood in a house with him and J_, who left Frisco for Boston and pretensions and a boyfriend she swore she would ignore. Our little family broke up in September 2006, after which I spent two months bouncing between friends’ couches and sharing a residential hotel room with a 42 year old Taiwanese woman named Ping who woke up at 4am every day for kalestineics and face scrubs. Anyway. six months ago C_ decided to fulfill his dream of renting a studio in the Tenderloin with a twin bed and a view. In quintessential C_form, he invited me to his apt with warning, part disclaimer:

C_: We are totally still on for this evening but a horde of girls showed up at my house last night and puked everywhere, so just make sure you don’t come over and vomit.
Me: ew.
C_: Don’t worry, I’ve had the windows open all day.

And so I made it over to the loin, passed Luny Lady number 38 dancing down Geary St in a pink nightgown and clogs, and rang his building bell in full anticipation of an obscenely inebriated C_ accompanied by his impressionable 23 year old neighbor who I know has been spending most evenings smoking his cigarettes and teasing him about the possibility of getting laid. And yes, I arrived and 23 Year Old was there, and they’d just lit a joint, and no amount of my own coercing could ease the party to the Irish trivia-and-peanuts pub downstairs. But when 23 left, it was just C_, me and Johnny Cash, and we easily lapsed into conversation about the malleable public and potential for political voice and real Truth and the signified and (yes!) this is the C_ I know, love and have been missing…… the pedantic banter, the Lacan references, the affirmation, the silliness. And after all, “This is life! This is life!” And it is almost like two little Alyoshas marching hand in hand toward pancakes and rainbows and joyful infinity.

But with C_, always, comes that node, that point where it turns, where the alcohol hits me and the who-knows-what-else hits him and I realize that this is as useful as a midday dream, and I have to be at work at 7am for a conference call. Even if I didn’t though, even if tomorrow were June and my earliest commitment was noon class, that node is also the recognition that I am different from him, with a plan and a vision for my life and a way of being that doesn’t sway well with Tuesday nights drunk and high in the Tenderloin.

He tells me I am smart, that that is my “thing.” And I have no response. And then I leave and laugh because there really is something uniquely humorous about C_ and his refusal to pick a San Francisco genre, his insistence on living in a shoebox on the corner of Crackhead Avenue. And I think of our Quaint Little House for a second and feel nostalgia. I flash back to last July and the scotch rituals and porch lurking and groggy mornings and I remember sitting out back with my journal while C_talked about WWII, and I remember crafting the different possible scenarios for my life. There was the corporate consultant track, the professor track, and the most outlandish one of all, the physician track. And I smoked J_’s cigarettes and mapped out pros and cons for each of the three options all in the middle of C_’s eloquent ramblings about totalitarian regimes and the Hitler Charisma Factor. And I remember distinctly facing my page of scribble with awe, noticing entirely how simple a decision can be if you JUST FUCKING GO AHEAD AND MAKE IT. Decisions can be the once only, nip-it-in-the-bud kind of easy when you already know the why. And I’ve known the why about medicine even before the thought crossed my mind to become a physician.

What I do has gotta be consequential.

It’s gotta matter, writ large, even when it doesn’t feel like it does.

I’ve found the “so what” factor to be so pronounced, so severely a part of business that I can’t go on with that life, no matter the money.

And I know medicine isn’t absolved from this rant, and I know I’ll be hardened and embittered about it. But I don’t have to embrace those parts quite yet. I’ll get into medical school, eventually, because I want it THAT BAD. And I’ll be able to create space for myself. I think if I’d had better parents, they would have somehow led me to this conclusion at an early age. Not necessarily the doctor-thing, but the idea of cherishing a vision of yourself. Of thinking, seriously, about structure, about priorities, about plans and how to live with yourself crawling into bed at night when you’re beat up and pulpy and pretty much alone — of what makes it all feel worth it.

All told, I think it’s the Great Ambition that is cursed. It’s certainly the one that gets tortured. If not attached to something big, to something personally meaningful at a young age, it veers hard toward the doldrums, through indecision, into madness… and a baseless critic takes over upstairs. Here I am. Creating a purpose, seeing it, living it – that is tremendous. But starting at the beginning and feeling like it’s late –that is a pride-swallowing task. Ambition doesn’t like slow beginnings.

I’m told reentry into science is like learning a new language.