The Little Chowder that Could

I will admit fully and freely that, as a child, I very much took for granted that my mother is quite a brilliant chef. Not only were her recipes delicious and diverse (I don’t remember ever having the same thing twice in one week—a feat in itself), but everything always came out at exactly the same time. I didn’t realize the vast skill and planning this took until, when I was a teenager, she went out of town briefly and I tried to make my dad dinner. The chicken was burned on the outside, frozen in the middle, the peas were soggy, and I don’t even want to think about the rice. The only thing I could think to do was tearfully yell at my dad (who, good man that he is, took the unwarranted abuse with great grace) and then make tuna melts.

My continued culinary learning curve generally depended upon having a very patient dining companion—patient not only with the more or less edible product of my endeavors, but also with my hysterics throughout the cooking process. My roommate in Italy was one such companion. She would look on calmly as I perched on a footstool (the counters were remarkably high in our tiny kitchen), frantically trying to whisk a sauce into submission and yelling at the stubborn lumps. There was much rejoicing when I finally hit upon a successful recipe: Dijon and Balsamic vinegar marinated chicken. I also found out that one cannot go wrong with basil, tomatoes, and fresh mozzarella. Like I said, it was a learning curve.

Once I had mastered a few simple meals, I realized the next major step in my cooking career would be the mastery of our most sacred family recipes, the ones that invariably meant home. I knew that at some point, somewhere between my basic sustenance and my mother’s mastery, food became more than what you chew and swallow for nourishment. It became a ritual, a two-way comfort mechanism. There were things I could not take with me, like the way my house smells or the feel of the back-porch floorboards on my feet, but I could take the recipes with me and try to make a new home with them.

A week after starting my first job, I told my sister over the phone that I was completely lost. Having vast experience with being far from home for work, she told me that whenever she is settling into a new place, the first thing she does is make her steel-cut oatmeal. The food and the ritual of preparation are comforting in their familiarity, their predictability. She asked me what thing meant home to me.

“Meatloaf,” I sniffled into the phone.

“Then make meatloaf.”

So I did. The act of pouring, squishing, and patting was the same as it always had been, and the homesickness got a little better.

Months later, I made my first batch of pilaf in my new apartment. I had inherited my grandmother’s pots and pans, and making her recipe, the staple carbohydrate of my childhood, was a little unnerving. The recipe involves the very strict admonition NOT TO PEEK, and I waited with no small amount of anxiety without touching the lid. When the required time had passed and I uncovered the pan, I think I actually wept a little bit because it looked exactly right. It tasted even better.

Recently I undertook an even bigger task: my mom’s clam chowder. My sweetheart had told me he absolutely loved chowder, so in preparation for his visit, I gathered the requisite ingredients (did you know they sell bottled clam juice? Like, the juice of clams?) and got down to business. My mother was on-call that night, and was not surprised that when the phone rang (several times) it was me on the other end, screaming things like, “OH GOD, IS THE BACON SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE THAT?” (Incidentally, it is the bacon that makes the chowder.) Mom knew the recipe, and the unwritten modifications, by heart, and coached me through valiantly. Unfortunately for my nerves, the recipe doesn’t look like much until you add the final ingredient: the half and half.

But when I did, I swear it was like transubstantiation in a Dutch oven pot.

Where but a moment ago there had been a dubious-looking pile of glop, some miracle had occurred and I was staring into a pot of my mom’s clam chowder. When I tasted it, I actually whooped with joy and began dancing around my kitchen like an idiot. Next stop: Italian wedding soup.

Some of the more scientifically-minded people out there may point out that a recipe is a recipe for a reason: you follow the same instructions and you will get the same results. Not being scientifically-minded myself, I find that to be a precise load of hooey, because in the kitchens of my mother and my grandmothers, there was a lot more going on than just the combination of ingredients. Our lives happened in those kitchens. There were inevitably children of varying ages and dispositions tromping in and out, dogs underfoot, and probably three or more conversations happening simultaneously. “Well-tamed chaos” may seem like an oxymoron, but to me that’s the perfect description of home. And in the midst of that chaos, there was always incredible food.

So maybe that’s why I have a desperate need for my recipes to come out. If I can make something good from the chaos, then the chaos will have been worth it. My long-distance friends have become used to sudden screams and crashes of pots and pans over the phone—they know that just means I’m in the kitchen. I’m willing to be a mess, but from the mess, so help me God there had better emerge something meaningful. Extrapolate that outwards, and you get the idea.

I have learned the hard way that there is no point at which the universe presents you with a certificate of adulthood, ala the Wizard of Oz handing out hearts and diplomas and medals of valor. I make meaning in my life where I found meaning in my childhood: in cooking, in comforting, and in being a chaotic and social creature.

Fortunately, ‘tis the season for all of those things:

I am immensely proud of the fact that yesterday I picked up my first ever solo Christmas tree: a marvelously plump, six foot tall Balsam, which I have named Noël. And I mean I literally picked it up. And carried three city blocks in high-heeled boots to the T. When I got home, I immediately put on the two definitive (if odd-couple) Christmas albums of my childhood: Nat King Cole and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s respective carols. Shortly, my DVD of “White Christmas” will arrive via UPS.

And next week, I will make the traditional family Christmas cookies, because the whole shebang just wouldn’t be the same without them.

The Facebook Debate

I had thought about how to approach a particular topic for a while and had spent many email hours polling my friends on their opinions. But really, it would just be me doing the asking when I finally wound up my courage, which I managed to do this weekend.

I was sitting with my sweetheart on his bed in his parents’ house, where we were taking a break from cleaning out the shop that holds, among other things, his dad’s car restoration projects and a keg of beer. I faced him with some trepidation and told him I had a really stupid question to ask him. He looked at me expectantly. I couldn’t even look him in the face as I asked:

Will you be my boyfriend on facebook?

Oy vey. My mortification knew no bounds.

I had been chasing my metaphorical tail on this for a long time, well before my boyfriend became my boyfriend (both on and off facebook—and for the record, I know these two phenomena are very different). On the one hand, I fully recognize that making it (cringe) “facebook official” has very little to do with the actual emotional life and reality of a relationship. If the electronic status of your partnership is the glue, there are significantly larger problems afoot. Mark Zuckerburg does not make your relationship real; you and your partner do.

So why, why if I knew all of these things did I still want it so badly?

It isn’t as though I’m insecure about my sweetheart’s affections. I am not, and have not been, lacking in reassurance from him. He challenges me when I need challenging, and he supports me when I need supporting. His Monday morning texts cause me to start my week with a really dopey smile on my face. But it’s also nice that he refers to me as his girlfriend, and that his friends and family know about me. I love that I am in the public record of his life as he is in mine. While I believe that wanting his friends and family to know I exist as his girlfriend is reasonable, the facebook debate takes a few steps beyond and treads suspiciously outside reason.

Facebook played an odd role in my college socialization. Early on freshman year, a friend of mine asked me if I had signed up, and the blank look I gave her indicated that I hadn’t. She immediately helped me set up my profile. I am one of those unfortunate people who have to make a conscious effort not to talk about myself all the time (and I often fail at that—blog much?). But here was this website that was inviting me to do so. I wondered at the time if people actually cared that I love Cheez-its and biking, and the answer was “no, probably not.” That question, however, has become obsolete in the brave new world of facebook and twitter. In the early days of facebook, during which time I joined, the website was restricted to college students only, and we stalked one other with alarming energy—indeed, we adopted “stalk” as our verb of choice, as if that weren’t indicative of some very weird cultural changes. Sometime before graduation, the site opened to non-college email addresses, and the deluge of high schoolers (disturbing) and then parents (even more disturbing) began. I think I entered into a new realm of weird when my grandmother friended me.

Something tells me that my desire to have people know that I am in a relationship finds its origins much, much earlier than facebook, but the current culture of (over)sharing has certainly encouraged my preexisting leanings and insecurities. I’ve had two boyfriends in the past who withheld (as it were) on facebook to varying degrees. The first was so loathe to even hold my hand in public that an expectation to declare couple-hood online must have been appalling to him. When I step back and look at the bigger picture of that particular relationship, I realize that the facebook relationship wasn’t what I was looking for necessarily; I was looking for any kind of validation, any freely given gesture of affection that might indicate that—for whatever reason—he was the other half of a couple, that I wasn’t just making this up.

In a way, the facebook relationship status is just that: a culturally idiosyncratic gesture of affection, rather than a public declaration of exclusivity. My sweetheart is seldom on facebook, so it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him to update his profile, but when I asked him, burying my head in a pillow so that my words came out a bit muffled, he smiled and said, “Of course.”

What he did in that moment was not decide he wanted to announce to the social networking world that we were a couple. He decided that this thing that was not a big deal to him was, for whatever reason, important to this crazy girl of whom he is very fond. And so he gave it freely, probably a small thing to him but a big deal to me—whether that is reasonable or not was sort of a moot point.

In the ever expanding, networked universe in which we find ourselves, my own insecurities have been given a whole new stage on which to play out their varying dramas. I am reminded of a good line from an unfortunate movie in which Drew Barrymore laments, “I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It's exhausting.” The weirdest part of hearing that line was that I knew exactly what she was talking about. I am often ambivalent about technology, but I have zero ambivalence towards a miraculous phenomenon that I’m sure has been played out for centuries before Mark Zuckerburg was ever born:

The insecure half of a couple seeks an odd form of validation from the other half of the couple, who, being very kind and almost shockingly insightful, gives this validation freely. And suddenly there is a significant change in status—internal, facebook, or otherwise:

Insecure half is… very happy, very grateful, and—by the way—in a relationship.

Cake-Stand Stories (or, The Chronicles of Naperville)

In the town where I grew up, there was a place called “Tasty Bakery.” It had a huge electric sign in the shape of a cartoon baker—imagine the Pillsbury Doughboy, maybe a few pounds lighter, with rosy cheeks. It’s nice to remember my town as it was: quiet, and full of family businesses. I guess when the Starbucks moved in, and the Eddie Bauer followed, the decline was really only a matter of time.

With my twenty-fifth birthday looming—and no, it doesn’t just approach, it decidedly looms—I had a sudden onset of nostalgia for Tasty Bakery, home of the best black and white cookies in the world, other cookies shaped as Chicago Bears helmets, and above all the raspberry chocolate birthday cake. Some of my first memories of home are from my older sisters’ birthdays: my mother would get the cake from the bakery and set it on a beautiful glass cake-stand. I think my love of single-use utensils originates with that stand; melon-ballers, garlic presses, and apple-corers have a special place in my heart because they are items that know their purpose. The cake itself was a two layer contraption of dense chocolate and raspberry filling. On top, around the circumference of the upper layer, were small nests of chocolate frosting and preserves. These, too, served a single purpose: they were where to place the candles.

I went looking for that bakery on the internet, hoping against hope that it hadn’t closed but simply moved. I was out of luck: the number, with my hometown area code, had been disconnected.

When we first moved there, my town was small: two lane roads and empty plots in our development. Storms would come over the prairie preserve across the street, turning the sky a bizarre and thrilling green, and then a thick, dark black. My friends and I would dig holes in the vacant lots and cover them with plywood as forts—afternoon kingdoms fed on goldfish crackers. There was one farmstand where we always bought our corn: a dozen-dozen ears. My dad and the daughters would gather on the back porch and shuck one hundred and forty-four ears of corn, which my father would then scrape, so my mother could freeze the corn-guts for sweet corn soufflé all winter long. My dad and his brother built me the biggest swing-set in the neighborhood with precut lumber; Chuck told my dad it was nuts to have it precut, and when it came together perfectly, my dad was nothing short of smug. I watched my sisters get ready for prom in the brightly lit mirrors in my parents’ bathroom—last minute hysterics over deodorant stains on black taffeta, followed by a deeply enviable entrance down our wrap-around flight of stairs into the foyer.

Sometimes I wonder how Laura Ingalls Wilder felt, writing out her childhood. I acknowledge that there is a very large difference between looking back at your childhood through the lens of industrialization as opposed to yuppification, but I still feel as though I’ve lost something. I view my childhood as something that is over, and therefore in some ways separate from my continuing relationships. I isolate people and places in memory, and in a way, put them in storage: the role they played in my childhood, and who they were then, remains static in the place where I keep my memories. In that space, my oldest sister, who now keeps her hair buzz-cut short, will always have blonde hair down to the middle of her back and wear her letterman’s jacket. My middle sister will always wear dark lipstick and oversized sweaters. My parents are perpetually forty, a time anomaly with which my mother takes no issue.

If one can extrapolate such a verb, I have in essence snow-globed my past—I’ve wrapped glass around the time between my first memories and roughly my twelfth birthday, and every now and then I look into the strange little world and see things that I miss, things that I wonder about. My relationship to my own history is a strange and complex beast, often taking on different incarnations. We necessarily live in our own timelines and tell ourselves stories to make sense of our own history—a post-modern, personalized myth-making, if you will. My favorite history professor in college said once that every generation invents its own past, and I think she’s right, though it’s not a one way street, as her syntax might indicate. As we invent our own pasts, we simultaneously draw on them to inform who we are. This is just one of many odd, tautological cycles I can’t quite seem to shake as I think about getting older. And all of this started because I wondered about a bakery I used to know.

I tell myself a story about my childhood: a snow-globe, a Laura-Ingalls-Wilderization of my history. Taken as simply a story, not as a living part of my own timeline—though it is both—maybe that story is one of those single-purpose objects I love; an emotional cake-stand: mostly useless, but lovely to have when you need it.

When my birthday loomed, then arrived, then passed with remarkable timeliness, I felt incredibly self-conscious, as if the universe were looking at me and saying, “Well? You’re twenty-five now. What do you have to say for yourself?”

I would say that I have some pretty good stories to tell, and that I’m sure it will be a riot to look back at the snow-globe I will inevitably create sometime in the future, and marvel at my sweet and ridiculous twenties.

The Greatest Sum

Whenever I’m dealing with a particular problem, for better or worse my mind begins to catalogue experiences and memories that might help my sorting out the issue. It’s as though my brain has an automatic search function, and whether I like it or not, I get the search results with remarkable speed. Often in our lives, we base our decisions on our judgment of the situation at hand and our experience in the past. While it can be helpful to have that background—a bibliography for a decision—sometimes I wish I could solve the arithmetic of a problem without factoring in the sum of my complete experience:

It is August, and I am sitting in the passenger seat of the car belonging to the person I think of as my boyfriend. I am sixteen and have spent the entire summer with this charming boy, thinking that the high school experience I’ve been craving has finally started to happen. When I came back from my college tour, I knew instantly something was wrong, and today I ask him what will happen when we go back to our respective schools, and more specifically, will he call me his girlfriend. He gives me a look that will make me cringe even long after this painful hour is gone: the look that indicates that not only are all of my impressions mistaken, but it’s a little embarrassing that I could be that wrong at all. He says, “Well, I’ve been hanging out with an old flame lately… I never thought of you as my girlfriend.”

I am walking with my two sisters and our dogs in the park near our grandparents’ house. It is the dead of Indiana winter, and my eldest sister is livid. Earlier that year, she began referring to the man she was with as her partner, and it eventually became clear to the rest of the family that while they had committed to one another for the rest of their lives, that commitment would not come in the form of marriage. Our parents can be liberal-minded about many things, but this didn’t turn out to be one of them. JR, as I’ve called my sister since I was a child, is speaking more to the cold air and our other sister than to me, but she is relating how our mother told her that if her partner would not marry her, that might mean that he did not love her enough. Far out of my depth, I nevertheless venture the hesitant opinion that maybe it was less likely that they would break up if they were married. JR, who most resembles a bird of prey when she’s angry, turns to me and says, “Calling someone a wife doesn’t make leaving her any less of a possibility.”

I am wearing a surprisingly acceptable coral pink color and sitting in a sweltering church in Connecticut. As I listen to my middle sister read her vows, I am trying (and failing) to hold back tears that seem to come from two wells. The first is totally virtuous and kosher: happiness for my sister and her love. The second is completely shameful: somewhere between self-pity and envy, I am crying because I am not in love, and I feel an alarmingly dense hole in myself; the perfect opposite of the whole my sister is becoming with the man standing next to her.

I am sitting in my favorite margarita joint in Boston with someone about whom I am certifiably crazy; he is in a chair, and I’m across the table from him on the wall bench. He seems discontent with something, and eventually says, “Hold on. I want to move.” For a minute I’m confused, because the only thing my brain can piece together is that he wants to trade seats with me, which I find odd. But he gets up and comes over to sit down next to me, draping his arm behind my shoulders. “That’s better,” he says with satisfaction, and I am completely dumbfounded, both with joy and my brain’s inability to reconcile this guy with anything I thought I had figured out so far.

A Sesame Street tune from two decades ago sings in my head: one of these things is not like the other… one of these things just doesn’t belong. When the larger portion of your romantic experience takes the shape of disappointment, it can be difficult to fit a new, obscenely happy shape in with the rest of the puzzle. Part of me expects this round peg to eventually whittle itself down to fit itself into the square hole of my expectation, but I also have a strangely optimistic impulse to which I am entirely unaccustomed. And that makes me think about what exists in between the various shapes of my experience.

I wonder at what point our knowledge becomes more than the total of our experiences; when we become more than the sum of our parts; and when a belief in something we haven’t found yet fills the spaces in between. Out of what, exactly, do we make that mortar? I imagine it as a combination of hope and gravity, maybe even a biological imperative tucked somewhere near the nesting instinct and pack mentality I find within myself. My brain may not quite believe this thing is real, but the rest of me does and has been waiting for the chance to believe it for a long time.

I think somewhere along the way, my search engine memory also took it upon itself to deduce patterns. I have come to expect a certain trend, and this recent outlier has my brain stumped and suspicious. It would be easy, cowardly, to believe in the trend rather than in this new love, but I’ve come to understand that is the point at which I let the past beat the future before it’s even had a chance. So here are the things that are true:

I am more than the sum of my disappointments. I have never been good at math, so there is no reason to apply any of that reasoning to my emotional life now: trends, outliers, or whathaveyou. And more than this, perhaps most surprisingly of all, I am madly in love.

The One Year Mark

And so it was on the twenty-seventh of August that I squeaked in under my own deadline and published my twenty-fourth original work, just a week shy of my one year mark.

My therapist, whom I adore in all of the healthy ways, says often, when I’m questioning why it is that I form the things in my brain the way that I do, “Well, you’re a writer.” I think she frames “writer” as less of an occupation and more of a personal attribute—like being stubborn, or putting my right forefinger on my nose when I’m thinking hard. I suppose it doesn’t matter overmuch whether it’s inherent or learned; the important part is that it simply is, and it is a very large part of me.

One of the things I didn’t anticipate in this undertaking was how through the process of writing, I would be able to articulate things I didn’t know were there. It was as though my writing was two steps ahead of my brain, and when something illuminating would come out, I would stop and only be able to say in shocked tones, “Oh.” Also surprising was how this blog snuck into my everyday speech: talking with a friend, I will now occasionally pause and note, “Hmm… there’s a blog in there.” My friends have taken the addition of this particular idiosyncrasy with great grace and generosity—namely, none of them have rolled their eyes or told me to stop being self-referential. I thank you for this.

It never ceases to amaze me how much can change in a year; true to form, I want to frame this phenomenon as plotlines surfacing, disappearing, and making grand entrances. I am not entirely sure where I’ll go with this effort—whether the year of writing has worn me out or revved me up, I can’t quite tell. But I’m glad I did it: wringing confessions and enlightenment out of myself a couple of times a month made me think in different ways about how I form my world and how it forms me.

I’ll tell you this much: Carrie Bradshaw I ain’t. But I’m grateful to my alter ego, Dylan Fitzgerald, for allowing me some camouflage, without which I might not have had the courage to do this.

My name is not Dylan Fitzgerald, but this is still my Middleground.

With love, and thanks,
Cait

The Faith of a Freshman

Though I’ve worked for a large university for almost two years, it was not until recently that I went to work on the main campus. I should have known the fall was truly upon us when small family groups—generally two parents and an anxious-looking upper-adolescent—started boarding my daily bus with enormous bags of bedding and shower accessories. It only really hit me yesterday as I walked through the main quad on my lunch break. Large tents are not uncommon on campus, but the one that now covered a large swath of grass had an enormous sign: FIRST YEAR KEY PICK UP.

My own beloved alma mater did not have such a tent—instead, there was a small office in the basement of one of the central dorms, accessible through a backdoor in a parking lot. My parents and I went there first when we arrived on campus. It must have been pretty familiar to them by then; not only the freshman key pick up, but that very office: both of my sisters had picked up their keys there before me. What we didn’t know (though I wonder if they suspected) was that of the three of us who attended, I would be the one who would love it the most.

The clearest memory I have of the day my parents dropped me off at school came towards the end of the afternoon. It had started to rain a little, and I was wearing my brand new college hoodie, which I had purposefully gotten about three sizes too big. Just before they left, my dad turned and called out to me the exact phrase his father had said to him thirty-five years earlier as he was departing for the same college. After they drove away, I took a deep, shaky breath and walked up the steps of a then-unfamiliar building. I knew that, good or bad, something very big was starting.

But more importantly, here are the things I didn’t know:

I didn’t know that my mother was desperately trying to suppress panic for most of the day: she was convinced that between the bad weather and my asthma, I would probably need to be evacuated by helicopter at some point during the canoe trip I was about to embark upon. I also didn’t know that after they left me, my parents were both crying so hard that they missed their exit and had to drive about fifty miles out of their way to the next one.

I didn’t know that the unfamiliar building I was entering would become my second home on campus (I do know for a fact that I spent more waking hours in that building than I did in any dorm I lived in). That I would eat innumerable lunches on those steps and meet people there who now form my insides. That I would lie in the grass, walk through the mud, stomp through the leaves, and roll in the snow outside that building for four very, very good years.

That a year after graduation, I would visit campus, sit on the same steps, and try very hard not to cry because something else was beginning—my adult life—and I felt like I didn’t know anything.

My parents took a picture of me as I was walking away that I didn’t see until a few years later. I am wearing a pair of blue jeans that I would later wear out while studying in Italy and the giant green hoodie that now has stains all up one arm from a radio-active hot chocolate spill at Homecoming. Having grown into my place at college (if not the sweatshirt), I was always surprised at how small I look in that photo.

Colleges go out of their way to welcome their incoming freshmen—I know that mine did, most obviously in the form of upperclassmen, who chopped off varying degrees of hair, dyed the remainder psychedelic colors, and danced around in resplendent flair. But the real world? Not so much. My college life began with an acceptance letter, and my adulthood began with nine months of rejection. Adulthood orientation has not been nearly as much fun as college, but I think that’s just part of the deal.

My current landscape continues to become more familiar, but eventually I will need to leave it to do something else. And I’m sure it will be scary in all sorts of unique and debilitating ways, so something I should learn is the ability to turn my faith forward. When you’re starting something new and suitably terrifying, it’s almost impossible to be confident in anything, save your own nausea, and the definition of faith necessarily includes confidence: “Faith is the confident belief or trust in the truth or trustworthiness of a person, concept or thing.” Maybe when starting something new, I need to borrow confidence from where I was before: I earned it, I saved it, and now I literally owe it to myself. The confidence I learned as a freshman before might be able to fuel the faith I need in the future.

There still lots of things I don’t know, but maybe that can be something that I believe.

Just One of Those Things

In high school, after a trying day, it was not uncommon for me to come home, dump my backpack beside the couch, and announce to my mother that I needed my gravy boat. She would nod sympathetically as I sat down on the carpet next to the lower shelves in our kitchen’s island. The gravy boat in question was a beautiful piece of fine china from Limoges in the Autumn Leaf pattern. It was permanently fastened to its dish and had painted gold details on the lip and handles. If the day had been particularly rough, I might even go so far as to pull out a flat soup dish or two. I very seldom needed to go as far as hauling out the teacups, but I knew they were there if I needed them.

Call it object therapy.

I read an article recently that said in terms of the money/happiness relationship, you get more of the latter if you spend more of the former on travel as opposed to material objects—the point being that experiences, rather than stuff, are more consistently likely to make you happy. Having recently entered the final month before a long awaited, self-funded trip to Spain, I was certainly encouraged. I also didn’t miss the fact that the real thing that makes us happy is interactions and relationships with other people: it makes a certain amount of sense that tromping through Barcelona in my beat-to-hell Tevas with one of my best friends will make me happier than buying several pairs of obscenely expensive, if lovely, shoes.

Nevertheless, I would make an argument for the occasional object. Stuff for the sake of stuff has always been something of a touchy issue for me—I realize its folly most of the time, but I have also been known to take joy in retail therapy (I recall in particular an instance with purple leather gloves—my motivations are sometimes unknown even to me). However, I do believe that material objects aren’t always equivalent to just stuff.

When I would sit with that gravy boat and be comforted, I think it’s safe to say I wasn’t only sitting with a gravy boat. I was sitting with my grandmother, with whom I shared a deep love of beautiful things made priceless by the history they carry. The Autumn Leaf china was her mother’s, whose story I learned over countless cups of tea—one of many histories that reinforce who I am even as I protect their memory: we guard each other. For most Christmases and birthdays, I would get a fruit compote or salad plate to fill out the set. My grandmother and I agreed that the gravy boat was the crown jewel of the lot, so almost without realizing it, I anchored years of love and comfort to it.

A few days after she died, just before I left for the airport to fly back to school, I swiped her last box of Tic Tacs from a basket on the kitchen counter because it was something to see, something to hold in my hand—a small signifier of a very large love, because she was not there anymore, and I needed something to hold.

I make the case for objects not as things, but as artifacts of experience. I grew up with the sense that I did not construct the things in my head in a ‘normal’ way; that my own mind could be called into question at any time, making my thoughts and memories somehow invalid. As a result, I came to assign very intense meaning to things—objects that I could hold out as proof of the things in my mind; undeniable evidence that something had been there, and it had been important. I came to realize later, of course, that there is no normal, that what I had learned was a doubted ‘idiosyncrasy’ could actually be interpreted just as easily as a unique ‘personality.’ My instinct to anchor, though, remained.

A few days ago, I was walking through an open air market with someone who makes me deliriously happy, which is always a good place to end the weekend. One of the things I love most intensely about him is his ability to make the things about which I am most self-conscious seem like the most natural things in the world, to make my quirks seem both normal and special. As we walked, we had been talking about our love of objects that contain memories and history. He had been looking that day for something glass to have in his apartment, and he turned to me and said, “Why don’t we buy something together, and have today be the memory for it?”

Were I to say something like that, I would instantly berate myself as cheesy and ridiculous, even if I did believe it whole-heartedly. Another thing I love about him is that he makes me feel that if I believe in something whole-heartedly, my believing in it is all the validation it needs.

We ended up picking a glass perfume bottle that, oddly enough, had scenery straight from our past painted right on it. He is taking the first shift in our joint custody arrangement, and he’ll bring it to me when he visits. It was a strange reversal for me, because for the first time an object didn’t simply anchor a memory for me: it was also proof of a possibility, and it was proof to someone else too.

I would always choose a person over an object, because even though I do love my things, I know the one is just a stand-in for the other. But it is comforting in a very real way to be able to hold my gravy boat and think of my grandmother, and to know that somewhere, it is entirely possible that someone is looking at a little glass bottle and really wishing I were there.

And really, if at the end of the day, you have some combination of comforting memories, beautiful things, and people to love, you could do a lot worse.

Twenty-Four Working on Thirteen

There is a girl who lives in my head. She can’t ever seem to nail down a good hair cut, but that’s probably because the odds are stacked against her in the form of greasy bangs. She has braces, but they haven’t been on long enough to have made much progress in combating a huge overbite and defining her previously non-existent chin. She has acne, but that’s nothing new—she’s had it for a few years, certainly before the rest of her peers. Her immediate family is populated by intelligent, funny, charming people who all have straight teeth and, at the bare minimum, seven years on her; she has been the odd man out in a family of pairs since day one. She is extremely fond of a blue, furry bucket hat and using big words that her oldest sister teaches her sometimes. She can’t articulate it yet, but deep down she probably knows that she is most grating and annoying when she is most desperate to be seen and liked.

Meet me, at age thirteen.

I have a theory that we don’t discard the outdated versions of ourselves; we absorb them, like rings in a tree. If you take an emotional cross-section of who I am, she’s definitely in there, close to the core, with a remarkable ability to inform my actions to this day.

In situations of anxiety and uncertainty, I can feel her rising to the surface. The desperation to be liked bubbles up, and I realize particularly in those moments that being calm, being cool, are things that I am still decidedly not good at.

People don’t respond well to desperation. Maybe it’s evolutionary: it makes a certain amount of sense not to welcome someone to your campfire for some mammoth barbeque if you know that person is ravenously hungry. In an emotional way, it might be the same preservation instinct: you can smell when someone wants something from you, and you guard your own reserves jealously.

The irony is that my adolescent desperation to be liked actually distracted from the fact that, when you peeled away all of the anxiety, that thirteen year old was imminently likeable. She’s got a mind like a steel-trap and can quote “Monty Python” with astounding accuracy. She reads voraciously and makes a mean grilled cheese sandwich. She’s funny, in her own nerdy way. And having spent a lot of time on the lonely side of the campfire, she can be unexpectedly empathetic and fiercely loyal.

I was too young to remember my sisters’ tragic, awkward phases. Even if I caught the tail end, I was still watching them through the lens of the worshipful little sister. As they grew up, my sisters disparaged who they had been—my oldest sister in particular scoffed at her former selves. The underlying theme I learned was that whoever I was at the moment was going to be an embarrassing memory in a few short years. But what good does that do? How does sneering at who you were then make you better or more mature now? It doesn’t. It never did.

It is so easy to remember who I was in two dimensions, to blame my inner desperation to be liked on an awkward, greasy nerd from 1998, but the blame game doesn’t work so well when, at the end of the day, you're still just blaming yourself. I’m also falling into the same trap that left me so lonely all those years ago: I’m not peeling back all of the anxiety to see who lives underneath it. Maybe that’s the real irony—that in trying to ignore the more anxious parts of myself, I’m also ignoring the really strong parts that are woven into it. Because it’s not as though characteristics can be lined up side by side like crayons in a box: they bleed into one another, inform each other, and bolster themselves in a whole that turns out to be you.

So in times of stress, when things that I really care about are on the line—a new dream job, falling in love—and I feel the panic rising, maybe I can simply acknowledge that it’s there, and see the person who’s standing behind it:

There’s a woman inside my head. She enjoys wearing black and is fond of heavy boots, something she has in common with her thirteen year old self. She arranges her bookshelf autobiographically and prefers driving stick shift. Her friends are all forms of wild and kind and smart and special, and she loves them intensely. She always carries hydrocortisone and floss in her purse, just in case, and the reason she is growing out her hair is so she never has to wear it down. She knows exactly where the fantasy shelves are in her favorite bookstores and makes a mean peanut butter cookie. And she has a secret desire to travel back in time to meet her thirteen year old self, and be kind to her, and tell her to hold on, because things really will get better, but that in the mean time, who she is at thirteen is just fine as she is.

Unpacking

Last fall, one of my best friends called me on a Sunday morning to get some advice on a relationship. There were many moving parts to both the relationship and our conversation, but I remember something she said very clearly: “I don’t think I’m as happy as I could be.”

Which is, I have come to realize, perhaps the bravest statement of all, particularly when one intends to do something about it, as she did.

For a long time, I thought that achieving happiness was, very simplified, the act of assembling all of the things you were supposed to have. When your collection is complete—Education, Job, House, Romantic Lead —happiness is when you can sit back and admire the full set.

(If there were a top 25 playlist for my therapy sessions, this phenomenon would most certainly be on it.)

In my own pursuit of a full set (insert obvious joke, as needed), I became more preoccupied with simply filling the roles and less with the quality of the things and people with which I filled them. My junior spring, I had my first college boyfriend—and with him the satisfaction of having something in that particular box. Unfortunately, I reasoned somewhere in the more injured parts of myself that the act of having that box filled was worth his consistently debilitating treatment of me.

A few years later, entering an abysmal job market with a liberal arts degree, I accepted a job that I knew was a terrible fit and spent the subsequent sixteen months being kicked around by my bosses. Frequently during those months, I would go home, plug in my phone, sit down on the couch, and weep. Being screamed at on the phone, having my education thrown in my face, and generally being humiliated and degraded—I thought that was just the price of filling the Job box. It is a strange thing to get used to: feeling obligated to be grateful for something that makes you miserable.

Disturbing trend, isn’t it?

Though my advice-seeking friend probably does not suffer from my special brand of near-pathological myopia regarding ridiculous boxes, we somehow eventually arrived at a similar realization. In my case, when I started dating my next boyfriend, I began to have some point of comparison to the one before him and was downright horrified at what I had put up with. Likewise, when I dismally applied for another job and miraculously got it, I had to adjust my expectations for the better—the first time I gave something to my new boss, and he told me it was perfect and thanked me, I very nearly burst into tears of gratitude. When you’re in a bad situation and you have to make the most of it, maybe it’s not the best idea to examine how wretched and absurd it is on a regular basis. However, when you’re in that situation by some form of choice, when you tell yourself that this is one of those things that will make you happy and it doesn’t, it is surprisingly difficult to lift up your head, look around and realize that you deserve better.

My friend was in a more subtle and perhaps more insidious situation where she was middlingly happy but believed that she could be happier. Maybe I lack that sense, or, more likely, maybe out of cowardice and my obsession with those goddamn boxes, I decide to ignore it. In either case, it wasn’t after the fact that my friend lifted her head up and looked around—it was when she had that box filled, but knew she was not as happy as she could be.

Let me tell you, the force is strong with this one.

It’s a fairly terrifying leap of faith: letting go of something that makes you kind of happy so you can go after something that may really, truly blow your socks off. Letting go of any kind of happiness is painful, and I've come to believe that the letting go and the leaping towards something that may or may not be there is the hardest and bravest thing you can do for yourself. I don’t think my friend has necessarily found that which will leave her stunned, sockless, and ecstatic, but I believe it’s out there for her, and I know she’ll get there.

And I? I need to think outside the box. Literally. Suddenly I imagine a scene of empty packing boxes, labeled with all of the things that I think will make me happy. Have you ever jumped full force on an empty box? For items that seem so upstanding and solid, they collapse with surprising ease (particularly when one adds a few extra stomps for good measure). And so I jump up and down inside my head, collapsing these ridiculous boxes that have been taking up entirely too much space in my mind.

Maybe in the future that will make it easier for me, if necessary, to lift up my head, look around and decide that I deserve better.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Removed

“Cary Grant, right?”

"You know that movie?” Meg Ryan’s face, yet undisturbed by plastic surgery, lights up with hope.

“One of my wife’s favorites.” The crusty old Empire State Building desk clerk, who has a well-timed soft spot for romantics, waves her to the elevators so she can make her date with Tom Hanks, and by extrapolation, destiny.

That I know the lines from this scene, and most others, in Sleepless in Seattle is probably not all that surprising. Many women of my generation, myself included, developed their cultural consciousness in the age of the romantic comedy, and I personally have a mind like a steel trap for ridiculous and useless information. That I was reciting these lines, almost without realizing it, while folding my laundry this weekend is admittedly a little weird.

That a large part of the movie I was reciting is based on its own characters’ reciting another movie’s lines—that’s when the level of removal becomes downright strange.

As we continue into our twenties, many of my friends and I have increased the frequency of our griping that romantic comedies have completely warped our expectations for how our relationships should happen. A co-worker of mine, who grew up in Russia, recently commented to me that the fairy tale and the idea of happily ever after, replete with Prince Charming and perfect, straight, white teeth, is a distinctly American preoccupation. Reflecting on my own fantasies and four painful years in braces, I couldn’t help but think she was on to something.

The collective movies of our childhoods (generally of the Disney persuasion) had no qualms about labeling themselves as fairy tales. As I got older, I was able to rationally separate myself from the main characters—I can acknowledge, for instance, that I am neither a mermaid nor an Arabian princess. My life is not populated with helpful, singing rodents and crustaceans. I am, in the most literal sense, not a cartoon character.

I am, however, in my Mid-Twenties. I live in a City. I have Supportive Girlfriends. I have been known to carry a Baguette in my Cloth Tote when walking from the Alternative Grocery Store. I feel as though I am constantly at the ready to become one half of a meet-cute. I am performing the modern equivalent of sitting at a window and singing about how someday my prince will come: I am waiting to become the star in my own romantic comedy.

God help us all.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton must be rolling over in her damn grave.

When I pull myself up short and actually examine thoughts like that, I feel vaguely nauseated. I perform so many other useful, independent, important functions, and this? This is what preoccupies me? Ye gods, for lack of a better interjection.

The romantic comedies with which we grew up are fairy tales in contemporary drag: they are stories we tell that reflect not only our values but how we see ourselves in our culture. As we get older, the stories with which we are presented sometimes begin to look a lot more like the lives that we find ourselves leading. The catch is that, as far as I can tell, the plausibility of the romantic scenarios does not increase proportionally with the visual similarity. And therein lies our problem.

Sometimes I wonder what it means that the romantic comedies to which I refer in fact themselves refer to an earlier generation of romantic cinema. I can’t help but remember an interesting phenomenon in Western art, which follows a similar trajectory: artists reach a level of classicism that is regarded as ‘perfection,’ equidistant between nature and an ideal. The Greeks did it, the Romans copied them, and the Italians made their way back to it in the 16th century. However, things always get very interesting with the next generation of artists, because where exactly do you go from ‘perfection’? It seems that the artists take one step closer to the idea, the abstraction, rather than to nature, and from there, things get just plain weird. As an enthusiast with a soft spot for the younger, less perfect siblings of art history (wonder why), I’ve always liked the Hellenistic and Mannerist movements—they may be kind of weird-looking, but they’ve certainly got imagination.

If you take the classic romantic movies—the Affairs to Remember and the Roman Holidays—and you remove them one more step from nature, you get a kind of mannered (or comedic) romance. After all, it’s one hell of a leap to go from Cary Grant to Tom Hanks—there has to be some manner of abstraction in there.

So where exactly does that leave us? I’ve noticed lately that movie critics mention in passing the demise of the romantic comedy in favor of even more far-fetched genres (bromance or insemination comedy, anyone?). I think the first step is to stop abstracting and start trying to figure out what real relationships look like, beginning with the fact that they don’t tend to follow a script. Still, I believe there’s hope for the thing that we’re really looking for, in our own twisted ways: real live, sustainable love.

A few weeks ago I watched my sister marry the man she loves, and I realized something very important. That day, there were two functions: a wedding and a marriage. The wedding was a great party, but it was an abstraction, something that culture teaches most of us to want in a certain way. The marriage was my sister and her love, standing up in front of their friends and family, committing to one other for the rest of their lives. In the movies, ‘the rest of their lives’ means about four minutes of credits (ever notice how romantic movies don't tend to have sequels?). For my sister and her husband, it means the actual heavy lifting of promising to love each other for every day of their lives together.

My sister won’t wear that beautiful gown for the rest of her life, but she’ll be married to her love for that long. And when I really think about it, it’s not the ball gown or the meet-cute I want forever. It’s what comes after when I get to change back into my blue jeans and go back to being who I am in my life rather than the star of my own abstracted romantic comedy. Because, in the words of the Avett Brothers,

Real life is more than just two hours long.

Baby Steps

There’s an anecdote in my family about how it’s a miracle I ever learned how to crawl. Evidently, about the time I was supposed to be learning how to strike out across the carpet on chubby hands and knees, our house in Florida had a flea infestation. Understandably, my mother was not too keen on putting her baby down on a floor quite literally hopping with fleas, so she carried me instead. It was not a great couple of weeks for the entire family, I’m told, particularly for our golden retriever. Eventually, though, I did learn to crawl, and with the help of the same golden retriever, I learned to walk. The story goes that I’d haul myself up by the hair of Cariad’s rump—a more patient, saintly dog there never was—and she would kind of slither forward, forcing me to walk to keep up. When I would face plant, as was inevitable, she’d scoot back towards me so I could once more take a hold and try again. My grandmother always liked to say our dog taught me how to walk.

I started wondering recently about why exactly I felt the need to crawl or walk. I imagine it had something to do with necessity—after the fleas were gone, and my mother put me down, I probably found it necessary to become my own means of travel from point A to point B. I have to wonder, though, if it’s something a little more adventurous—do we learn to walk as a sort of infantile version of Manifest Destiny? How far afield we travel as adults is often a function of resources and personality, but I’d imagine almost without exception, where a baby is able, that baby will learn to crawl. We don’t know how at first, but eventually we figure it out. With all of the research being done on babies, I wish there were a moment scientists could pinpoint when the sedentary baby looks around, sees the distance and how he or she is not in it, and thinks, “Well this will never do.”

My legs know how to walk now, largely without conscious coordination with my brain (watching where I’m walking, however, is a separate issue). It’s only one example of muscle memory: the actions you learn and earn until they can live latently in your muscles, waiting to be cued. I like to think that my muscle memories are one quirky facet of my personality and my history. I measure flour the way my sister does, tapping the dull edge of a knife across the cup measure’s rim. I twirl a pen between my index and middle fingers when I’m not paying attention—something I picked up from the debaters in high school English. I drive a standard, and whenever I’m in an automatic, my foot reaches for the clutch and comes up empty. My muscles simply remember.

I have another muscle memory that I became aware of recently, one that involves most of my insides between my collar bone and my hips. People talk about a sinking feeling; for me it’s more of a hollowing out, a quiet little whirlpool that forms somewhere around my stomach and expands from there. And it’s triggered by the same thing, over and over after so many years that no wonder my muscles remember: that exquisite moment when your crush is crushed. Since I learned that feeling, it’s grown with me; larger disappointments and high stakes make for bigger whirlpools.

I can’t think of love as a thing you experience only emotionally—I’m the type of person who occasionally feels the need to crank up the musical theater and dance around my apartment like an idiot. Waltzing along with Mitzi Gaynor is all well and good, but thus far I’ve only been able to waltz straight in to disappointment, with a greater or lesser sense of awareness as to my elation’s imminent demise. And so I fall flat on my face—I don’t think even our golden retriever, long since gone to the happy hunting ground, could help me up. The only thing left to do is pull myself up and try again. While my brain deals with the emotional fall out, my body goes through the motions of disappointment. It’s hard for me to tell if it makes me feel better or worse that the ache in my stomach is so familiar.

And again I have to wonder: when was that moment when I decided that being alone was just not good enough? I’m capable of being alone—I’ve gotten quite good at it, in fact—but there must have been a moment somewhere in my own emotional development, when like that sedentary baby I looked around and thought, “Well this will never do.”

I read an interesting article in the New York Times recently about the moral development of babies, and how some scientists have postulated that in order to learn and absorb morals, you have to have a relatively receptive blank slate. That is, you have to be preprogrammed to accept the knowledge by having some basic form of morality (or something like that). Is it that healthy legs are preprogrammed to walk, and our bodies somehow know it? Am I preprogrammed to offer up my heart to others? It is as if I was born with a series of muscle memories, things I do without even realizing it or even needing to learn how. Maybe the best way to define it is “instinct,” but the way I perform it feels a lot like memory.

The saying “if at first you don’t succeed” conflicts directly with that fact that I know insanity can be defined as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. I try, I fall, I pick myself up: I’ve done it so many times that the accompanying disappointment has its own muscle memory now, another unfortunate part of my personality and my history. Parents start getting worried if their baby isn’t walking by a certain age; sometimes I feel like I’m up against an unknown deadline after which I need to be happy and in love, or somehow dysfunctional. My brain flashes with a funny image: a baby on the floor, glancing up in irritation at anxious parents, wondering why he won’t walk. The baby thinks, “Chill out. I’m visualizing.”

Maybe that’s what I need to tell myself: chill, because maybe I’m just visualizing now, but I’ll probably figure it out eventually.

Darwin, Gershwin, and Me in the Middle

I have found something rare and wonderful, completely by accident, and I have absolutely no idea what to do with it.

As a matter of observation, things that are rare are not often simultaneously sturdy or robust. That’s not the sort of thing you can really test, either: someone hands you a Faberge egg, you are not likely to assess first-hand how well it bounces. You believe, through some instinct or education, that this thing in your hand is rare because it is frail—uncommon and valued because of its proclivity to be broken.

Approaching the matter scientifically, Darwin might have you believe that something rare is doomed—fragility will eventually and inevitably be selected against. How many creatures will we never know about because they couldn’t quite bear up against climate, predators, environment, or the distance between Boston and New York?

Okay, I may be referring to a very specific species that is at risk for that last one: a population of two that may or may not be viable in the long run.

Most relationships don’t stand up against selection pressures—from both within and without. You could say a selection pressure from within is just the act of being picky: the female bird is so not impressed with that particular feather display. Move along, pal. Relationship selection pressure from without has nothing to do with choice: if some manner of jungle cat eats the male bird, the female, no matter how much she approved of the male’s plumage, would seem to be shit out of luck.

I take no issue with my chosen bird’s plumage. When he met me on the corner of 34th and 8th this weekend, I saw him before he saw me, and I took a minute to simply admire him. Those are some fine feathers, let me tell you.

I know I am in trouble when Frank Sinatra starts singing in my head—that generally means I have passed out of the realm of reason and straight into fantasy, replete with imagined embraces in fog and fedoras. For the last few days, Frankie has been singing a George Gershwin standard, which begins: “There are many, many crazy things that will keep me loving you, and with your permission, may I list a few?”

The request for permission was probably a rhetorical exercise; it’s entirely possible that whomever Gershwin was writing about never knew such a list existed. In that possibility, I feel George’s pain. One of those selection pressures that could crush this fledgling romance into extinction is the act of my listing those many, many crazy things that keep me loving him… so I write them to the ether, on a whim:

I love the way your eyes crinkle up when you grin, like a cheeky little kid who’s quite pleased with himself for having been caught covered in peanut butter. I love your selective use of anachronisms when you talk. I love how the universe saw fit to create you with a breathtakingly perfect blend of irony and self-awareness—the personality version of a dry martini—which goes so well with your corduroy blazer. I love that I love your friends and your favorite book. That you are excellent at receiving gifts. That you drink ‘dark and stormies,’ which are awful. That you have expressed strong opinions about my shoes (you hate my Tevas, which recently broke and made me think of you). That you remember certain places where I have left pieces of myself. That you see me, my lowest common denominator self, who prefers blue jeans, talks too much, and is filled with obscure Star Wars facts, and you like all of those things. That sitting across the table from almost every date I have had in the last year, I have thought that I would rather be with you.

The memory of all that? No, they can’t take that away from me… but I don’t want the memory of it. I want the reality of it. Unfortunately, reality is the biggest threat to our population of two; something along the lines of “cause of death: blunt force reality.” Love and evolution aren’t mutually exclusive: I believe the best kinds of relationships evolve. Sometimes I worry, though, that giving something time can cut both ways: if you don’t make something happen, how can you make anything happen?

I’m not quite ready to drop the egg and see if it bounces; I don’t know that he’ll ever know of this list of many, many crazy things. But sometimes Nature does give me hope: there is miraculous footage of ducklings essentially BASE jumping out of their nest high in a tree.

They are fragile and wonderful too. And they bounce.

The Courtesy of Rejection

June 16, 2008

Learning proper etiquette was a big part of my upbringing. In my family, you knew the order in which to place orders at a restaurant (based on seniority, which translates to a combination of age and gender) and which bread plate was yours (left, same number of letters and two in common with ‘loaf’). Thank you notes for Christmas were always posted before New Years.

Now, entering that murky but decidedly threatening realm dubbed ‘the real world,’ I find it mercilessly bereft of etiquette, and I have absolutely no recourse.

I graduated college in June with a degree in Art History and have found myself virtually if expensively unemployable. Deciding not to go straight to grad school and not being investment banker material, I began to apply for entry-level administrative jobs at museums. I have been applying for nine months, trolling museum websites every few days between classes and internships, then full time at home after I graduated. Nine months worth of applications adds up; I would say I have applied for roughly eighty jobs.

I have been officially rejected by two of them.

It has been a long road since January, when my peers and supervisors at my college museum were assuring me I was destined to get a great job. I started out hopeful, even though the word 'recession' began to flicker on the edges of my consciousness. There were fewer jobs, and arts budgets were being cut. I still had faith.

Every week I would fire out more applications. Writing a single cover letter would eat up hours. I tried to go with a form letter: one for development positions, another for education positions, etc. I found that was a lot like a technique I tried to use in grade-school for my thank you notes: “Dear ___, Thank you for the ___. I really love it.” The form method in both cases flopped.

Each cover letter I would send was an interesting façade of fact and enticement covering outright desperation. It is true, I have good qualifications, but what I could not say outright was how I wanted a job so badly that I would work longer and harder than anyone else just to prove it.

One museum rejected me in a single line of email text: the position has been filled. Another sent me a form rejection, thanking me for my interest though they could not at this time offer me the position. I clung to this rejection as so much kinder than the first. By now, however, I would gladly welcome anything as short as the first. Key word: anything.

The logical side of my brain tells me that the human resources departments cannot possibly keep track of all applicants and coordinate mass rejection. This side of my brain also seems to laugh wryly and say, “Welcome to the real world, little girl.” I am not particularly fond of that side of my brain of late.

After all, I tortured myself over each cover letter: how to appeal most articulately, how to show my talents, how to stand out in the crowd. My resume is my little masterpiece, recording the things I have worked so hard to accomplish: awards, honors, magna cum laude, experience in the field.

The image of that resume languishing in someone’s email trashcan breaks my heart, but then, as an art history major, I am probably overdramatic with my images.

I walked around my college campus with an intoxicating self-assuredness. I understand that it is part of the deal to be squashed back down to where I belong: the absolute bottom of the food-chain, the new college-grad. I have found that the word “internship” in fact translates out of the erudite dialect of museums into a reality of unpaid, well-qualified labor.

Unlike most commencement addresses promise, I am abundantly aware how I cannot change the world, since I can’t seem to find an opening. I do not want to be an investment banker: I want to work in a museum. I want to talk to people about art. I want to communicate to my own generation how art is a record of what makes us human. I want to help others feel the new-love butterflies that I feel when I look at El Greco’s “View of Toledo.” I want to start an outreach program to fund the livelihood of students who would have internships at the Met but cannot afford to live in Manhattan. I want to break the closed socioeconomic circle of the art world, because as I see it, art belongs to us all. I have faith. I have a mission.

I just don’t have a job.

Note from Dylan

Shortly after I graduated college, I sat down on my bed and wrote an essay called “The Courtesy of Rejection.” A lifelong Newsweek reader, I had written it specifically for their column “My Turn,” in which guest authors (read: the rest of us pedestrians) submit short essays about particular life experiences. I thought even if they never acknowledged my existence, they’d prove my point, so that would be some consolation.

A month and a half later, about three weeks before the economy collapsed, I got a call from an editor saying they’d like to publish the essay. I met with a team to do a photo-shoot a few days after that (no, seriously—a photo shoot), and I worked closely with an editor to perfect the essay for print. It wasn’t just the idea of national publication that made me deliriously happy—actually being paid to write seemed like some sort of miracle—but that museum directors might read it, deduce I was brilliant, and hire me. I signed the contract and faxed it in, believing everything was about to start going right.

(Cue the dire music.)

Three days before the essay was set to be published, one of the senior editors cut it without any explanation. The editor with whom I had been working told me over the phone. She was very kind as I tried (and failed) not to cry and suggested maybe taking a different direction with the essay, but I think we both knew that I wasn’t going to be published in the magazine. I had spent the last few months (and would yet spend several more) being rejected, but that one I think was the most painful from that year.

Understandably, my readership of Newsweek ended abruptly. Don’t get me wrong: I mourn for the print media, but my attitude towards that particular magazine became distinctly unsympathetic. My friends, bless their hearts, didn’t ask when the essay I had been so ecstatic to have published would appear, and I didn’t have the heart left to tell them that it never would.
I thought of that essay recently, more than a year now into the job I eventually got. I knew it was a bad fit even while I was interviewing, but when the offer came, I bounced off the walls anyway, because it was the opposite of rejection—finally. So now, many paradigm shifts later, I proudly publish one of my original essays.

Take that, Newsweek.

To Go—Bravely or Otherwise

During high school, I developed a weird little ritual, which I enacted every time an in-class essay was assigned. Generally speaking, as soon as the assignment was on the board or handed out, my classmates would begin scribbling furiously. At the time, I think we all knew that the exercise of in-class essay writing was part preparation, part adrenaline, and part bullshit. Fortunately for most of us, we were consummate bullshit artists. As they began writing, though, I would just sit. I don’t even remember if I would read the assignment, but I do remember the act of simply doing nothing. And one thought would cross my mind:

What if I just didn’t do this?

It was an uncharacteristically rebellious thought for me—especially in light of the fact that my favorite classes in high school were the classes in which these in-class essays were assigned. For whatever reason, though, I always felt the need to sit still for a few minutes and consider my alternatives. I knew in the most literal sense that no, the world would not end if I did not pick up my pen and begin to wax pretentious about the phallic significance of this or that (one teacher in particular had the reputation of giving an A to anyone who could find anything remotely penis-like in a passage of text). Many students in my school, though, myself included, believed in some sense that some world would in fact fall of its axis or explode in a flurry of singed Hemingway pages if we did not pass muster. Personal Armageddon is a miraculous motivator. After all, a paper wasn’t a paper: a paper was a grade, a grade was a transcript, a transcript was a college acceptance or rejection, and college… well, we didn’t really know what college was short of “monumentally important” for some obscure reason. Our priorities may have been completely wacked out, but it wasn’t a coincidence that our school could brag about a clean sweep of the Cal universities and Ivies alike—no matter if their graduates were emotional and adrenal messes when we got out.

It is in this context that my few moments of perspective were particularly out of character. Needless to say, though, after I took those few minutes, my adrenaline would kick in and I would begin writing frantically. Alas for missed opportunities.

My oldest sister told me once that there is a very well marked border between brave and stupid. She was referring specifically to an ill-advised bike ride I took once that left me hypothermic in the fetal position on my floor, but I think she’d be willing to extend the statement to a broader context. I would, however, pose a question: if you aren’t near that well-marked border, if there are no landmarks (“Welcome to Stupid—Population: Regrettably High”), how do you know when the ground you’re metaphorically standing on is brave or stupid?

All of my in-class essay exercises in latent bravery came back to me this weekend while I was on the road. A large family gathering had necessitated a car-swap scenario that had me driving my grandfather’s SUV back out to their house in Lexington. Not owning a car myself, the act of driving has become a rare high for me—it hints at an autonomy and independence I don’t ordinarily have. I have borrowed that particular SUV, an ancient and noisy gas-guzzler, many times to drive north back to school to ski or see friends. And on this recent Sunday night, I found myself in that car again, windows down and radio up, pointing north on I-95. And that traitorous thought came back after years of dormancy:

What if I just didn’t do this?

What if I didn’t take the exit towards my grandparents’ house? What if I just struck out north and left everything behind? The idea was as intoxicating as it was implausible.

In a weird way, over the last couple of months, my thinking has changed. It’s not so much the where anymore that is the draw—it’s the act of going and the fact of gone that you leave in your wake. Another adult who’s been at this longer than I have told me recently that maybe it is brave to be out on my own, working every day, not really liking my job: doing the hard thing every day, even though it’s hard, is brave. As I hit the turn signal on Sunday night with an emphatic swear, I didn’t feel brave. I felt like a coward as I exited towards Lexington, and the feeling of freedom stayed on I-95 and headed north without me.

I used to be an exclusively goal-oriented person. The promise of where I wanted to go was the fuel that got me there. After a couple rough years of economic realities, though, my intended destination is starting to waver. All sorts of questions are invading and eroding my certainty, the most corrosive of which is: What if what I think I want will not actually make me happy?

In high school, I drank the cool aid and pushed myself to the point of breaking—but I got what I wanted: the acceptance letter to the school that had fueled me the whole way. No matter what I was thinking at the beginning of class, I always turned in the essay at the end. Now, with my faith in my goals faltering, I’m stalling on the way there.

The high school chapter of conventional wisdom more or less worked for me. The twenty-something chapter says that you get a job, you pay your bills, you apply to grad school. Essentially, you do your time and work towards what you want. Sometimes I wonder, though, if what I want takes into consideration the common models of wisdom, or if what I want is trapped inside the common models.

Yes, it would be stupid to abandon job, apartment, and possessions and pretty much commit grand theft auto with my grandfather’s ’95 Explorer. Perhaps bravery for the sake of bravery is stupid. The ‘bravery’ that tempts me always seems to be reactionary: I want to use the convention in my life as a push-off to launch myself in the other direction. It doesn’t necessarily follow, though, that what I’m launching myself into will make me happy, or that the act of launching makes me brave. So I always turn in the essay, I always exit towards Lexington on Sunday nights, and I am praying that whatever qualifies staying the course—bravery or stupidity—will eventually be worth it.

It is comforting to know also that north isn't going anywhere.

The Gift of Patience

Patience (lower case p) and I never spent much time together—I am many things, but patient isn’t one of them. Anyone reading this who knows me is probably nodding sagely. I did, however, have occasion to spend four years of my life with Patience (capital P), who happened to be a very temperamental mustang mare. Before I met this particular mustang, I imagined them to be very large horses, but Patience was in fact rather low to the ground. She was, for lack of a better descriptor, compact: short of leg, broad of attitude. Anyone who knows me is nodding sagely again, because that description sounds remarkably familiar to them. She was, in many respects, my equine other half.

I guess it’s not hugely surprising that I’ve always had an affinity for horses; I grew up reading fantasy novels, and what’s a fantasy novel without extensive travel on horseback? I also took to it more readily than the other extracurriculars that were available when I was a child—not graceful enough to dance, not athletic enough to play soccer, not nearly coordinated enough to be a gymnast without endangering myself and others. I guess I had the blunt force of personality and stubbornness that suited me to be in the saddle. My nerdy roots served me well in my chosen activity when I picked up an introductory trick from an author who clearly knew her way around a horse.

The way you introduce yourself to a horse is to blow your breath into its nose. Literally. Considering the fact that a human breathing into another human’s face generally indicates that one is prone on the floor and the other is (hopefully) trained in CPR, walking straight up to a very large animal and blowing at it may seem a little odd. I’ve done it, though, many times, and it has surprising (and somewhat surprised) results. The horses to whom I have introduced myself in this way suddenly stand very still, and it’s strangely clear that you’ve got their full attention. After they take in your breath, they give you theirs in return with a huff of warm air. It’s a strange and wonderful intimacy to have with someone you’ve just met.

Not that all of my interactions with horses have been serene and intimate. I’ve been scraped off on walls, dumped in the dirt, bitten, kicked, bucked off, stomped on, snotted on, and knocked over with a purposeful bump of a hip. My first instructor, though, was a very wise woman, and if there were no bones erupting from my skin after a fall, she’d put me right back up in the saddle again. I learned to go back because, at the end of the day, the alternative was not being on a horse, and why the hell would I want that?

In high school, I worked for a barn down the road from my house, and that was where I met Patience. I probably spent more waking hours at the barn than I did at home. Aside from the perk of free saddle time in exchange for labor, the barn gave me a very concrete purpose. I had expected to go to the same high school as my sisters, follow an established path, excel in a certain way, and make my own mark in a familiar setting: that was the plan. The plan was not, by any stretch of the imagination, to move to California and get thrown into an insanely competitive school full of kids who had grown up in Berkeley. I had been preparing to measure my success by a certain metric, and that metric was suddenly, cruelly gone. It may not have been healthy, but it was a fairly straightforward arrangement to do my damnedest to best my sisters’ high school achievements. That had been my purpose; it was how I would know when I had succeeded. Now that was gone, and I didn’t know what the hell my purpose was.

Except to throw hay over a fence in the morning. To mix a bran mash for Bandit and wait for him to finish so I could put him back in his paddock and go home to get ready for school. To ride Patience around and around in the ring. To hose down the horses in the worst of the summer heat. To shovel shit. Every day.

And every day, it was absolutely worth it.

When a friend of mine was killed in a car accident my senior year, I hid at the barn. Lots of people were willing to tell me what I was feeling, why I was feeling it, when I should stop feeling it, and as a result, I was not willing to spend time with lots of people. The horses were boarded at a larger winter facility, and I spent a lot of time in those weeks squatting in Patience’s stall. They were all trained as therapy horses, and for some reason, they knew—and I mean really knew—exactly when they had a child in the saddle, and when they had what the barn called an “able bodied rider.” I like to think Patience saved up for me: for every docile moment in lessons, she’d give me maybe a minute and a half of hell when I was in the saddle. I also like to think that during that winter, she knew I was in trouble—I never got a single bite, crushed toe, or even a laid back ear. Instead, she stood by mildly while I sat in the wood shavings, arched her neck in ecstasy when I rubbed her girth line, and, in one very memorable instance, crooked her head over my shoulder and waited quietly while I hugged her neck and sobbed like I would break in half.

There are very few expectations in a barn, short of adherence to a feeding and watering schedule. We are expected to make so much of ourselves so quickly, and the age at which we are expected to do it just keeps getting younger. Even when you’re simply reflecting your own frightening expectations back at yourself off of other people, it’s still easy to burn in the glare. It’s understandable, I think, that as a teenager, sometimes I just got tired of wondering what people thought, how I was measuring up, looking around and wondering what was another person’s judgment of me and what was just a reflection of my judgment of myself. Thankfully, miraculously, for a few years I found a place with no reflective surfaces and the good company of horses.

Recently I went to a concert given by Jeffrey Foucault, who is my favorite musician on this earth and a friend of mine in a very loose sense. Jeffrey has a very particular way with words, such that when he sings, it’s like the Holy Spirit walks in, sits down, and orders a beer. On this particular night in February, he sang a new song in which a line contracted my ribcage around my lungs:

Last night I drank the breath of horses.

And I thought about how many hours I spent, soaked in sweat, dirt under my fingernails, smelling to high heaven and swearing to Patience I’d sell her for meatballs and carpeting if she didn’t stop yanking her lead rope. In every one of those hours I was drinking the breath of horses.

Time well spent.

Call Me Sentimental

Several years ago, when my family was still living in California, my dad came into the family room to find me curled up on the sofa, alone in the dark watching Die Hard on TV. He didn’t say much to me at the time, other than to indicate his general approval, and walked back to the room he and my mother shared. There, on the couch in the bedroom, my sister was also watching Die Hard. The way my sister tells it, she looked up and asked where I was, and he told her I was also watching Bruce Willis blow things up. Then he got a funny look on his face and gently placed his hand over his heart, saying proudly with a sigh of contentment: “My babies.”

Sentimentality is a funny thing. More often than not, it is defined in very judgmental terms, like “extravagant or affected feeling or emotion” and “emotional response disproportionate to the situation.” Basically, you’re overreacting. I think, though, that sentimentality is a very personal thing, a unique soft spot that, when prodded, triggers intense emotion. To anyone else, it may seem like an overreaction, but only you have the incredibly complex intersections of personality and experience that make certain cues meaningful. My father loves having daughters, make no mistake, and our parents raised us to raise hell, but it is understandable that he would take joy in knowing we love some of the things he does. He left his mark on us in innumerable ways, but finding two daughters happily watching Bruce Willis bleed and swear is one of the more obvious signs that we really were listening.

It is odd that sentimentality is generally more disdained than romance, as if only romantically motivated soft spots are permissible. To me, sentimentality is in many ways the more docile, manageable sibling of romance. Both can make ordinarily rational human beings act very strangely, but more often than not, it is romance that makes us veer into the realm of the ridiculous. After all, it’s not for nothing that the phrase is “fool in love.”

So you’re in love. That’s great. You’re doing cartwheels and wearing bells on your shoes, in the more or less figurative sense. I recently dove head-first into a very googley-eyed state of mind (or more accurately, I dove straight out of my mind), only to come up sputtering and coughing a few days later. What can I say—I’m a romantic and an optimist. Also not for nothing are we called “cock-eyed optimists,” so when in love, I tend to be an idiot who can’t see a damn thing coming. Swell.

Crawling out of my most recent near-relationship experience, I had a bit of an epiphany: I needed to change tacks. Instead of pulling a hard and short-lived U-turn into cynical rationality (usually by way of a pint of Ben and Jerry’s), maybe I just needed a detour into sentimentality. Romance is exhilarating, but after a while, it can be exhausting, and even tedious. Roller coasters are only fun in moderation, and I seem to have become a sort of dating adrenaline junky. My hope was that I could get my irrationality fix with sentimentality, and perhaps come out the other end with fewer bruises.

So what are the things that make me happy—what are my non-romantic soft spots? I’ve been enduring a bit of a rut lately as part of what I’ve come to call the “post-grad existential twenty-something blues” (which is possibly why I’ve been dating up a storm), so I took stock. To put myself in the proper frame of mind, I went back to the first mix I made in high school, heavy on Dave Matthews, Guster, the Indigo Girls, and other bands I had forgotten I liked so much. High school was a pretty miserable experience, so I became very adept at finding things that made me happy in a very immediate sense: things that didn’t fix the problem (i.e. being in high school) but made the duration a bit more bearable. By some miracle, none of these involved anything illegal or illicit, but they got the job done.

First and foremost, I drove. While it may not have been terribly sustainable, my best hours in those four years were spent winding around back roads of Contra Costa County in my manual black Jetta. I was essentially inseparable from that car and love it still to this day. I perfected the Cherry Coke slurpy (three eights coke, five eighths cherry, for the inquiring mind) and always paid with exact change. I baked scones periodically. I worked at a barn and took comfort in the company of horses, who don’t expect anything from you other than that you show up on time to feed them. I may not have fit in very well or ever had a boyfriend in those years, but in my car, windows down, slurpy in hand, with my riding gear stinking up the trunk magnificently, I found a zen kind of happiness that only I could make for myself.

It’s that kind of happiness that I’m looking for, but now, several years later, the scenery has changed vastly. My beloved Jetta remains back home at my parents’ house, and I don’t know of any small, accessible barns in the area (though I have found a 7-11 near my apartment, so the slurpies are less of a problem). In any case, my needs have changed a bit since I was seventeen.

My current job doesn’t exactly use my brain to its full capacity, so recently when I picked up a New Yorker to read at the airport, I was amazed at how wonderful it felt to think critically again. I ordered a subscription when I got home—I had almost forgotten how being intelligent and liberal aren’t passive occupations. I tried a new recipe the other night and damn near burned my apartment down, but as I was hopping up and down hysterically fanning my smoke-detector, I realized I was having a pretty good time. The next day I sought out some new recipes and made a shopping list. I have discovered that going to a matinee alone is incredibly liberating, and I don’t even have to go through the motions of sharing my Whoppers. I have devoted the entire butter drawer in my fridge to York Peppermint Patties, and I buy myself flowers from my favorite shop every couple of weeks. Daffodils may be sentimental, but they also happen to make me really happy: mission accomplished.

As I learned in high school, but forgot until recently, finding yourself in a less than blissful situation doesn’t necessarily doom you into constant misery. I feel like it’s dangerously easy to spend my twenties waiting for the big things to happen, THE BOYFRIEND or THE JOB, and moping with an air of expectation until they do. I’ve been chasing after romance like it would fix everything else that’s wrong: the panacea for being twenty-four. For the moment, though, I’m tired and sentimental for zen, slurpy happiness, which fortunately I can recreate on my own.

After all, I learned from my dad a long time ago that even by myself, the Bruce Willis warm-fuzzies are an entirely acceptable cause for joy.

Shakespeare, Meg Ryan, and Beards (Oh My)

I never cared much for Romeo and Juliet. As an awkward teenager, with whom no one ever fell headlong, prose-spouting in love, I developed (in addition to intimacy issues) specific theories about models of love: which are good, which are bad, and which are profoundly obnoxious. It’s possible my predisposition against the main characters came from my inability to relate to them—my fifteenth year was spent in combat boots and black eyeliner, not sighing on balconies (not that I didn’t want to, mind you). I found the angst tedious—I had enough of that on my own. I wanted something with a little more punch, because to me, the truest part of love is the fighting for it. In the R&J model, when the going gets tough, the tough… drink poison. Where the hell is the romance in that? Melodrama by any other name would annoy as thoroughly.

Fortunately for me and my fledgling theories, there was a great deal more Shakespeare to be had, and I found the satisfying model I was looking for in Much Ado About Nothing.

Admittedly, Much Ado has the sappy, tortured romance between Hero and Claudio, but the Benedick/Beatrice interaction was really what took me. It had, after all, a very auspicious start: Beatrice is whip smart and doesn’t give a flying iamb about what others think. The smart I could do. The confidence… well, I could work on it, but the relatable potential was there.

In addition, the proceeding banter, the “merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her,” appealed to me enormously compared to all of the kissy pilgrim talk betwixt (er… between) R&J. After all, the sex is in the banter. The chemistry and the crackle in a “skirmish of wit” are, let’s be honest, intellectual foreplay. If a man ever said to me “I would my horse the speed of your tongue,” I make no promises about my resulting actions.

So you’ve got the strong, smart woman. You’ve got the banter (and, by extrapolation, the promise of rockin’ sex). And then, when the going gets tough, the tough don’t spout poetry: they just lay it on the line. In her worst hour, when Beatrice is broken-hearted and mad as hell that dumbshit Claudio has slandered her cousin, Benedick says to her: “I do love nothing in the world so well as you: is not that strange?” In that worst hour, he doesn’t know how to fix it, but damn can he love her.

Granted, much drama ensues (he’s not so thrilled when she wants him to kill his best friend), but in the end, he stands with her, she’s right, Hero is vindicated, and everybody’s happy.

Vastly simplified, my devotion to Much Ado foreshadowed my love for most of Austen: how could I not love a plot where a smart, strong woman gets to keep being smart and strong, maintains her principles, AND gets the guy? Juliet just ends up dead.

There’s a catch, though, as there always is. Regarding the choosing of a mate based on facial hair (I’ve chosen for worse reasons), the Lady Beatrice has the following to offer: “He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man: and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him.” Sort through all of the more and less thans, and the math works out to precisely zero men. She didn’t seem to have any problems with dying single, then partying it up with the bachelors in heaven. My outlook on that particular scenario is not so rosy. Like I said, I’m working on the confidence thing.

I was walking towards a first date recently (that relationship was good, then fantastic, then not, in short order) when a few neural impulses collided and I thought to myself that I should send a hopeful prayer out to Meg Ryan, patron saint of romantic comedies, to bless this date. Something like “forgive me Meg, for I am single: it has been two years since my last real relationship.” I think it’s safe to say that this sentiment is regrettable, flawed, and a troubling indicator of how I’m looking at my love life. In their day, Shakespeare’s plays were popular entertainment. As I was formulating all of my romantic theories with Shakespeare, my own popular culture was more or less reinforcing my ideas; many romantic comedies are, to a greater or lesser extent, based on the Much Ado template of how a smart (albeit neurotic) woman banters, battles, and is betrothed.

Beatrice, in her speech on beards, is generalizing, and I, in my theories of relationships, am doing the same. Sometimes, when I’m being perfectly honest with myself, it seems like I’m looking for someone to play the Benedick role. I have set the parameters and am waiting for someone of the correct dimensions to fill the part, as if that would help me know love when I see it. It seems so much easier and more logical to line up all of the things you would like in a mate (or even a date), as if you were handing the universe a Christmas wish list, but at the end of the day, what are the odds that any one person will meet every criterion on that list? Or even that the criteria on the list are what should be on the list in the first place? (I’ve always been pretty good at specifying what I want, but whether what I want is good for me or not is an entirely different matter.) In trying to make it easier for myself I have actually made it much more difficult.

Maybe the truth is that no matter how you spin it, or set up models, or pray to mid ’90s romantic comedy patron saints, it’s just not easy to find someone who fits. That seems like such a self-evident statement to make, but sometimes I’m so wrapped up in theories and fiction (because Much Ado and Meg Ryan have at least that much in common) that I miss the most obvious truths.

I seek my own Benedick insofar as I want someone who will be able to bait me, banter with me, and love me even when I’m spitting flames at him. I leave the rest to the grace of the universe— the beard is negotiable.

“For man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.”

Break It Down (Again)

Early on in my short and uninspired career in math, I remember an exercise my math class did to break down numbers into the lowest primes whose product would be the original number. For example, 24 can be broken down to 8 and 3, and from there to 4, 2, and 3, and from there to 2, 2, 2, and 3. I liked this way of thinking because in a way it made everything potentially understandable. It was satisfying to me that many big, scary numbers could be reduced to a less intimidating combination of 2s, 3s, and other, more manageable primes.

Though I mostly left math behind many years ago (does balancing my checkbook count?), I held onto that idea. After all, the biggest, grisliest problems I encounter in my life are often combinations of things. Insecurities from one area of my life meet up with previous mistakes, concerns for the future, and even maybe a recent bad hair day, and suddenly I’m staring up at one very large, ugly, and complex knot of issues. While it is often tempting to simply turn tail and run from these monster problems, it is also sometimes satisfying to pick up your metaphorical baseball bat and beat the damn thing until your primes start falling out: the real, basic problems. (A therapist, I should note, might take issue with the image of beating one’s problems until their parts fall out, but I believe in reality a therapist does pretty much the same thing—though admittedly with a little more finesse.)

Daniel Jones, editor of the Modern Love section of the New York Times, recently broke love down into its primes. As if I weren't already thoroughly enamored of this man, he also referenced Star Trek in his introductory explanation: “If I were Spock from ‘Star Trek,’ I would explain that human love is a combination of three emotions or impulses: desire, vulnerability and bravery. Desire makes one feel vulnerable, which then requires one to be brave.” (See below for a link to this article.) So there they are: the 2s and 3s of love, albeit with a Vulcan twist. After some thought, I came to the conclusion that even those primes are still a little bulky—and maybe I in my hubris could break them down a little more, or at least define them a little more thoroughly for myself. After all, science didn't stop with Einstein.

Desire I understand. To return to my linguistic roots for a moment, Lord have mercy do I understand desire. It may be a little redundant to break desire down into its primes—I think it’s already pretty primal as is. To make a brief attempt, though, I think desire is pretty much the distance between your lack of an attractive something and the attractive something itself. Raise that distance to the power of pheromones, and God help you.

Vulnerability required a little more thinking from me—I got the sense that there were more moving parts to this one (after all, for me the only moving parts in desire tend to be my falling all over myself and what results when my falling all over myself is just fine with the other person). I believe that everybody has a certain amount of personal armor, in a greater or lesser state of repair, and that there are, by necessity of design, gaps in that armor that we have come to call our weaknesses, or, as a whole, our vulnerability. So exactly what is it that we’re guarding ourselves against? Pain doesn’t seem like an adequate answer; rather than being a prime, that to me looks like an infinity symbol. It’s just too big of a thing to understand. And so, true to form, I gave it a bit of a thwack to see what fell out, and I came up with three things: disappointment, humiliation, and loss.

In a lot of ways, I think that these are the things that go bump in the night when you’re a grownup; they are the things that scare us the most. To frame it conceptually, disappointment is what happens when the distance between your lack and the thing that would fill that lack (desire, see above) becomes too great. The desire snaps and the void across that now unconquerable distance is called disappointment. Humiliation is a subtractive process: you are made smaller by the exact amount that measures how much you care about other people’s opinions. And then, of course, there is loss.

Loss is more than simply an absence. It is a hole in yourself, shaped in the image of the thing that was once there and is now gone—an emptiness that still has the ability to shape you. Loss has mass, it has character. I’ve seen pictures before of trees that grew up around bicycles, bushes that have absorbed chain-link fences. I think loss is like that: we can absorb it into ourselves, but we can’t change it, and it’ll always be there within, foreign and painful.

And so, in the face of vulnerability, the noun that is the state in which we find ourselves because of disappointment, humiliation, and loss, why the hell would you then move to bravery? Is love really worth the physics of vulnerability?

For whatever reason, my immediate answer is yes, though I couldn’t give you a logical reason to save my life. Maybe we’re trained by family, culture, even our own instincts that love, and everything that goes with it, is worth the risk; that the stakes are so high because the prize is so great. And now I come to define bravery: bravery is the mass of your faith that love will be worth it combined with the acknowledgment of your own vulnerability, multiplied by your velocity moving through life. And hell, square it for good measure.

I’ve whipped myself into a linguistic and physics frenzy trying to describe all of this, but maybe it just goes back to primes:

Lay out your 2s and 3s, all of the basic components of exactly who you are: flaws, virtues, sapphires and gum-wrappers. And maybe there’s a person who will look at all the primes and see the product. Suddenly you’ll know in your bones why relativity makes sense, and all at once you’ll be mass and distance and energy and in love.


(For Daniel Jones' brilliant ruminations on the subject, please see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/fashion/14modlove.html?pagewanted=2&sq=modern%20love&st=cse&scp=3)