The Brain/Gut Corollary

Sometimes, when faced with something simultaneously mundane and unexpected, I have noticed moments in which my brain can’t quite seem to keep up with current events. Even as I am experiencing something quite different from what I was expecting, my brain will briefly, stubbornly dig in, as if it is saying, “No, just wait a minute—that liquid in your mouth is apple juice. I promise it is. Just hold on a second.”

In this particular instance, I was about eight years old, home sick from school, when I shuffled downstairs to get something to drink to soothe my sore throat. In the fridge there was a tall glass of alluring, amber liquid. I thought it was apple juice, and for a few seconds my brain kept trying to convince me it was, until it finally gave way to the irrefutable fact that I had just taken a large gulp of beer.

My mother came downstairs to find me coughing and sputtering on the kitchen floor, and I was convinced (at least for another several years) that beer was some sort of punishment inflicted upon poor, unsuspecting mortals.

In retrospect, those moments are often comedic: the time in which your brain has to catch up, while the rest of your body knows exactly what is going on and begins dealing with the issue independently. After all, my tastebuds weren’t wrong: that was definitely beer. No two ways about it.

I notice this phenomenon occasionally when I’m dealing with my alarm clock.

When I wake up on a week day, of my own accord, my body is instantly suspicious. Usually I have to be hauled forcibly out of sleep by a very insistent alarm. It is immediately evident that not only do I feel more rested than usual, but also that the light in my bedroom looks brighter than it should. In times like this, I will roll over and look with some bemusement at my alarm clock. The time will usually read an hour later than I expect, because for some unfathomable reason my alarm didn’t go off, and I will spend a few seconds gazing in mild confusion at the clock, thinking, “That’s funny—this clock is wrong.”

While I’m thinking this, the chagrin will be mounting in my stomach, and when my brain finally kicks into gear, I’m usually already launching out of bed with an emphatic pronouncement like, “SHIT!”

So all right, maybe I’m a little slow on the uptake. It is interesting, though, that not infrequently do my brain and my body disagree—or at least believe in two separately, not entirely compatible ideas—and more often than not, my body turns out to be right. I observe this trend especially in dating: while my brain is churning out excuses for some guy’s not calling, my stomach and surrounding organs know that no, his arms have not fallen off due to a rare and exotic fungal attack. He’s just not going to call.

I know that I’m not the only person who possesses this kind of intuition: the most common expression is “knowing in your gut.” I think it’s interesting that the noun of choice in that phrase is “gut.” It’s blunt little word, and it seems to conveniently refer not to a specific anatomical locus, but to the general space in your body where emotions manifest. I tend to think of my gut as the space in between my organs, and it is subject to all kinds of interesting physics. Without any actual change of state, temperature, or location, my gut can freeze, melt, sublimate, tighten, or drop into my boots very convincingly. Also not for nothing can the noun “gut” also function as a very effective verb, meaning to eviscerate, disembowel, or just generally take all the inside stuff and make it outside.

There is an odd corollary, though, to the phenomenon of feeling something in my gut. Sometimes, very rarely, my brain will actually figure something out ahead of time. For whatever reason, I’ll know in advance that I’m going to feel something very strongly, even though I’m not feeling it yet.

This seems kind of self-evident: of course I can anticipate emotional events. Nevertheless, it is unusual that when I realize I have an emotional punch coming somewhere down the line, I don’t simultaneously begin to feel that punch.

Recently, my parents sold their house outside of Chicago. For the last few years, my dad has been working in Fort Lauderdale, and my mom has been holding down the fort in Illinois, in the house they lovingly remodeled as the place in which they would be grandparents. Ironically, though this situation might work for many married people (one partner in one state, another partner in a different state), my parents, after thirty-eight years of marriage, are still crazy about each other and couldn’t stand living apart. Fort Lauderdale was never really home, but eventually they decided that being together was more important than keeping the house, so they put it on the market.

This was not the house I grew up in. Still, it was the house to which I came home. The first day we moved back to Illinois, my two best friends came over to celebrate, and we all ate carry-out Chinese food. They both drove—maybe thirty minutes or so—when for the past four years, they had had to spend about five hours on a plane to get to me. That fact alone was enough to make that house sacred to me, but it also just felt right. It sits on a big front lawn, on a street lined with old growth trees, a few blocks up from your typical small, old Chicago suburb, complete with tiny train station. Our dear departed Bogart used to sit on the back porch landing, surveying his domain with benevolent grace, and when it got dark in the summer, the fireflies came out.

To be perfectly honest, what I had expected was for the house to be on the market for years, long enough for my dad to retire, and for my folks to simply move home. I was surprised when the house sold, after only a few months of being listed. It was an odd, abstract sensation—not being part of one of our family’s large, wrenching moves. There have been quite a few, and the ones in which I participated were horrible, drawn out affairs. When the various and inevitable dramas of inspections and contacts began to rev up, I felt an unflattering sense of relief: far away in Boston, installed in my little apartment, I didn’t have to deal with it. Sure, I talked on the phone with my mother, who was experiencing the same trauma I remember very well, but I didn’t actually have to be there in the thick of it.

When the house sold, I felt mild surprise, but not much else.

What my brain realized then was that eventually, I would feel more. A lot more. Intellectually I knew that there had to be fallout: there was no way that I could lose something I had loved so much and not feel it, even though I hadn’t had to live through all the nasty, real estate details of losing it like I had had to do before. So I shrugged, and waited.

And eventually turned out to be right.

One evening last week, I set my alarm for a few minutes later than the current hour, and sat on my bed to wait. That morning had been one of those times when I woke up and wondered why my clock was wrong (shit). I wanted to make sure my alarm clock wasn’t going to make a habit of not going off, so I set the time and waited. While I did, I killed a little time on my phone.

I puttered around in my apps, eventually bringing up a weather program I don’t usually use. When I first got my phone, I added to the weather app all of the places I thought I would need: home, school, Rome (just in case). As I waited out my alarm, I went through the varying locations. Boston came up first: no snow in the forecast. Damn. I swiped across to the next place.

Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

I started to cry. I had known it was coming, but the pain in my stomach was somehow still surprising.

Though belatedly, I had officially been gutted.

I Wonder

My entire family was perched on edges of furniture all around the family room. The tension was palpable, as I’m sure it was for many, many other Illinois residents on that particular night in 1993. With 3.9 seconds left on the clock, we all watched breathlessly as John Paxson’s feet left the boards and the ball arched gracefully away from his fingers.

Regardless of day to day belief system, everyone in Chicago believed in magic for the seconds in which that ball was suspended in midair.

It was game six in the NBA finals, and the Bulls were down by two against the Suns in the remaining seconds of the game. As Paxson’s three-point shot swooshed effortlessly through the net, my family room exploded, as did much of the Chicagoland area. Four years later, my family once again enacted a similar scene of joyful hysteria as the Bulls won their second three-peat. On that night in 1997, my sister’s new puppy had been snoozing peacefully in the kitchen when the cheering had detonated, and he awoke in sheer terror, bolted for the laundry room, and could not be coaxed out for a good long while afterwards.

I remember my childhood as a golden age of cultural Threes, specifically the double three-peats of the Bulls and the holy Disney trifecta of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. The funny thing is that I remember those basketball games as fondly as I do the Disney movies: my wonder at the fireflies encircling Ariel and Eric’s rowboat is only rivaled by my wonder at Paxson’s perfect three-point shot. They all shared a common, breathless hold over me; the rapture of experiencing something unexpectedly magnificent or beautiful.

Who says there isn’t grace in small moments?

Wonder, by nature and necessity, is brief, but it packs a powerful punch. I have vivid memories of wonder from my childhood, and they are odd, idiosyncratic instances, like the moment I realized I had gotten an American Girl doll for my birthday or the first time I watched Han Solo swoop in from space to save the day in the first Star Wars movie. These moments got rarer as I got older; a phenomenon which is unfortunate, trite, tried, and true.

The thing about wonder is that it is unadulterated: it is the complete and immersive sensation of surprise, joy, and amazement. As I thought about it, I wanted to make meaning out of the fact that “unadulterated” was such a significant word in how I defined the concept of wonder. To adulterate is to corrupt, debase, or make impure by the addition of a foreign or inferior substance or element. When I thought about what that meant in terms of wonder, my brain stuck on the idea that wonder could be corrupted by the addition of cynicism. In a way, wonder could be adulterated by… well, becoming an adult.

The etymology nerd within raised her gladius with a battle cry: To the dictionary!

Unfortunately for my convenient theories about adulterating and adulthood, it turns out that “adulterate” comes from the Latin word adulterare (to adulterate), which is ultimately derived from ad altero (to or towards another), essentially meaning false or unchaste. The English “adult” derives from adultus, the perfect past participle of adolescere, to grow up or mature.

While an interesting Monday morning Latin lesson, none of this particularly advanced my theory about the adulterating nature of adulthood. Curses, foiled again!

I had been thinking about all of this because recently, I had the odd experience of consciously choosing wonder over cynicism—I basically smacked my cynicism on the nose and commanded it to sit and stay. This was not a climactic moment in my life by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it was a lazy Sunday night, curled up on my couch watching the movie Tangled.

I had seen the movie once before, after reading the glowing review of a fellow blogger. Pixar lately has done a pretty good job of resurrecting the art of good story-telling through animation, and though Tangled is not a Pixar production, I had been willing to give it a shot. In my opinion, it was worth watching, since the chameleon sidekick alone made me laugh out loud.

There is one scene, the sort of romantic click moment in the movie, when thousands of paper lanterns are released into the night sky and reflected in the sea below. The scene, visually and thematically, has a lot in common with the rowboat scene from The Little Mermaid: there’s something about a world of music, water, and floating lights that just keys up enchantment and goosebumps.

Presumably, the presence of Prince Charming doesn’t hurt either, but that particular detail is where I nearly derailed myself.

Yeah, I began to think, because the good-looking, charming guys always turn out to have hearts of pure gold…

It was then that I pulled myself up short. As I had started to scowl, all of my goosebumps had evaporated, and the loveliness of the image withered as my cynicism overwhelmed it.

What was the matter with me? Was I really being grumpy over the fact that a Disney romantic lead turned out to be a winner? Seriously? I took time to pause and reevaluate.

Yes, it’s been an interesting couple of years, in which some of my expectations and assumptions have changed. Cynicism, which I’ve always possessed but which in the last few years seems to have run rampant, is in no uncertain terms a defense mechanism: it is the mental catch you develop to nip unrealistic dreams in the bud, before they can take root and potentially lead to disappointment. But when that cynicism seems to wriggle in to most areas of your life—including Sunday night Disney movies—isn’t that an indication it may have gone a little too far?

We temper humor with irony; we smother wonder with skepticism. We do so because to do otherwise would not only seem childish and naive, but would also make us vulnerable. I’m not sure when my concept of adulthood became so truculent and uncompromising, but the logic is flawed that says we can save ourselves from disappointment by ruling out the possibility of wonder.

I am in no way saying that I will henceforth skip about my life with a coterie of blue birds. However, I will make an effort not to dampen every hint of wonder with a strong dose of cynicism. After all, I very much doubt that positive reinforcement and cookies will fall from the sky to reward me for being a mature, immovable adult. I created these ridiculous expectations; I’m the only one who can dial them back.

I think that, not surprisingly, Jim Henson was the one who ultimately got it right. The Muppets are hilariously funny, with no small dose of irony and pratfalling. That humor, though, does not dilute, and in a strange way enhances, those small moments of wonder and grace, like Gonzo singing to the sky: “I’ve never been there, but I know the way—I’m going to go back there someday.”

Those are the moments when even my cynicism is humbled and quiets down to listen. To others it may sound unforgivably cheesy, but I like to think that it’s important to keep those instances of wonder sacred: to keep them undiluted, to enjoy the vulnerability and awe of experiencing something amazing, and to occasionally let yourself be fully wide-eyed and goose-bumped.

And so I will watch (next season, I hope) with joyfully bated breath as the magnificent spiral of a Peyton Manning throw finds the outstretched hands of Joseph Addai. I will be amazed as my very own best friend grows a whole new person inside of her. I will reserve the right to be, without rationalization, moved by the loveliness of floating lights in an animated movie.

And I will think to myself, What a wonderful world.

Adventures in Marketing

My dad has been in marketing for as long as I’ve been alive, and as a result, an odd fascination with advertising rubbed off on me at a very young age. I don’t remember my dad’s bringing his work home as something that took him away from me. Instead, as a special treat, when the marketing department would be interviewing new ad agencies, he would bring home the agencies’ demo tapes and ask me what I thought. I was completely smitten with one ad featuring the kid from Jerry Maguire engaged in an earnest conversation about marsupials, and equally horrified by one equating the distribution of Nintendo games in the suburbs to food packs in Africa. Dad agreed on both counts.

Many years into my marketing education, my dad gave me an interesting insight into the nature of the beast itself.

“The goal of marketing is to achieve trial,” he told me, as Brian Williams went on a commercial break one night. “After that, it’s up to the product people to make something that consumers will enjoy and buy again. But the exclusive purpose of marketing is to get the consumer to try it the first time.”

They are strange, self-aware moments in which I experience this phenomenon in action.

Take Apple for example. I think I was actually with my dad the first time I saw the TV ad for the Macbook Air: the manila envelope sitting innocuously in the clean, blank space with vaguely hipster music playing in the background. When the disembodied hand casually reached into the frame and pulled the impossibly slim and sleek laptop from the envelope, I very nearly went into convulsions. I’m a Dell woman myself, but in those few minutes, all reason abandoned me, and the only semi-coherent thought I had was along the lines of, “GIMME GIMME GIMME!”

My dad thought the entire process, from my eyes glazing over to full manifestation of consumerist frenzy, was hilarious. He would point out, though, that ultimately the marketing was not successful, because I never got to the essential trial phase. Nevertheless, any ad that can solicit rapturous effects like these cannot have been entirely off the mark.

What Apple was selling in that ad was not speed or endurance—it was beauty, pure and simple. As I convulsed, I was not concerned with the specs of the hard drive or the coverage of the warranty. Hopefully, if I ever got as far as purchasing, I would concern myself with those details, but what would get me to the store, credit card in hand, was that the thing was so damn pretty.

Armed with this understanding of advertising and how it does (or doesn’t) work, sometimes I eye myself in the mirror, faced with something of a dilemma.

The feminist side of my brain kicks into high gear at the very notion of thinking of myself as a commodity: something to market, to sell, to be consumed, purchased, or owned. I do not, in fact, think of myself as a commodity in the consumerist sense of the word. It's just that, for whatever reason, my brain seems to be hardwired to think in marketing terms: it’s the language by which I understand and conceptualize the phenomenon of desire, of wanting or trying to get someone else to want. I also do not think it is terribly surprising, or troubling, to want to be wanted.

How much, though, do I want to invest in my pursuit of being wanted? To put it another way, how much do I want to invest in (cringe) marketing?

Oddly enough, hair is a good example.

Though it is a non-descript brown, my hair is fairly thick, in good health, and falls midway down my back. However, the damn stuff has a distressing tendency never to stay put, so when it is down, I’m always pushing it back, smoothing it down, and generally fussing with it. Since I have absolutely no desire to deal with my hair constantly throughout the day, I simply circumvent the problem by wrapping it up in a tight twist and clamping it back. A few members of my family, who are female and of a slightly older generation, have actually mourned this in conversation with me: how it’s so lovely, and how I look so much softer with it down. One of them went so far as to tell me that I should leave it down, because men love women with long brown hair. Apparently it makes me look fertile.

Never mind a unique and challenging intellect, a wicked sense of humor, and quirky personality. No: men will be attracted to me because I look like I could really bear them some good, healthy children.

Oh dear God.

My horror was swift and righteous, not to mention loud. However, in all honesty, I think my horror was as loud as it was to cover up the fact that this particular comment had prodded a very troubling strain of insecurity, which I bury close to my spleen in the hope that nobody (not even me) will ever notice it. This unreasoning and embarrassing insecurity runs roughly along the lines of: What if my hair really is the best asset I have to attract a guy?

Like I said: unreasoning, embarrassing, and buried near my spleen.

Hypothetically, in the rare instance when my hair is down, if a man notices me in a bar, I do not think he would be musing to himself, “Wow, that girl looks fertile. I want to buy her a drink.” (At least, I fervently hope a guy would not think that, and if he would, that he would also exhibit other, easily identifiable red flags.) He may just like the way I look, which isn't a bad thing, and he may just be inspired enough to conquer the manifold fears and risks inherent in talking to an attractive stranger. This theoretical guy could potentially prove to have good taste in more important areas than looks, enjoying banter and obscure debates about the place of Fraggles in the Muppet spectrum. The thing he might like most about me at the end of our conversation could in fact be my big sexy brain, rather than my big sexy hair. But the question bothers me: was it the big sexy hair that got him to come over in the first place? Because if it was, my ‘marketing’ did in fact achieve ‘trial.’

By this point, my insecurities are wailing so keenly and my feminism yelling so loudly that the mental din is truly deafening.

My worry essentially comes down to this: if I value and invest uncharacteristic effort in beauty, towards the goal of being wanted, am I simultaneously devaluing everything else about myself?

There comes a point at which “uncharacteristic effort” becomes something a little more troubling. I could, in theory, teeter around on towering heels in tiny, sparkly items of clothing, adhering to some misogynistic fantasy of how an attractive woman should look (not to mention act). I could, but I never would: I'm in no danger of valuing that questionable desirability over who I actually am and the principles I have. I know who I am and who I am not: I don’t wear high heels, I don’t own party clothes, and I have no interest in pretending I do. Nevertheless, back in the gray area in which I perpetually find myself, I’m also a person who doesn’t wear her hair down. So when I spend the better part of an hour coiling my hair into unusual, Rapunzel resplendence, am I prioritizing desirability over reality? How do you determine which truth should be in advertising?

The truth is, I don’t know.

What I do know is that I’m probably over-thinking the entire issue.

I want to be wanted, but I also want to be wanted for who I am in reality (picky, right?). The reality is that I am a woman who wears heavy boots and likes terrible jokes, but also has a pretty good head of hair. And there might just be some discerning guy out there who likes all of those things, so maybe there’s a happy medium in and amongst all my episodes of angst.

To put the shoe on the other foot, I might muster up the courage to cross a bar and talk to a good-looking guy because, on some evolutionary level, his ability to grow a good beard speaks to his skills as a hunter/gatherer (or something). Still, if he’s unkind or idiotic, I have faith that my modern, reasoning brain will override my instinctual leanings and bail out.

But, if by some miracle, he too enjoys terrible jokes, or Battlestar Galactica, or any of the other wonderful, unanticipated weird characteristics that light up my brain and flip my stomach, I hope I would never be so shallow as to hold his having a good head of hair against him.

A Few Good Men

A few weeks ago, I had come to a point in my frustration where I was literally hopping up and down in my kitchen. I have found that periodically thrashing and flailing in the safety of my own apartment can release negative energy, but this particular time, it wasn’t releasing nearly enough. I stopped hopping for a moment and fumed at my cabinets in silence.

I knew exactly what I needed.

I needed a man.

(Now ain’t that just a mouthful?)

I had, in the previous few weeks, wound myself into a veritable tizzy over a particularly good-looking guy at my gym. The hysterical tone of my thinking surprised me a little—I hadn’t gotten this worked up in a good, long while. In fact, I had sort of been hoping I’d outgrown it. Alas for dashed hopes.

Three days a week, while quietly doing my sets at the gym, my brain would be shrieking varying certainties at me: that he was totally checking me out; that there was no way in hell he was checking me out; that we were already dating and he just didn’t know it; and that it is vastly unfortunate that most therapists take the entire month of August off. In retrospect, I realize that my unusually high-strung reaction to this man may have been linked to my impending graduate school exams. Instead of freaking out about something with relatively high stakes, I would funnel my energies into an increasingly unwieldy crush. (Transference, anyone?)

On the afternoon of my hopping episode, the crush had reached fever-pitch, and I knew instinctively that I needed male intervention immediately.

Historically, my luck in romance has been hit or miss, mostly miss. My personality exists at the intersection of neurotic and assertive, so I guess it’s not entirely surprising that they haven’t exactly been lining up. Most of the guys I’ve dated seemed to have liked me against their better judgment; as if they couldn’t quite resist this maelstrom of bright affection and attention but eventually they’d come to their senses and realize I wasn’t worth the trouble. Whether or not this guy at the gym fell into this pattern was irrelevant, since up to that point, our entire interaction had consisted of spotty eye contact and near psychosis on my part, to which I was hoping he was oblivious.

Fortunately for me, a brilliant ray of logic had managed to break through the chaos in my kitchen, and I instantly knew that I needed a man. However, I didn’t need just any man: I needed one of my men.

In a fairly predictable phenomenon, where my luck with men romantically is crap, my luck with men platonically is quite unmatched.

It can’t really be stated any other way: I simply have the best men in the world as my friends. This is one of those unusual ironies that I really can live with: that I find myself surrounded by the most magnificent, good-looking, charming, intelligent, kind-hearted, patient men that humanity has to offer, and I will never be romantically involved with a single one of them.

Water, water everywhere—and not a man to date!

So often I find myself worrying, writing, fretting, and fuming over the state of my romantic affairs that I do not pay proper tribute to the men in my life—the ones who get me through any participle I may be able to throw at them and somehow still love me at the end of the day.

And so, I write an open love letter of a platonic nature, to the superlative men that I love:

...

Jeff: the best brother.

Jeff may or may not have known exactly what he was getting himself into by marrying into our family, because in addition to the incomparable love of his life (my sister), he also got a very enthusiastic little sister (myself). I have to admit that when he and my sister announced their engagement, my happiness for them was shamefully rivaled by my diabolical, personal joy that I would get the big brother I had always wanted. He’s patient, thoughtful, and always answers my texts. Obviously, it is most important that he makes my sister deliriously happy (which he does), but he’s also a wonderful brother. We didn’t even have to go through a mutually injurious adolescence to cement the bond.

Ian: the best date in the universe.

Ian crossed five state lines by three modes of transit to accompany me to my sister’s wedding to the aforementioned Jeff. Looking back, I think that I may not have even let the poor man eat his whole dinner, because I kept hauling him off to the dance floor (in addition to being polite and charming, he’s also the best dancer I’ve ever met). Ian is entirely composed of grace and ease, and as if that weren’t enough, he always smells good.

Jeremy: the most understatedly wise.

It was Jeremy I called on that particular, hopping day in my kitchen. I’ve known him since he was a runty, wickedly smart blonde kid with entirely too much attitude. I now know him as a tall, wickedly smart, gorgeous blonde man with just enough attitude to be the most charming breed of annoying. We’ve been friends for over a decade, and as a result, he was able to glean most of the pertinent details of my problem as I hollered at him on the phone, taking my own frustration out on his eardrums.

I eventually wound myself down, saying in conclusion: “Jesus, Jeremy, it’s like I’m living in a movie in my head.”

To which he replied, “Yeah, but hon, you’ve been doing that for years.”

There was something about the way he said it that made me want to break down in grateful tears. What I perceived as a character flaw of some sort, he perceived as a characteristic quirk. It is an incredible thing to have someone know you for so long, through so many of your incarnations, that he can easily name the things that are truest about you. In that conversation he also had another truly winning moment: we had fallen back into normal conversation and I was telling him about my most recent ex, specifically an incident in which the unfortunate man had made a sexist remark about me in my presence.

In the shorthand of our long friendship, Jeremy was somehow able to condense his disapproval of the remark and his anticipation of my reaction in one sentence: “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a minute to chuckle.” And he did.

Brendan: the truest soul mate.

When I was a junior in college, I had the most enormous friend-crush imaginable on a senior named Brendan. For lack of more adept descriptors, he was simply the coolest person I had ever met, and I wanted desperately to be his friend. He became aware of this fact somehow on my birthday, and promptly friended me on facebook. It was a running joke that his first birthday present to me was actively, electronically asking to be my friend. I was, of course, thrilled.

I have never met anyone whose deepest, nerdiest, and truest passions run so closely to my own—from devotion to early nineties movies like Clueless and Pretty Woman, to utter adoration of opera, to insatiable appetite for Crab Rangoon and Bourbon cocktails.

He made me dinner in ninety degree heat with no air conditioning on the day of my big job interview. He wrote me a postcard from Vicenza: addressed to Betty, signed Al. He looks like one of those impossibly stylish Italian movie-stars from the 1950’s, while somehow maintaining the appearance that he could chop down a tree on short notice if you needed him to.

It's times like this when a judicious swoon really is in order.

Chris: the best beloved.

My cousin Chris and I hated each other when we were kids. Little did we know at the time that our grandfather was constantly playing us against each other, talking exclusively about the excellence of the one in the presence of the other. When we were teenagers, though, we managed to put the pieces together, and when I looked more closely, I found a very wonderful person in the place of my previously loathed twerp of a cousin. Around the time we were getting ready to leave for college, he glanced over at me while we were doing dishes and commented casually, “You know, I’m really glad we stopped hating each other. I think you're great.”

Chris is one of those people of whose love you know that you are definitely unworthy, but you are so damn grateful for it that it all works out. Here is a man who flew half way across the country to pick up a moving van and drive it across the other half of the country to move me into my new apartment. That weekend, he would occasionally come and stand next to me, leaning his head over to rest on top of mine. This works because he’s about a foot taller than I am.

He has the most unpretentious and generous heart I have ever encountered, and by some miracle, I get to be related to him by blood and friendship.

Cal: quite simply, the best friend.

There is a pantheon in my life of men who will always come first (many are listed here), and the holy trinity which crowns this magnificent assembly consists of my father, my grandfather, and my best friend, all of whom share remarkably sarcastic tendencies and an uncannily similar expression of smugness when they’ve won an argument.

It seems strange and redundant for me to describe Cal’s importance in my life, as it would be to describe an essential organ.

Why do you value your lungs? Because I need them to breathe.

Why do you value Cal? Same answer.

Of course I value him for his innumerable good qualities—brains, wit, sarcasm, perceptiveness, understatement, dry laugh, patented zinger abilities… and the list goes on, but the list still feels inadequate to express how his entire independent whole makes me whole.

He and I have joked since the early days of our friendship (when both of us thought leather bracelets were the very height of coolness) that we share a brain; that though we were born from two entirely separate sets of parents, we managed to come out as twins.

Cal is the one who keeps me honest, in the way that only one who knows the geography of both your head and your heart can. Not infrequently do I want to kill him, which is only fitting for one I love so much, but ours is a friendship of implicit faith that he will never give me more than I can take, and that I will never go so far off the deep end that he won’t be able to find me.

...

I’ve come to the point in my life, which may indeed be a phase or may in fact be a revelation, where I am no longer sure that there is a life-long romantic partner out there for me. I’m sorting through cultural paradigms, trying to figure out what I actually want and what I think I can get, and as a result, a lot of surprising things have come into question, including the existence of The One. What are the things that I know? I know that the reality I live in is more authentic, and in the end more valuable, than a more streamlined, pleasant one I create in my mind. I know that miracles happen, but that I should by no means depend on them (this includes the advent of a permanent, romantic male lead). And I know, above all, the value of the good people I have in my life.

It’s too early to even think about “ending up,” though I often do. But really? If, in the course of my relations with the opposite sex, I end up with a life full of good men, even though none of them is a life partner, I hope I’ll keep in mind that such a life should be no cause for complaint.

Note from Dylan

Regular readers may have noticed unusual amounts of design activity happening hereabouts lately. About halfway through the summer, I found myself in an existential funk and decided, instead of taking it out on my hair as usual, that I would inflict creative impulses and the need for change on my blog. My darling and brilliant friend Brendan Willis provided the design work--link here for further brilliance. I will be very smug in a few years when people are paying him millions of dollars for his talent, and his fee for this project was a batch of cookies, a few straight-up Manhattans, and three orders of Crab Rangoon (which, now that I'm thinking about it, he actually paid for).

Thank you, love!

Luck and All

When I was a kid, I went through a period of fascination with, respectively, the stock market and the cartoon strip Hagar the Horrible. Regarding the latter, I was specifically enamored with Hagar’s pet duck, whose name was Qvack. My father and I had a lot of quality time in those years bonding over both stock prices (during a school stock market project, my hypothetical Starbucks shares went gangbusters) and a cartoon duck in a Viking helmet. When my dad came home at night, sometimes he would hand me the funny pages of the paper, and I knew immediately our favorite duck had made an appearance. At school during the day, I would pore over the stock pages, looking for my favorite symbols. I always felt especially cool because Starbucks was listed on the NASDAQ, so I had to know where to go looking for my numbers.

During that time, my dad offered me an enduring piece of advice: “Buy low, sell high.” It may have seemed kind of self-evident, but I took it to heart. As it turned out, that phrase would turn into a shorthand for us—we use it to summarize a conversation, which otherwise concludes with something we already knew but is worth reiterating.

For example, recently I’ve found myself calling him after I finish a chapter of my GRE review book. He will talk me down from my study-induced hysteria and pessimism, and he will end with general encouragement and restatement of his belief that I’m doing everything right.

“Mm,” I’ll grunt. “Buy low, sell high, right?”

To which he will always reply: “Qvack, qvack.”

And I will be vastly comforted.

Another classic piece of advice my dad has always given me is applicable to stock prices, standardized tests, and many additional subjects:

“If you ever have to choose between being good and being lucky, pick lucky.”

For a long time, I didn’t really understand what he meant; it was just one of those things my dad always says. I think it took me so long to understand because, at a certain level, this particular piece of wisdom was fundamentally antithetical to my long held (if misguided) belief that I could do my best to control the universe around me by covering all my bases—that I could effectively hedge the idea of luck. When I was trying to get into college, I was hyper-vigilant about my GPA and heaped on diverse extracurriculars. I was trying to model myself exactly on what I understood to be the perfect candidate, because perfect candidates got into their top colleges—right?

(Well…)

Did my good GPA and diverse extracurriculars help my admission? Of course.

Did those things guarantee my admission? Not by a long shot.

It wasn’t until many years after I got into college that I came to realize that my admission was not only a result of my being good, but also one of my being lucky.

In the years since my college admission and subsequent graduation, I’ve had to let the idea of luck—and with it, my lack of absolute control over the universe—into my thinking. It’s been a humbling process, though perhaps not as crushing as rigidly adhering to the belief that if you don’t get what you want, it’s because there’s something wrong with you, not because you’re subject to unfortunate circumstances. In my lost year of job applications, I took my continued unemployment as a personal failure, not as a function of a bum job market. The funny thing is that I never extrapolated that outward: I never believed that the high unemployment happening around me was a result of many people’s failures. I believed their challenges were largely due to bad luck and a crappy economy. In a masochistic, intensely self-centered way, though, I thought for some reason that I alone was exempt from the indifferent arbitrations of luck. Whatever happened, it was my fault.

Again, my acceptance of the existence of luck was humbling, but it ends up beating the heck out of the alternative.

Much of my adult life has been spent trying to find the middle-ground between accountability and acceptance of an uncontrollable universe. That sweet spot, I have discovered, is a moving target, but sometimes the path can be fairly clear. For instance, it would be patently stupid to forego studying before taking the GRE, banking on luck and a few years of nearly forgotten high school math. However, there is a point at which I could cross the line into an unhealthy level of preparation, during which time I could foresee becoming convinced that my maniacal studying would guarantee me a great score.

In essence, there are two ends of the spectrum: at either end, I am a mess, having bombed from either a dearth of preparation or a surfeit of it. Every day I try to remain in the middle, keeping equidistant from insouciance and hysteria, between absolute dependence on being either very good or very lucky.

Recently, I was fretting to a friend about a graduate program, which she had just completed and which I am borderline desperate to attend (because after all, I’m not taking the GREs for kicks—there yet is an whole batch of application challenges awaiting me). She brought my father’s advice into very sharp focus, addressing my seemingly understated proclamation that I wasn’t convinced I would get in. Fortunately, my friend knows that when I casually admit I’m “not convinced” of something, that in reality I mean I’m pretty damn sure it won’t happen. In this case, I was also pretty sure that the program would not only reject me, but also probably kick me in the shins, spit on my neck, and tell me these jeans make me look fat. (When I address potential injuries, I tend to go all in, just for the sake of emphasis.)

Decoding my hysteria and coming to the root of my fears, my marvelous friend, cool of head and great of heart, said to me, “No one can be convinced they'll get in—it’s a competitive program. But some people have to get in, so why not you?”

She went on to state her absolute faith in me and my application, but something about her theory—and her own spin on being good and lucky—eased my anxiety so instantly and immensely that it made my head spin. Hers is advice grounded in the realities of skill and luck, taking both into account, and managing somehow to be both realistic and optimistic. As it sunk in, I nearly wept with relief.

In studying, in stock markets, in love, in general: I seek to live in an optimistic reality, accepting both responsibility and the insane, arbitrary nature of the universe. Also, of course, accepting along the way some very good advice:

Why not you?

Pick lucky.

Buy low, sell high.

(Qvack, qvack.)



(To anyone who would like to take ownership of my GRE vocabulary flashcards after August 22, please feel free to contact me. Did you really think I’d use “insouciance” and “surfeit” if there wasn’t a secondary, exigent purpose?)

The Hiccup Moment

During the September of my senior year in college, I went on a very disastrous date. The guy turned out to be a dog-hating conservative. I am, under exigent circumstances, willing to negotiate on the political front. Barring the excuse of a previous traumatic experience, though, I really just can’t get behind not liking dogs. To put it bluntly: that just ain’t right.

From the upstairs Thai restaurant, we gratefully went our separate ways after the date, just as it started to rain. I was in no way prepared for the weather and took shelter on the old-fashioned porch of the local inn, already soaking wet. It was then that I noticed I had a voicemail from my dad.

My dad seldom calls me just to check in. I have always initiated check-ins, so unfortunately, when I get a voicemail from him, it’s not often good tidings. I listened to his voicemail under the awning of the porch: more bad news about my grandmother’s health. Her decline was becoming more rapid.

In that moment, already starting to shiver from the rain, I had a very sad and very simple epiphany: there was no more good news coming. There was none left to be had.

In retrospect, that moment was one of the turning points for me in what turned out to be the last month of my beloved grandmother’s life. I think that was the moment when I truly realized she wasn’t going to get better; that the quiet, quirky, intensely intelligent, and immensely loving woman whom I had adored for my entire life was, in some ways, already gone.

When, about a month after that, she did leave us, as sweetly and gently as she lived her life, I still felt like I would break in half from the grief. Nevertheless, that moment on the porch held a very important flash of clarity. It wasn’t welcome, but it was necessary.

I think, for better or worse, I had another one of those moments recently.

Two years ago this October, I got another one of those calls from my dad. His father, who with my grandmother is the heart of our whole family, had been diagnosed with colon cancer. The prognosis—a word that clanked dully in my head—was six months to a year, at the very best.

The bad thing about living alone is that no one is immediately there to pick you up off the floor when that’s where you suddenly find yourself, wailing. The good news about living alone is that you can sit there on the floor and wail just as much as you want: true, tearing, broken howls.

The fundamental difference in my thinking about the respective health of my mother’s mother and my father’s father goes back to my childhood. Grandma had had several heart attacks when I was still in my single digits. Grandpa had still beaten me down a ski slope into my late teens. Where I always remember her as having been frail, he was always robust. In a way, Grandma’s death had never been out of the realm of possibility. Grandpa’s mortality was, and in many ways still is, a completely foreign concept to me. It does not compute. It doesn’t work. As my sister told me once, we all figured he’d die in a freak ski accident at the age of a hundred and four.

So why, suddenly, were words like “prognosis” and “metastasized” being used in relation to him? Why was that okay? How did that possibly make sense?

I hate it when I can answer my own questions: that the reality of age and illness very rarely is okay, or makes sense, but that doesn’t stop it from happening anyway.

Over the succeeding months, which became a year, which became more than a year, something rather miraculous happened. The cancer responded well to treatment. While still difficult, his reaction to the chemo was not as debilitating as it could have been. He lost his hair and got horn-rimmed glasses, so that when people asked what was different about him, he could say, with the proverbial twinkle in his eye, “Oh! I got new glasses. That must be it.”

Grandpa, feisty and good-natured as ever he was, stayed himself.

And I, stubborn and afraid as ever I was, stayed very firmly in denial.

The realities have been seeping in more slowly than they would have, had the cancer been more aggressive or if he had not responded well to treatment. In that time, I have had to come to realize that while he is still himself, he is also dying. That idea still gives me pause, is still illogical in the greater context of the man I know and love. But it is also true.

Last week, I had one of the worst cases of hiccups I have ever had. It was one of those times where your chest is so tight that when you hiccup, you feel as though your whole diaphragm is about to spasm out through your mouth. The noise you make is not a demure little “hic” but more like a strangled “HURK.”

I could barely breathe, let alone speak, so I did the one thing I know to do: I called Grandpa.

One of his many legacies in our family is his incredible ability to cure the hiccups. You will tell him, gasping and squeaking, that you have the hiccups. He will level his eye on you in amusement and scoff, “No you don’t. Come on, give me one good hiccup.” And more often than not, you will do your damnedest to produce one hiccup as proof and fail utterly. He will grin knowingly, and you will be cured.

Unfortunately for me and my airways last week, his line was busy. As I continually dialed his number, heard the busy signal, hung up and tried again, hiccupping myself into oxygen deficiency, I had a very clear and quiet thought:

Who will cure my hiccups when Grandpa is gone?

If I had been thinking about his illness, I never would have gone near that thought, but my distracted brain brought it to the surface. After I recovered from both my hiccups and the shock of accepting that someday, probably sooner but hopefully later, Grandpa would be gone, I wondered if I would look back on that moment as one of the turning points, akin to my realization on the inn’s porch in the rain. I think that may be the moment when at least a small part of me stops fighting, stops being so scared and so angry, and acknowledges that somehow there will be a world without this person, whom I have spent my whole life loving.

The gratitude for a life, well-lived and well-loved, is an immense thing. Somehow, though, in my experience, the grief for a life lost is louder, at first. It is aggressive and must be ridden out, with the faith that ultimately what will be left is a quieter grief, which will heal, and a very large love, which will persevere.

A world without my grandfather is not one I would choose to live in, but eventually it’s a world I’ll have to live in. It will be a world where every day I think about how many of the pieces of who I am and how I live came from him. It will be a world where he lives in every moment of banter, every deck of cards, every mint julep, and countless other details.

And it will be a world where maybe someday I'll be able to level my eye on younger relatives in dry expectation and smile smugly when they are inexplicably and utterly unable to produce one good hiccup.

If you ask me, that's a pretty good legacy to uphold.

Bullshit

We are, above all things, a card playing clan.

This statement I apply to my father’s side, which consists of two grandparents, a collection of aunts and uncles, spouses, various and sundry cousins (first, second, and some degrees of removed), one great-grandchild, and a cousin from my mom’s side, whom my grandmother has officially claimed as her own—bloodlines be damned—since we all love him to the point of distraction.

Gin rummy is our time-honored standard, as is an accompanying, strong dose of trash talk. My mother reflected once that even after decades in the family, it was still a bit jarring to overhear her sweet, tender young daughters lay heavy sarcasm upon her father-in-law over a hand of cards. He of course had coached us all in both cards and sarcasm, and would rib us joyously and mercilessly.

Sometime in my childhood, as card games caught on at my elementary school, I started bringing home new games to add to the repertoire (Gin was the standard, but a few brave souls occasionally ventured into Russian Bank). Since I had the mongoose-like reflexes of an uptight nine-year-old, no one except my sister would ever play Egyptian Rat Screw with me, and when she did, she became remarkably violent in her slapping technique. The game fell out of favor quickly.

Bullshit, though, was a surprising hit.

The reason the game caught on in our family is that many, many people can play, and there sure are a lot of us. I have a very vivid memory of the first time we played, sitting around the kitchen table in the house where I grew up. Some two or three decks of cards had been called in for the occasion, and we eyed each other—by turns suspicious and smug—throughout the game. At one point, my grandmother, the sweet and enduring matriarch of the lot of us, gently laid down a stack of cards, stating their impossible content. I knew it was impossible, because I was looking at what she claimed to have in my own hand. I opened my mouth and then froze.

Really? I’m about to call bullshit on my grandmother?

Of course, the younger ones weren’t allowed to say "bullshit," but even the implication of "BS" was rather shocking to me, when applied to the grand high queen of our clan. We could trash talk with Grandpa, sure, but the deferential respect we paid to Gram was just as sacred as the sarcasm we used with her husband. My family watched with some amusement as two of my long held beliefs collided: that being respectful to our grandmother was a consecrated duty, and that losing at cards (or, really, anything) was to be avoided at all ethical costs.

Eventually I managed to squeak out in a tiny voice, “BS…?” Everyone, including Grandma, burst out laughing, but I had learned a surprisingly and widely applicable lesson:

Sometimes calling bullshit isn’t quite as easy as you might think.

I received a text this morning from a friend of mine, the only person from high school with whom I am still in contact. We joke that since we became friends during our last years in high school, we have been in love with each other in shifts: whenever either one of us turns up single and starts to think longingly of the other, the other is pretty much guaranteed to have just started seeing someone. I repressed the urge to call him recently when I broke up with my boyfriend, to let him know he should be on the lookout for a new main squeeze. When we did end up talking, I found out—with vague amusement—that he had in fact just started seeing someone.

It’s a strange friendship—one based on a mutual attraction that we’ve never quite gotten around to addressing in the many years we’ve been friends. When we both ended up going east for college from California and his Thanksgiving plans fell through, he came to my family’s Boston branch festivities. My family, of course, fell madly in love with him (I began to wonder if it was genetic predisposition on our part), and the next year he sheepishly asked his parents if it would be okay with them if he stayed east to be with us. And so the tradition started.

On one of those Thanksgivings, he and I ended up walking around Boston for an entire day. We passed a jewelry store, and I said offhandedly that when I was older, I wanted a strand of fat black pearls—then I’d know I’d really arrived (whatever that meant). Six months later, a small package arrived in my college mailbox: a little bag with a strand of freshwater black pearls, all the size of blueberries, which he had bought for me when he had visited family in the Philippines.

It’s no wonder that most of the men I date have had a hard time measuring up.

In college we had talked about how we would get married one day; we’d use our twenties to date all the wrong people and come back to one another when the time was right. I didn’t realize at the time how dangerous a game that was to play: a form of relationship Chicken, where you play along with the banter, refusing to blink first and admit that such a clean arrangement belies a lot of complicated emotions.

I was forced to blink last year when he asked if he and his girlfriend could sleep on my floor while they were in town.

I realized, with some surprise, that in the strictest sense, he and I never really had been together. I’d never met any of his other girlfriends and had always imagined them as more temporary and theoretical interludes than actual people. My claim on him, the bantering future we had casually built, turned out to be remarkably slippery. I brought out the black pearls and held them in my hand. Here was the proof, right? Here was the evidence that ours was more than just friendship, but at the same time never quite a relationship.

Cold comfort, that.

He had broken the unspoken arrangement. He had forced my hand, called my bluff, and made me admit that I had wanted the game to be real. We started with a small pretense—not quite a lie—putting cards facedown on the table and pretending like there might be a relationship underneath someday. I didn’t notice that over the years the pile got bigger, the stakes got higher, and as a result it became increasingly difficult and extraordinarily painful to call bullshit.

When I saw him a few months ago, he single and I in a happy relationship, I felt that old, seductive pull: how effortless it was to be with him, how natural the banter. I flirted with him the way I shuffle cards: easily and without thought. Without thought, that is, until the thought of my boyfriend pulled me up short, and I looked at our interaction a little more closely. It was the same as it always had been—mostly fun and comforting, until either one of us needed it to be real, and then it was just a house of cards.

I realized then that ours had been an inherently cowardly game: there was never any risk in planning a pretend relationship. In that moment I thought of the most gratifying part of my relationship with my boyfriend: that it was real. We had both gone out on that terrifying romantic limb and miraculously found each other out there together. You don’t plan relationships in theory. You build them in reality.

It was quite surprising to me when I broke up with my boyfriend, because what we had built didn’t turn out to be permanent, that I kept that realization in mind and didn’t fall back on the old, comfortable game of pretend.

So when my friend texted me this morning, telling me that he had gone out on a date last night, and that the woman’s mannerisms reminded him of me, which made him like her all the more, I rolled my eyes and thought, “That’s great. It’s also bullshit.”

What's Love Got to Do with It?

Over the last several years, I have formed a kind of mental repository for debunked pop cultural wisdom, John Lennon to John Hughes and beyond. I try to seal these emotional red herrings away, but they have always had a way of seeping out in the form of insidious and unrealistic expectations.

Good rules of thumb: though as a sophomore you may nurse a debilitating crush on a dreamy senior, it is unlikely that you will end up sitting cross-legged with him on a glass tabletop on either side of a birthday cake. Neither you, nor probably anyone, will ever be as cool as or pull off “Twist and Shout” quite like Ferris Bueller. No resolutions, confrontations, or massively coordinated dance numbers will happen at prom. A band nerd without glasses is likely a half-blind band nerd, not Taylor Swift. In reality, even if someone did try to chase you through an airport to confess everlasting love, TSA would probably tackle that someone before he or she cleared the first couple of gates. Getting the guy (or girl) is hard, yes, but being with him (or her) in real life, doing the work of an adult relationship, is much harder; happily ever after is never, ever guaranteed.

And, unfortunately, love is not all you need.

After my breakup, I experienced brief, passionate, and irrational bursts of anger at John Lennon for propagating such unconscionable tripe. I ignored in those moments that he was only participating in the grand tradition of “love conquers all,” because I found it much more convenient to have one Beatle upon whom to focus my wrath.

The unconscionable tripe, of course, is not the idea that love is all you need, but that love is all you need.

(Also, “unconscionable tripe” may be a bit strong, but it was a painful couple of weeks.)

It was an odd and wonderful experience to be, for the first time in my life, in a real relationship in the real world. I didn’t write him: he came fully formed, ready to screw up in ways I would never have planned and take my breath away in ways I would never have imagined. As a result, and also as a consequence of getting older and wiser (hopefully in equal measure), I began to think about our relationship less in terms of a movie and more in terms of our actual lives: two people in love, trying to make it work. I began to notice delineations in my head, marking out what I knew was fantasy from good, solid emotions, on which I could reasonably act.

The perfect example is my go-to theory about weddings vs. marriage. Yes, I want a wedding. I would like to wear an enormous white dress, attend a smashing party, and be the center of attention for a full calendar day. Shoot, I’d do that tomorrow if given the opportunity. However, I do not want to be married tomorrow. Not by a long shot. I am by no means prepared to join my life with another person’s until death do us part—the very thought makes me a little green around the gills. Which, I think, makes perfect sense: deciding to get married is a two person job. Deciding, on your own, that you would like to be married strikes me as missing the whole point. Marriage is a thoughtful, thorough agreement and promise between two people—at least, that’s what I’m hoping.

To recap:

Wedding: yes. Marriage: no (or, not for a good long while yet).

I never mentioned this theory to my ex, since I thought (accurately) that he might miss the subtleties of my differentiations as his pupils dilated and fight-or-flight kicked in at the mention of “wedding.” In the talk that may have been the beginning of the end of our relationship, he told me that he thought I was hearing wedding bells. I repressed the urge to kick him. I also repressed the urge to tell him that of course I was hearing wedding bells—but that was in no way related to my wanting to marry him any time in the foreseeable future, because I didn’t.

(Again with those pesky subtleties.)

He told me then that he wanted to think about our relationship six months into the future—no further. I was willing to agree to that, since it made sense for us at the time. However, as I started to think about graduate school and my own two year plan, I felt uncomfortably lopsided: I could plan everything else, but there was an enormous STOP sign right there in the path of my relationship. He had told me, in the same conversation in which he outlined the six month rule, that he didn’t want me to make any sacrifices for him. On the one hand, that’s fine, and I can appreciate that as someone whose mother has made many sacrifices for my father. On the other hand, I began to realize, just as I found the distance between wedding and marriage, there is a distance between sacrifice and compromise; between laying yourself down on some metaphorical (or not) altar, and realizing that in order to be together in the long run, sometimes you have to choose something that wouldn’t be your first choice if you were in it alone.

Increasingly I found myself on one side with my new set of subtleties, facing him on the other side with his hard and fast rules.

I find it ill-advised to marry for the sake of being married. I find it heart-breaking when the person you love refuses to budge on things he decided before you came along. And I find that in reality, love is not all you need. You need to be flexible. You need to be mindful of subtleties—of the distances between broad generalizations (that all women want to get married, that all men are commitment phobes, etc.) and the actual individual with whom you’re building something.

Even if it started like a movie, and for a long time was the most wonderful reality, you need to be able to see what something has become and will become.

And if it isn’t all you need—the love and all the rest—you need to be able to walk away.

Eat Two Pints, and Call Me in the Morning

About a year ago, my oldest sister was having a hard time. We don’t always get along; I think the trouble started when she left for college. That was—oh, give or take—eighteen years ago. Still, I love her enormously and fiercely. In a way, how crazy we drive each other is not in conflict with how much we love each other; it’s actually indicative of how much we love each other.

Nevertheless, JR and I have the unfortunate habit of hurting each other when we’re mostly trying to help. As a result, when I understood from our mother that her life was getting jostled around in a most distressing manner, I found myself a little stuck. On the one hand, I wanted to call her and tell her how much I loved her, and how sorry I was that things had taken a turn towards sucking. On the other, I also knew that we give and receive comfort in very, very different ways, and the last thing I wanted to do was accidentally set off a small nuclear disaster on top of everything else.

The solution came to me in a remarkable flash of insight.

Say it in butter.

My signature cookie was once known as the Witch’s Hat, before I started tinkering with it. Now it is commonly referred to as the Peanut Butter Orgasm. (With all due modesty, I think the name change indicates a certain level of success in my tinkering.) I tend to make these monstrosities for birthdays, breakups, and the occasional well-timed seduction. They're my go-to, but in this case, I wanted to make something a little less common, a little more historical. I settled on our grandmother’s Coconut Oatmeal cookies, which start with two sticks of butter and only improve from there. I shipped them off in a converted Kleenex box, held together with duct tape, with a short note telling my sister how much I loved her, how sorry I was that things were hard, and how these cookies were the best way I knew how to communicate both of those things.

A week or so later, she emailed me to thank me. She told me that when her daughter asked for one of the “special cookies” as a treat in her lunch box, my sister had to physically brace herself for the blast of narcotic coconut smell as she opened the ziplock, because if she didn’t, she would fall upon them with abandon and have to explain to her daughter why there were none left.

Which was, more or less, exactly what I had intended.

This particular mechanism came full circle about two weeks ago, when I effectively raised the red flag, via text, to my closest friends in Boston:

Woman down. Send reinforcements.

I had broken up with my boyfriend.

Their response was immediate, and along the lines of, “We’re on our way five minutes ago.”

They circled the wagons, and they brought supplies.

Stine, whose exceptional timing and intuition brought her to my door about two minutes after I had finished needing an hour alone, folded herself up next to me on the couch. Abbie, when I went down to let her into my apartment building, started pulling out pints of Ben and Jerry’s from her purse before I had even opened the atrium door. Back in my apartment, Stine found the spoons in short order.

A little while later, after I had singlehandedly demolished the Coffee Heath Bar Crunch, one of them asked me what I wanted for dinner. I was still thinking somewhat disjointedly, and said absently, “I have two chicken breasts thawing… I should cook them before they go bad…” After all, I may be injured from heartbreak, but wasting food is downright insulting.

Abbie turned on my computer, searched briefly, and proceeded directly to the kitchen: a woman on a mission. From my kitchen, the occasional hollers would issue forth as I nursed my second (or third, but who's counting?) Manhattan.

“Are you particularly attached to this pepper?”

“Do you have… oh here… wait—why do you have two canisters of seasoned salt?”

“I’m so glad you buy your cream of mushroom soup in four packs—do you mind if it’s expired?”

As a matter of fact, I didn’t mind at all.

What emerged from my kitchen a short while later was comfort in a casserole dish: a cheese-encrusted, chicken, pasta, and cream of mushroom miracle of love. We ate it while watching Aladdin, and when eventually (and with some misgivings) they left for the evening, they made sure I had enough hugs and Sun Chips to get me through until morning.

Never will it cease to amaze me how the combination of excellent friends and cream of mushroom soup can truly soothe the soul.

It is possible, when we whip up casseroles and ship off batches of cookies, that we are, at a very instinctive level, trying to stultify the emotions with excessive caloric intake. In The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love, which is one of my favorite books of all time, there is chapter dedicated to this very notion, entitled: “What to Eat when Tragedy Strikes.” My friends and I did not originate the concept; we just honor it and perform it as needed.

There are plenty of times when I eat my emotions. My emotions last night manifested themselves in the impulsive purchase of a filet mignon—I find that I mourn better with red meat in my system. I would be the first to admit that my relationship with food is a little bit fraught, and I am working towards a place where I can combat distress without defaulting to a system of adding more steak or (more economically) adding more Goldfish crackers. However, when I shipped my sister cookies and when my friends brought forth ice cream and casserole, there was a bit more going on than the simple math of “if you consume more calories than you have emotions you might just feel better.”

The cookies I made my sister were our grandmother’s recipe. Our grandmother was, even for two people as different as her granddaughters, the ultimate source of safety and uncomplicated affection for both of us. I was sending her love the way Grandma used to express it, because I knew that kind of comfort would never get lost in translation.

Abbie made me casserole because she knew that I consider casserole (especially with cream of [anything] soup in it) to be the best incarnation of home any Corningware could ever contain. Stine made sure I had plenty of Sun Chips because those were the staple junk food treat of my childhood.

Don’t get me wrong: the food was great, and my emotions were sufficiently blunted. I’m smart enough to know, though, that the most comforting thing that happened that weekend was not the procurement of grieving supplies. It was the circling of the wagons, the rallying to the wounded party, and the fact that I really do have the most wonderful friends in the world.

Point A to Point B, and Everything in Between

Last week, some coworkers and I grabbed sandwiches from the local deli and ate lunch at a picnic table outside our office. One of the women, about whom I normally have positive feelings, started to ask me about graduate school. As I felt my entire body go tense, I had to remind myself that, contrary to what I might believe sometimes, my anxiety is not immediately visible to everyone who might glance at me.

Leaning forward over the picnic table, as if she were anticipating a good answer, my coworker asked me what programs I was looking at.

I shrugged. “Don’t know yet. Maybe art history. Maybe education. Not really sure.”

When I am desperately trying to keep panic at bay, for some reason I also drop the subjects of my sentences and speak in fragments.

She persisted. “Well, where do you want to live? Like, where would you like to end up?”

Again I shrugged. “Charleston. Tucson. Denver. Indianapolis. Don’t know.”

“Well have you looked at programs in those areas?”

In my mind, my composure started to squeak uncomfortably, like a guitar string wound too tightly.

“Hey, I just don’t know,” I said more firmly, smiled and changed the subject. For the rest of lunch, I tried to smother my flailing anxieties with the fresh mozzarella in my sandwich.

What I had been doing without realizing it was emitting the visual and vocal cues that I had adopted during my senior year and immediately after: the admission of uncertainty, followed by a polite request—usually indicated by tone or body language—that the subject be dropped.

Looking at it from a reasonable point of view (a.k.a. not mine), it’s not an unusual thing about which to be curious. My coworkers and extended family care about me or at least are interested in what my plans are for the future. Since my fear of those very plans and that very future is mostly internal, they wouldn’t necessarily realize they had hit on a sore subject. The issue I sometimes face with those people, who are interested in my plans but don’t know me well enough to read my signals, is that they care enough not to accept polite deflection.

They have the best intentions, and I have a profound appreciation for how fresh mozzarella can come in handy in defusing my mounting hysteria.

Late in my senior year, it wasn’t uncommon for certain words or phrases to be banned from polite conversation amongst classmates. Words like…resume. And what are you doing next year? And So’s your old man!—wait, that’s The Music Man… but still: they all spelled Trouble with a capital T, and that rhymed with “me,” and that stood for, “Oh God, what the hell am I doing with my life?”

And I don’t know never seemed to be a good enough answer.

We are a generation of over-achievers. It seems slightly arrogant and more than trite to say it, but qualifying many of my contemporaries as “rabidly ambitious” doesn’t hit too far from the mark. My best friend mused in an email recently that our generation will probably never stop asking "what’s next?" because we were brought up to believe we could do anything and have everything. As we get older, that all-encompassing Everything evolves into a much more specific Something: the goal, the life we decide we want for ourselves. Mathematics leads us to believe that the best way to get from ourselves as Point A to our goal as Point B is a straight line, and then all of our "what’s next?" questions line themselves up along that path. So it would seem like all you need to do is choose a Point B—a goal, the life you want—and start moving forward.

As usual, the practice of personal mathematics and physics leaves a lot to be desired.

I’m the person who stands for twenty minutes in front of the mascara display, paralyzed by the excess of options. And from this point I am supposed to make major life decisions?

Awesome.

I realize the flaw in my formula: that I am assuming there can only be one point B. In a way, that’s how I think because that’s how I was brought up. My parents followed a straight line, and they measured out the distance in their minds after which they would be There, at Point B, when they could enjoy the fruits of their labor and the contentedness of having achieved the goal. By their measurements, they should be There. They are of the right age, their children are grown, and they have worked so hard to get There. But, in the quintessential Modernist bait-and-switch, there is no There, there. Jobs are still frustrating, bills still need paying, and life still isn’t easy, or at least as easy as they would’ve hoped by now. From early on in my own life I’m watching my parents experience a kind of existential crisis in the middle of theirs. And I wonder if they are asking themselves and each other what’s next.

The logical alternative to a Point B is a host of other points, C through Z and beyond. In reality, though, you do have to choose to a certain extent: what job you want and what degree you’ll need to get to be a viable candidate for that job. And which tests you’ll have to take to apply for the degree you’ll need to get to be a viable candidate for the job.

And the green grass grew all around, all around, and the green grass grew all around.

It’s about this point in the conversation that I start hyperventilating and looking for an emergency stash of mozzarella.

The most obvious fear is that I’m afraid I’ll make the wrong decision: get a degree that already stands a good chance at being economically useless (alas for the liberal arts) and then end up not liking the job I may or may not get. What I tell myself, when I’m pretending I’m a rational, mature human being, is that there is no law of physics that will make all graduate schools in the world instantly dissolve after I achieve that one degree I choose. (What can I say? Even when I’m pretending to be rational, I’m still sarcastic. The imagination only goes so far.) The point is that I can always change my mind and go back to school, seeking out another goal and another path towards it.

The less obvious fear, the bottom-dweller anxiety, is that I am afraid I won’t be brave enough to make the change: to go back to school and choose another life. I already know that change is hard and deeply scary, and I imagine it will only get harder and scarier as I get older. I’ve never been very brave by nature—I’m a lot of things, but courageous has never been one of them. So the panic I’m feeling now, closing off my airways and crocheting my intestines, is actually a manifestation of something I do know, not something I don’t: that if I choose wrong now, I may not be brave enough to undo and redo in the future.

The funny thing about Life (capital L) is that it is uncontrollable and inevitable. These are a few of my least favorite things.

So what do I do, other than curl up under my desk and eat my way towards lactose intolerance?

I think about my life so far, not as I’ve imagined it or planned it, but as I’ve actually experienced it: my actual, daily life (lower case l). I have experienced that if I have Cheez-Its in the house, I will eat them all in one sitting, so it is best not to keep Cheez-Its in the house. I have learned that my credit card spending has an ebb and flow throughout the cycle, so just because I’m having a slow week doesn’t mean I should buy that extremely desirable but ridiculously expensive dress. That relationships are hard: that there is not a foreseeable point at which I will experience complete romantic resolution and ride off into the sunset as the credits roll. Also, that my boyfriend is so much better than any romantic lead I could write for myself, because he’s real, and as an individual person over whom I have no control, he decided to love me. That only eating carbohydrates for breakfast will leave me ravenous by 10:30 am, and that those incredible, satisfying showdowns I imagine and script so carefully in the shower will never happen. That having good people in your life makes it better, whether you’re having a good day or a bad day. That happiness is not a constant state: you have a baseline of factors contributing to your general contentment, and an odd sprinkling of small elements in your day that can make you enjoy the whole shebang a little bit more. So for the love of God, pet that dog and shove your head in that lilac bush, because it will make you happy, and that is not a small thing.

Above all, though, I have experienced that there has not been anything yet that has killed me.

I have very wise friends. One, who knows exactly when to gently apply tough love, told me that thousands of people go through the graduate school application process every year and very few experience mental breakdowns. Another, while we were medicating our mutual bad day with blue-cheese burgers, told me that life is a collection of good days and bad days, and if you have more good days than bad, you’ve done okay.

I am responsible for who I am now, and who I’m becoming. However, I am not responsible for my Entire Future right here, right now. There is a place between taking no agency, blaming fate and old decisions, and assuming responsibility for my entire life as of this very moment. I seek that place, the middle-ground, because I imagine that the weather is very good there: an excellent climate for my chronic anxiety.

In the mean time, I’m going to smell lilacs and nudge my way into my future, buying a GRE book and perhaps a mozzarella sandwich and learning how to be okay with a scary answer to the scary question: “What’s next?”

I don’t know.

The Anecdotal Life

Two years ago, I was standing in a flower shop in my hometown waiting for a boutonniere when my phone rang. I had figured it was my best friend: we were T-minus twenty-four hours from her wedding, and as maid-of-honor, I was on-call and ready for action. I had flown home the previous day for the wedding, joyfully ditching in my new job for a long weekend, which I had negotiated when I took the position. I had a spike of anxiety when I saw that the number on my phone was a Boston area code.

I picked up and found one very urgent real estate agent on the other end.

“I need for you to be in Brighton right now,” Ashley said to me. After a few traumatizing Craigslist apartment visits, I had followed the advice of a friend and started working with Ashley, the agent who had helped my friend find his place. I had taken an immediate liking to Ashley when we had first met: she had frowned at several listings and said that she didn’t think they were what I was looking for. She was right: they weren’t. We got on well after that.

Now, three weeks later in a flower shop halfway across the country, my head spun with trying to remember who I was in that moment—somewhere between new Boston resident and maid-of-honor in Chicago.

“Ashley, I’m in Chicago for my best friend’s wedding. I don’t get back until Sunday night.”

There was a pause on the line, and I heard her take a deep breath. “Then you’re going to need to trust me.”

Everyone—and I mean everyone—in my family thought I had lost my mind when I signed the lease and faxed it in. The funny thing about my family, though, is that they will help you accomplish the task about which they are so dubious even while they’re voicing their doubts. My grandfather cut the check, which I was to pay back immediately, and dropped if off that night at the rental office in Brookline, probably about the same time that I was strolling down the aisle at the wedding rehearsal.

I moved in two years ago Sunday. Best leap of faith ever.

One of the trappings of adulthood to which I treat myself is a subscription to the New Yorker, sent weekly to my darling little apartment. One of the things I began to do almost immediately when the magazine started arriving was to cut out my favorite cartoons. (Let’s be honest: the only thing Playboy and the New Yorker have in common is that nobody reads them strictly for the articles—the images therein are a major draw.) It started out casually enough: I would see something about cupcake frosting or Lady Gaga and cut out the cartoon to send it to the friend of whom it reminded me. The snarky corporate images—“Sir, he left a suicide deck”—appealed to my sometimes fleeting, black humor about my job at the time. Some of them were just plain funny, like the penguin who is flummoxed to find he has his tuxedo on inside-out. And still others were almost embarrassingly insightful into how I think about my life: over coffee, one cartoon woman confides blithely to her two companions, “I don’t mind emotional trauma if I can turn it into a really funny anecdote.”

Yikes.

In reality, the day on which I signed my apartment lease sight unseen and attended my best friend’s wedding rehearsal was incredibly stressful. In the end, however, it made a great story, because everything worked out—the wedding was fantastic and so is my apartment. Likewise, one of the best stories I have was born from the longest thirty-six hours of my life, during which I travelled from Praiano (where the bus was full), to Sorrento (where the bus left without me), to Naples (where I barely caught the last train) to Rome (where I found out Orbitz had lost my reservation) to Newark (where my flight to Chicago had been cancelled), and finally to Chicago, after having caught the last flight home through the grace of one very kind gate agent. I arrived more or less in one piece, but as soon as I sat down on the flight to Chicago, I burst into uncontrollable laughter and thought they might have to subdue me.

Again: horrifying at the time, but hilarious in retrospect.

Even the stories that don’t end so well can be made into excellent cocktail conversation fodder: my standard line about my disastrous year on match.com is that I was secretly conducting anthropological research for a David Sedaris-style book of short stories. After I realized how the system did and didn’t work, I would almost pray for a truly catastrophic date. It was unlikely I was going to meet my match (no matter what their commercials might say—I always have to resist the urge to chuck a shoe at my TV when they come on), but nothing about a boring date was particularly funny. And dang it, if I had paid this much money not to meet my future mate, I’d better damn well get some good stories out of it.

It’s times like that when I worry that my twenties are turning into the pursuit of the perfect anecdote.

We often think about our lives as a continuous timeline: one age gives way to another, grouped under certain sub-headings (high school, college, first job) and punctuated by memorable events. This is, I guess, more or less accurate, since all of us are bound to a certain straight, chronological line; but really, how many of us think that linearly about the lives we lead?

When I think about my life, I think about a collection of stories. When I was little, my grandmother created an oral family tree for me, and I can trace my family back several generations through the stories I know about them (the one about great-grandpa George, the Tin Lizzy, and the rhododendron bush is especially memorable). At some point, between history class timelines and Grandma’s stories, my young mind decided that the stories are infinitely more fun, so that was how I began building my own history.

At some point, of course, in my overly analytical, literarily inclined brain, I started to anthologize (pause to flinch at unbearable pretention). If I am made up of the stories I’ve lived and the stories I tell, what do they mean as—for lack of a better work—a collection, and how could they indicate what comes next? I want so much to make sense of what my history has meant, as if I might be able to uncover clues about where the heck I’m going. It’s kind of like my own form of augury; it’s an inexact science either way, deciphering the flight of birds or common experiential threads.

In the last several years of my life, there has been quite a lot of uncertainty and general flailing. I’m not a big fan of uncertainty, so when I start to think about my most recent batch of stories, I cast them in a humorous light. I make sense of my twenties by making them funny, because if these years aren’t funny, they’re scary and uncertain, and I have a hard time knowing what to do with that. Yes, my adventures in weddings, real estate, international travel, scary bosses, and internet dating have been frequently hilarious. But sometimes they weren’t—sometimes they just sucked. I am a person who always wants to be funny and always wants to have a good story, but someday I would also like to be a person who is confident enough that even if my life is scary and uncertain, most of it will make sense eventually.

I have several different editions of The Great Gatsby sitting on my shelf at home, and each of them has a fresh, insightful introduction, which tackles the meaning of the book in a new light or under new assumptions. But really? I never read the intros. I just love the book itself. So maybe I should just stop anthologizing and keep writing.

It is, after all, a little early in my life for any definitive, editorial conclusions.

The Dangers of Furniture and Alumni

During the spring of my freshman year in college, I accidentally gave myself one of the nastiest bruises I have ever sustained. In a spectacular miscalculation of speed and distance, I basically impaled my right upper leg on the corner of a low table. The bruise itself was smashingly colorful and shaped like a flower; I remember, because—morbidly intrigued—I drew an outline of it in ballpoint pen and took a picture to prove it had the rough silhouette of a daisy.

The bruise plagued me for most of that spring, because I kept running into it over and over again: the first dazzling display of poor coordination was followed by many random acts of clumsiness. The unfortunate splotch on my leg remained purple and painful for about six weeks, and I got into the habit of dodging potential threats to my leg for most of that summer. My phobia of menacing, sharply cornered furniture had mostly faded by the fall.

On a night several years later, I was walking into an ice cream shop to celebrate a friend’s birthday when I came face to face with another bruising force: another alumna from my high school.

To be fair, she herself was not bruising. She was probably one of the nicest people in school: bubbly, sweet, self-deprecating, and totally beloved. Since at that time I was angsty, miserable, and awkward—and had yet to form a sense of humor about those qualities—interacting with this girl made my teeth ache with jealousy. Facing her now, a full seven years later, I realized with some detachment that outwardly I probably looked like a deer in headlights. Inwardly, I was reflexively hunching over a very old bruise.

In the time since high school, I’ve developed remarkably quick defense mechanisms, which (mostly) allow me to gloss over rattling encounters with barely a pause. The problem is that, when I see people from that time in my life, I find myself launched back into a time before I developed those defenses. Really, it is directly because of that time that I developed them in the first place.

What had happened was that my family had moved from a suburb of Chicago to a suburb of San Francisco when I was fourteen, and it had been a protracted, painful excision. It wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a clean cut: I knew we were leaving but not when, and my mother and I spent six months being kicked out of the house at a moment’s notice for real estate showings, while my dad commuted between California and Illinois weekly. When we finally got to California, during the loneliest summer I ever had, I tried to wrap my head around the fact that my life as I had planned it—and had every reason to plan in that way—was now an impossibility. There was no immediate support structure to speak of: my best friend was still in Chicago and we were limited by long distance charges; my sisters were both college graduates with their own lives; and my parents were by turns clueless and helpless, unsure how to deal with my massive grief, which evolved into a thick, ugly anger. It wasn’t actually Doom (capital D), but to a very scared fourteen-year-old, it sure seemed that way.

I felt like I had been evicted from my own life. I think to a certain extent that most teenagers believe that they are the only person who can suffer from the special kind of solitary confinement within their own minds. I don’t think I was any more or less right than the rest, but I came to rebuild who I was around the loneliness.

The first defense mechanism I developed freshman year, in order to protect a very bruised core, was kind of like a tool from the Iron Age: completely inelegant and bluntly effective. It involved a persistent scowl and way too much black eyeliner. I fairly oozed hostility, but of course, secretly, I still wanted everybody to like me. What came of that attitude were a few rather odd and disjointed friendships and a reputation as an Angry Girl.

In the few years that followed, I managed to smooth off some of the roughest edges, but what I ended up doing was honing one blunt tool into a sharper one, exchanging Iron Age hostility for a kind of Bronze Age sarcasm. Either way, I was never exactly what you might call friendly. In a funny and rather telling development, many of the minds of my male peers seemed to do a very basic arithmetic with me: angry girl plus smart girl equals Feminist. That I did (and still do) have feminist leanings was sort of beside the point for them: they had figured out why I was the puzzling combination of angry and smart. It was because of the Feminist. Problem solved, reputation established.

Of the many layers I built up in high school, many eventually felt false. I was more than my anger and my hurt, but in that context, I had no idea how to be a person who wasn’t built around those things. I always thought that once I got to college, the old scabs would fall away. Then I would be secure enough, knowing that I was where I was supposed to be, that I would end up being whoever the hell I wanted, not who a scared fourteen year old had needed to become.

I wonder sometimes how I might think about this differently if we hadn’t moved back.

Which is exactly what we did: almost four years to the day after we moved from Chicago, we unexpectedly moved back. I’ve always known that I’ve taken the easy way out on sorting through those four years of my life; after all, they were book ended so neatly by two very jarring moves. My years in California were the hurt years, the bad ones. I went home when I moved back to Illinois and started being happy again.

Problem solved, emotional alibi established.

But of course, nothing is every that easy.

I don’t spend a whole lot of time in my day to day life dwelling on high school (no really!); college replaced that Big Bad with its Saving Grace. (Sometimes my emotional building blocks are almost laughably rudimentary—I’m working on it.) The issue is that those paralyzing memories are always there, and that for some very unsettling reason, Cambridge is positively crawling with alumni of my high school. It’s almost as though the maniacal pursuit of Harvard is still subconsciously present, even after college. I would be lying if I said it were consistently awful: I had a very joyful reunion with my Latin partner of four years, and I was nothing short of flattered when a freshman I had known as a senior tackled me in the middle of a bookstore.

Nevertheless, as in my recent encounter at the ice cream shop, my general reaction to running into a fellow alum is freezing dismay. The hurt I remember threatens the person I became, and I feel like I’m having a forcible out of body experience: the person I was, defense mechanisms blazing, shoves out the person I am, who’s managed to practice a little more finesse in the subsequent years.

And a slightly exasperated voice asks from within, “Really? Are we still experiencing this?”

When has it been too long? There is a kind of conventional wisdom that implies that there is some sort of shelf-life for emotional stressors or traumas; that after a certain point, you have to “let things go” or you’re willfully and immaturely holding onto them for your own twisted purposes. I always hated that phrase—let it go—as if I would suddenly get a light bulb over my head and think, “Oh! I’m over it.” When I throw a baseball, I let it go: my fingers obey my neurons and release a spherical object with no small amount of force, and it speeds along a trajectory away from my person.

My memories and my experiences? Not so obedient to neural impulses. Believe me, I’ve been trying to launch these emotions on an outward trajectory for years.

I don’t want these bruises anymore. It’s been seven years since I graduated from high school, and I am honestly humiliated that they are still there. I like to think I have become a real live whole person, and the stress of being blitz-attacked by a broken fourteen-year-old’s emotions is very tedious. I wonder if I’m as whole as I think I am, still dodging memories like sharp furniture, and I wonder where the line is: between forgiving myself for an old protective instinct, and reaching some point of enlightenment to be able to just let it go.

I think “letting it go” may be a bit of a fallacy for me. First of all, it implies a very zen, beatific approach to pain, a quality which I have never possessed. Second, all of the things that have happened have made me who I am—I can’t take out those four years any more than I can take the flour out of a cookie after it’s come out of the oven. How nice it would be: to be able to pummel myself down into all of my elemental attributes. Then I could sweep the nasty ones aside and collect the ones I liked into a pleasant little pile. But as Jimmy Buffet has pointed out, I’m already out of the oven—and I am flawed individually.

Maybe eventually I’ll let go of letting go; maybe I’ll just be content with incorporating and be able to remain consistently in my whole rather than trying to sidestep one of the parts of my sum.

After all, I didn’t really notice in my conscious mind when I finally stopped avoiding table corners, so maybe there’s hope. Someday, I might run into someone from high school and notice with some surprise that I’m not flinching, because both the bruise—and the instinct to protect it—are gone.