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.
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