North Carolina calls me home

I've never before been in a situation where I suddenly had to abandon a big, long-term, difficult, exciting project. Nothing really urgent, that would require me to abandon a big, long-term, difficult, exciting project, has ever happened in my life. Well. I'm not a quitter and it wasn't a hard decision, but now I will be leaving Norway nine months earlier than expected and I'm not sure when I'll be coming back.

It is nice to think about times that you have felt "a part of something larger than yourself." I felt that way in college, walking through the old yard to the Adams library or some similar place with very bright and clear focus on everyone around, so occupied with their important and exciting things. (I watched the beginning of "The Social Network" when I was in a crumbling far-away hostel last month and was totally overwhelmed and desperate to put this feeling into words, which is not really possible. Maybe it is a feeling of being caught up broadly and communally in a tradition where the tradition is all about intense private work. It is a comfort that the very beating core of student-hood is something too personal to blog about, in that it would be unremarkable to anyone else. You are sitting in the library, eyeballs-deep in a Phil Fisher essay or so, and then you ignite with non-transmittable elation.)

But this right now is a new kind of "part of something larger than yourself": It's emotionally mandatory. It's invisible bonds you never tested before. You can't accidentally forget to go to your wedding, for example.

Blessed be the tie that binds! They sang this song in "Our Town," my junior year of high school (I was the train whistle), and I still sing it to myself all the time.

Sky-level

A story in Knee-Jerk: http://kneejerkmag.com/2012/10/the-flight-by-molly-dektar/

There were some more rainbows today. The rainbows here always seem so low and close compared to rainbows I've seen in Colorado, especially. But the sky also seems low here. I feel like the sky is also low in England and very high in California. Maybe it has to do with clouds and that's all. When I wear a hat, the sky always seems super-low.

I was looking up facts about rainbows. They look sort of like ring-worm when seen from an airplane, as it turns out.

(Photo from the Telegraph)

I love the post on this message board:

Colophon writes: It's certainly possible to see rainbows very close to you, not just "in the distance". I vividly remember seeing one just outside my school about 20 years or so ago. I was on an area of grass with overhanging trees, and there was a fine drizzly rain falling. When the sun came out and shone between the trees, I could clearly see the end portion of a rainbow striking the grass a few feet in front of me. Of course, when I walked towards it, it moved and then disappeared, but I could definitely see "the end of the rainbow" on a patch of grass right before my eyes. No pot of gold, though.

I remember thinking at the time that ought to be impossible, but I have since seen similar effects near waterfalls when there's a fine mist of water droplets in the air. I'm not sure exactly what factors affect the perceived distance of the rainbow.
 
Edit: I see njtt mentions a similar experience in actual rain. Glad it's not just me! 

It's the same kind of emotion that reaches its purest form on Sad Youtube (http://sadyoutube.com/)--plain language + longing for the past + the kind of memory you keep close to your chest, casually revealed in an anonymous conversation about something else. One of my great friends told me this summer that he's figured out that every moment that passes is loss, which didn't seem particularly true to me at the time, but now everywhere I look I see examples of it.