existentialism and a burning oven

It's 9:00p.m. and my home wreaks of burning randomness as the stove completes its self clean cycle. It wasn't that dirty, but I just couldn't take it any longer. As the oil splatters burn off and I try to vent the house with a door open to the 20°F exterior and snow filled entryway, I can't help but remember Thanksgiving week 2007(or was it '06?) when I overfilled two apple pies - resulting in the equivalent of one whole pie running over into the bottom of the oven; how I tried to self-clean the remains out instead of letting it cool and removing the 4 cups of apples myself; how all my walls were covered in yellow residue like I've not seen since my days with the Red Cross Youth Volunteer Corps scrubbing down walls of the “smoking room” at a home for schizophrenic adults in downtown Colorado Springs. How the burning fruit made the air outside the house smell as though the home was burning down to it's very foundation, and the air inside was worse if that was possible. How it took months for the dreadful aroma to go away, and a year before yellow drips quit trickling down the walls behind the stove every time something would be boiling (despite several scrubbings).

Self-clean cycles make me nervous.

It's a day of days though. Went to bed at 3:00a.m., up for work at 5:30. Breakfast of a 46 oz. Pepsi and pack of chocolate Hostess donuts from the gas station (breaking my 2 month stint with no soda, which has only been a challenge since I started teaching), then a day filled with psycho High School freshmen – a test day no less. The kids are always at their happiest on those. It's been a day of days, and I'm still just so happy. Honestly.

I don't know what it is, this growing older thing, somehow it seems so much easier now to be peaceful amid chaos. Or perhaps it's just the recognition that chaos is a state of mind, rather than a state of being, and I have found a way to build a barricade against it's attack on my mental state (at least for today). It all culminates in the wisdom of American playwright, essayist, and novelist James Arthur Baldwin who said “Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.”

We see the storms, the unpredictability of our sojourn here, and eventually come to the realization that it's all surmountable. The path of feeling enamored with possibility as so many of us do at one point or another in our youth is replaced by difficulty and disillusionment which we eventually conquer to reach a point of quiet contentment; Led back to our innocence and quiet satisfactions. No longer needing the carrot dangled right in front of our noses or the taste of sweetness on our lips. Where we can “love the light because it shows us the way, yet endure the darkness for it shows us the stars (modified from Og Mandino).”

I sort of like this existential contemplative state and the emphasis on bare necessities it brings to the forefront of my mind. With it comes a state of extreme gratitude for every good thing I experience and a greater desire to strive for helping others to reach that same cloud of consciousness. If only it didn't take sleep deprivation and legal addictive stimulants to achieve it.

At least when it's over I'll be left with a clean oven.