This is what it looked like when we last beat Ohio

I went home for Thanksgiving twice. The first trip home was to my parent’s house where I am not only welcome but also fed and even well-loved. The second trip home was a pilgrimage to Ann Arbor, where I lived the last six years (four in school and then two working as a functioning adult of sorts). Packed into that pilgrimage was the holy grail of the Ann Arbor experience from the perspective of a sports fan: The Game.

I cannot explain to people here why I love sports so much. It’s strange when I reflect upon it, but it is perhaps the thing that feels most alien to me about interacting with my cohort. I would make a poem about it, but it kind of exists outside of language and that’s kind of the point. All I can do right now is write about it, half-recreate it, but there just seems so little in that, at least in poetry. Maybe some day.

Suffice to say there are colors and emotions and collisions and crowds and movements of the body so inherently impressive and everyone’s sharing all of that and if you don’t get this then you don’t get this and that’s that, I will not explain.

So this is Identity

There are pangs of “this is great” when I go home and then remembrance of something that seems half-dreamlike, or long passed (I remember many of my dreams) that is so disorienting and yet so important. I feel my identity crunching together these months more than I have felt it at any point prior in my young life. I’m 24. I know much of my identity has already been solidifying, but the contrast is a moment of staring down at it all and I am most reminded of the Romantic idea of the sublime.

Credit Wikimedia.

Perhaps it’s from trying to cultivate more awareness of these kinds of issues because I’m a writer now, or at least in school to be one, and these things are supposed to be important. I’m not homesick. Identity has been a big theme in a lot of these posts, because I’m in transition, because I look at that wanderer as an ideal because I would be one, be outside any one place looking and creating and crunching together bit by bit the discrete parts of it all. He looks put together, doesn’t he?