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.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, March 15, 2010
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.”
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.”
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