Author: jonahso

Happy New Year!

I’ve heard a lot of people vocalize this sentiment about how going home feels off. And while I get it, I never quite heard a good elaboration of what this meant for people. They (including myself) liked to use the vague words like “off” and “weird” that only describe the surface of an emotion that is hard to dig through. This process, of finding what going home means to you, is largely personal and varies wildly from person to person. However, I feel there are some congruencies from person to person, which is why I always like to ask people about it. It’s interesting.

This poem is my summation of it. To me, there are two sides.

In my first year of college, I was organized, determined, and focused. I had made a schedule and loved sticking to it; I felt productive and like I had really come a long way from my where I was before. Every day was a step in the person I hoped to become. Now, when all this personal progress and development takes place in your dorm room where you stay for 2 uninterrupted months, going home, (the place of what felt like 17 years of stagnation) it killed my momentum. No matter how hard I tried, I tumbled back into bad habits and felt terrible for it. I didn’t have the drive of a fish-out-of-water.

On the other side, home is home. It’s where my parents cook for me. I had my own room to myself. Even the shower, (though not nearly as good as the ones at the dorm), was welcoming. No matter how much I grew in college, I didn’t lose my first tooth on the Diag. There are memories that you connect to at a childhood home, even the bad ones, and that vulnerable feeling can’t be replicated. As well, there’s less urgency. Homework, projects, lectures, student orgs. Those are all on campus, which is where you escaped from. There’s less pressure to impress a roommate, room to stretch.

One friend, after reading this poem, summed it up as, “being home sucks, but also everything feels a little less real and a little less overwhelming.” That struck pretty close to the heart of the issue for me.

I had to go home for 2 weeks to dog sit my parent’s 2 favorite children. And, while I was there, I was productive! Diving into Judith Weston and Akira Kurosawa I wrote and I got better at the ukulele. All while including time for recuperation. It was really great, and it showed me that the twisting I originally felt didn’t last forever. I was glad to come back to my apartment, but I’m looking forward to the next time I’m home for a while.

Have a good one.

-Jonah J. Sobczak

jonahso

“This poetry-vlog is brought to you by my parent’s dining room”

I got the idea for this piece when I showed my roommates what I looked like with the glasses I never wear. One of them regarded that if you need glasses, even only a little bit, and don’t use them, it can ruin your eyesight. This planted the seed, but then when my brother said that some people think wearing glasses when you don’t really need to can damage your eyesight, then it was growing.

There’s a certain frustration to this scenario. Rarely do my eyes hurt randomly, but what if those sparse moments get more frequent and it’s all because of me not wearing the glasses? Or vice versa, where I start wearing the glasses more and because of this my eyesight worsens, meaning I just have to wear them more and more often.

Honestly, I have no clue what to do, and I wanted to try to capture this is words. I’m semi-satisfied with how this turned out, but only because there were a few concepts that I wanted the voice of it to touch upon that I think it got. These were things like the weird and subtle superiority I felt for not needing glasses for so long, even though I recognize that’s preposterous, and other very vague, floaty ideas. This sort of subconscious connection I want the reader to make is a hard thing to pull off, but I think this poem is a good stepping stone for me as a writer.

Also, hope everyone had an great Thanksgiving! Almost done with the semester, so just keep your head up.

Sincerely,

Jonah Sobczak

-jonahso

Hello everyone!

I hope you all are holding strong in these challenging final few days before break.

This weeks piece is on the topic of cooking and how it can be more than just something you do when you can’t afford anymore take-out.

I really do believe that there is something special to it. A friend of mine loves to see the first bite when someone tastes her food, she says seeing the person’s face makes all the work worth it. Now, she is probably a trillion times better than me at cooking in general, but I think the same rule generally applies. When I do cook, and I really put all of what I can into it, I don’t feel rewarded when I eat it myself, or even when I have it for leftovers the next day. It’s when I share it with my roommates and I know that they like it. That quiet acknowledgement in a mouthful of food is something else.

I also tried to illustrate how much artistry can go into cooking. I’m not at a level where this applies, but I’ve seen actual chefs who do it for more than just a living, you know? And they get the idea that what they are making is really keeping that person, their customer, alive. Like, poetry and movies are great and all, but no matter how many Shakespeare monologues you watch you’ll still be hungry. A cook has that genuine physical connection to their “audience”, which is so unique and beautiful. And obviously I agree that the need for things like poetry and other arts is just that, a need. But the yearning for purpose through language is different than just being super hungry, and I think it’s okay to celebrate that difference.

And then of course, you have the hypocrisy. I value the craft of cooking and admire those who are good at it so much, yet I almost always seem to resort to the cheap and quick meal at the end of the day. I have gotten better since I was a kid, but I’ve still a long way to go before I don’t reach for the Blue Box more often than not.

-Jonah J. Sobczak

jonahso

I wake up decently earlier, usually shooting for around 8:30 everyday. Nothing crazy, but enough to where I still get to enjoy a morning routine.

For about an hour from when I wake up to when I finish breakfast, I am in this odd state of mind. While I’m mostly awake, the adult, “get things done” part of me isn’t. None of my obligations have any weight to them, and I can just kind of boot up my systems without the pressures of reality that plague every other time of day. It’s a calm that I appreciate. Especially on a beautiful morning like this one, where I’m thankful my apartment has so many windows.

The concept for this poem actually came from a song called Goodmorning by Bleachers. He encapsulates the feeling of oblivion from when you first wake up, before anything sets in. The lines “One foot out and I knew the weight was coming/ cause I left it by the bed last night” in particular always stands out to me. It’s morning isn’t so much about the unconscious absence of mind, but rather the fact that the light grogginess of just waking up can dull my anxiety to a point where I don’t have to worry about anything. While our pieces don’t necessarily address the exact same feeling, I still think they come from the same vein.

Sincerely,

Jonah Sobczak

-jonahso

This was the first election that I have been apart of, and the first election night where I lost sleep over it. For most of my life, I didn’t really care about voting or politics in general. As a child they seemed distant, and as a young adult they seemed trivial. Even the 2016 election had little effect on me, before or after the results.

However, this year was different. I can’t tell you why, but for the first time I felt so unbelievably nervous about anything and everything surrounding it. I was checking the polls every two minutes, barely getting any work done at all. I talked to my friends about what we wanted and what needed to happen to get it. I was talking about electoral votes and deciphering which candidate needed what states to win and all the different outcomes. It was, to put it simply, exhausting.

This poem is meant to capture a lot of the different feelings that I felt on Tuesday night. My anxiety and how thinking about certain scenarios made me cringe inside, the rollercoaster of either excitement or despair depending on which way the states were swinging, and even guilty at how others will be much more affected than I am with the results. But I think the idea I wanted to convey the most was how tired I was of it. It is very clearly important and I believe that whole-heartedly, but I would be lying if I didn’t miss those days when I was a kid and I wasn’t sympathizing with all the adults who had to worry about the news headline the next morning. It was nice and didn’t raise my blood pressure at all. My young self had that privilege, and I do not. I voted, and like a normal person, I was concerned for my country’s future. And that’s how I held onto my sanity, and how I still am.

-Jonah J. Sobczak

jonahso