Confessions of a Grade School Role Model

I have a new hero.

From CNN.com:

Many a visitor to New York's Museum of Modern Art has probably thought, "I could do that."

A British graffiti artist who goes by the name "Banksy" went one step further, by smuggling in his own picture of a soup can and hanging it on a wall, where it stayed for more than three days earlier this month before anybody noticed.

The prank was part of a coordinated plan to infiltrate four of New York's top museums on a single day.

...

"My sister inspired me to do it. She was throwing away loads of my pictures one day and I asked her why. She said 'It's not like they're going to be hanging in the Louvre."'

He took that as a challenge. "I thought why wait until I'm dead," he said.

Read the rest of the story here. See more about the artist, "Banksy," including pictures of his smuggled art, here.

"To live fully, one must be free, but to be free one must give up security. Therefore, to live one must be ready to die. How's that for a paradox?"

-Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Since late November, I've been living to some degree out of a suitcase, and I finally put it up empty in the closet this last weekend. The gesture brought to me simultaneously both a sigh of relief and an attack of panic, as I realized fully that both I won't be going anywhere for some time, and that I won't be going anywhere for some time. As much as I craved roots these last three years, now the itch of them makes me restless. Every cloudy day reminds me that somewhere else it is sunny, and every temperate day reminds me that somewhere now there is snow. I want this feeling to pass so I can learn to be happy where I am, in one place. I don't want this feeling to pass because the thought of just one place makes me start to choke. I'm not sure I'm yet ready for a committed, monogamous relationship with just one hometown. Decisive actions would be so much easier if I were.

I've been back now in Texas two months, and am just finally starting to settle in.  Last week I moved into an apartment, my own, but still rather primitive.  No furniture, no phone, no Internet, no TV, no VCR.  I read all my books and drank all my housewarming beer, and at the moment, it's not much fun there (see above).  I spent a morning unpacking the boxes I'd sent from Japan, and then realizing I had nowhere to put their contents, spent the afternoon putting everything back in the boxes.  My very next day off, I actually did that again.

I'm finding resettling here in America much more difficult than settling in Japan ever was.  In Japan, the challenge was to insert the whole of myself into a foreign environment, and to try do that smoothly enough to survive to the next day.  Now the challenge is stranger:  to smoothly incorporate that new foreign part of myself into a familiar environment, one in which to the casual observer, there is nothing foreign about me at all.