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.

There and (Regrettably) Back Again

Around this time of year, I start sleeping with my windows open. As far as I’m concerned, there are few pleasures in life that rival sleeping in a warm cocoon of blankets in a cold room. On weekdays, however, the pleasures of a blanket cocoon are slightly compromised when one has to depart from said cocoon into a very chilly apartment in the morning. When my alarm clock goes off, I tend to hit snooze and glare for a few baleful moments at the general surroundings of Wednesday, or worse yet, Monday.

I was describing this phenomenon to a friend in an email when I added as an afterthought that an Apartment Gremlin would be the perfect solution to this problem. (I should note here that I choose the word gremlin more for the pleasure of its pronunciation in conjunction with the word apartment. As a deep fantasy nerd, I realize there are other creatures that would be much more appropriate: brownie, fairy, sprite, etc. Again, the nerdhood runs deep.) An Apartment Gremlin, in my mind, would wake up around 3 or 4 am and make the rounds in my apartment, closing windows. Consequently, I would be able to fall asleep in a chilled apartment and wake up in a blissfully warm one.

My mind grabbed the idea and ran with it.

I’ve always had a fascination with things small and magical. I can trace this inclination to the books my grandmother read to me as a child: all of the E. Nesbit stories, The Borrowers and its sequels, and anything by Elizabeth Goudge. These books were inhabited by fairies, helpful bees, elder relations of suspiciously magical character, and other invisible goings on, and all of them had the ability to make it seem as though magic, and its presence and dealings in everyday life, was the most normal thing in the world. It went even further than that in many cases: often the magical creatures were characterized by very human foibles, from general prejudices to outright fussiness. It’s entirely possible that the reason these books are mainly written for a younger audience is that children can accept more readily the idea that mixing magic and Mondays isn’t so outlandish. Harry Potter wasn’t the first British child to discover a world of magic coexistent with his own; he is only one of the most recent and, I might add, he seemed more surprised to find it than most of his literary predecessors. Most other young, British protagonists in fantasy books simply took magic as a matter of course. I think especially of Lucy, emerging from the wardrobe into Narnia and promptly taking tea with Mr. Tumnus.

The distance now separating me from The Five Children and It and all the other stories is a bit wider than the breadth of the Atlantic. When I fantasize anymore, I don’t often dream myself into Maria Merryweather’s perfect tower room or Arrietty’s sub-floorboard living room. I dream about mystical, perfect grad school scholarships and an herb garden outside of a grey house in Maine. In a way, these are the adult incarnations of pots of gold and fairy tale castles. We just ground them, hauling them into our world and putting coffee cups down on top of them so they won’t blow away.

Sometimes I wonder about the point at which we stop importing ourselves into worlds of fantasy and start bringing fantasies into our own realities; when the trappings of dreams must become more real to be more acceptable to the adult mind. It’s not that one is necessarily better than the other, but the difference is certainly startling. The change, though, isn’t necessarily permanent, and sometimes the wonder does come bubbling up.

As soon as I formed the idea—Apartment Gremlin—a remarkably detailed image came to mind and rapidly wrote itself into something like a story:

It is just before dawn in my apartment. The light is subdued, and the air is cold. There is a small cottage underneath my bed, which is conveniently set upon risers. The structure is mock-Tudor, fashioned from cardboard, plaster, whiteout, thatching, and scraps of cloth; particular attention has been paid to the windows, which are adorned with curtains within and shutters without. There are sturdy window boxes, which boast an assortment of Corsican mint and sweet violets.

From the tidy cottage a small figure emerges, stretching its arms over its head to work out the night’s kinks. It has a broad face, decorated with a beaky nose and determined eyebrows. It wears its sugar-floss hair in different colors, depending on its mood, and today has chosen a wealthy tuft of pale green. On its spindly body it wears indifferent brown trousers and a bottle green vest, which is decorated with a silver watch chain of which it is very proud. One may note that there is no watch upon the watch chain; gremlins take very little note of the institutionalized measure of time per se, but are quite fond of the lovely adornments humans give to the measure of time: arms of clocks, chains of old fashioned watches, and the brief and entirely insistent music the keepers make at an especially appointed hour. This gremlin’s personal watch chain was cleverly adapted from an old silver necklace chain, polished to enviable brightness.

Fully awake, the gremlin surveys the expanse of hardwood floor and mountainous furniture with quick, business-like approval, and clambers nimbly upwards towards the windows. At its polite request, the windows lower themselves silently, only making an apologetic, muted whump as they seal. It taps the radiator on its way to the kitchen, to politely remind it of its duties, and before the gremlin has had its tea, warmth has begun to creep back into the apartment.

It enjoys a meal of precisely one Cheez-It and a small cup of Constant Comment tea. I came to understand very early on that gremlins are not appreciative of thimbles as drinking receptacles and reserve special disdain for all things pink. As a result, I was obliged to find a doll’s tea cup, which was not difficult, that most especially had no pink decoration of any sort, which was surprisingly difficult. When I obtained a light blue china cup, the gremlin was exceedingly pleased.

Its first meal of the day is also its last, since gremlins have very short days: they do not favor brightness (and so avoid morning and afternoon), cannot abide darkness (and so avoid night), and their disfavor of pink predisposes them to avoid sunset entirely. They seem only to enjoy the few silver hours between true night and glaring dawn and in an adaptation, which may only be described as peculiarly British, they take particular delight in gloomy days with soaking rain. As a result, I often wonder about the gremlin population of Seattle and whether or not it is, in fact, an untapped resource.

After its meal, the gremlin casually retrieves a vicious looking shrimp fork from behind the toaster and descends competently to the floor. In the remaining time before true dawn, it stalks a now domesticated population of dust bunnies in their usual haunts. It feels no compunction in their slaughter, because (as it pointed out in our one conversation on the matter) there will always be more. I had experienced some surprise at its pursuit of the dust bunnies, their extinction not being a feature of the gremlin’s original contract, but (again, in our one conversation on the matter) it noted to me that the bunnies had themselves gone quite feral and that it enjoyed the hunt. It had also taken the difficult procurement of the blue cup to be a gesture of good will, and had been pleased to return the favor.

With the dust carcasses skewered on the bristles of a well-placed hand broom, the gremlin yawns (which, in gremlins, is primarily a function of stretching its feet luxuriously) and walks back across the floor to its cottage. The warmth of the obedient radiator has made it sleepy, and it takes a final cursory glance around the room before it enters its home and closes the door behind it.

I come back to my awareness at my desk, shaking off the curiosity about whether or not the gremlin has a mailbox. I feel predictably silly and surprisingly sad, and I realize that I miss the combination of wonder and everyday acceptance of the possibility of magic. It is simultaneously necessary and terrible that we grow out of it, perhaps only satisfied as the eccentric aunt or uncle who still secretly believes and provides a suitable and supportive backdrop for another child’s story.

I also realize regretfully that tomorrow morning, I will wake up with no cottage under my bed, the windows open, the room cold, and a rampant population of feral dust bunnies.

Dead Poets and Career Choices (an ode to Karen Wallace)

In my family, the story goes that at one point in the early stages of my aunt’s adult life, an older relative informed her that she should never let a man see her sleep before they got married, since she snored. She should also never beat a man at checkers, apparently. I got my own dose of advice, from a different relative but along similar lines, while I was demolishing an unfortunate crustacean at a family crab-feed: that I should probably have something on paper with my beloved before I let him see me eat shellfish.

On the one hand, all of the aforementioned advice positively reeks of chauvinism and values of antiquated femininity, in neither of which I place much value. On the other hand, I am well aware that I (perhaps only surpassed in reputation by my mother) am the creature with which mommy crabs threaten their baby crabs to make them behave. Eating crab and lobster combines for me three of my most favorite things in the world: eating in general, butter in particular, and competition above all. I take just as much joy in picking every last ounce of meat from the crab as I do in enjoying the spoils. I’m not kidding myself about how such a sight might affect a potential suitor: I’m intimidating enough as it is. Perhaps it’s best to wait a while before we go out for lobster.

Self-awareness is a funny thing. While it primarily involves honesty, it also involves some other components. It’s kind of like the gin to a martini: essential, but incomplete without supporting ingredients. One of those ingredients—in the martini metaphor, this might be the exquisite, gorgonzola-stuffed olive—is external perspective: someone to reach in from outside and point out something that is obvious from a distance but less so from within the confines of your head (an extraordinary best friend is perfect for this; a therapist also helps). The trickiest ingredient is the ability to gauge how hard on yourself you should be; the vermouth of the equation: too much and you run the risk of a wimpy martini, too little and you can barely kid yourself that you’re enjoying drinking this jet fuel.

Many of my exercises in self-awareness are harmless and sometimes accompanied by the warm, fuzzy feeling of figuring out that some of my quirks aren’t faults. For instance: yes, consumption of shellfish should wait until the preliminary stages of a relationship have passed. Another realization has saved me a lot of money: an item of clothing may be simultaneous desirable and totally unrealistic. Sure, I may like it, but I’ll definitely never wear it, so put the credit card away, stupid. There are some movies that will make me cry—as in, bawl my eyes out with loud, messy hiccups—and so should be watched alone. Among these are: Armageddon, Toy Story 3 (a recent addition), Moulin Rouge, and Dead Poets Society.

The last of these movies (no, I’d never call Armageddon a film) was on the other night, and I stood paralyzed in front of the TV, watching the last scene even as my tea kettle was shrieking to be unplugged in the kitchen. As soon as Ethan Hawke starts up from his chair, stuttering about how he knows it wasn’t Robin Williams’ fault, the floodgates opened. By the time the boys are standing on their desks, I was a blithering heap.

I myself was lucky enough to have an O Captain, My Captain, in the form of the inestimable Dr. Karen Wallace. I hated her at first: she had a very low tolerance for bullshit, and as an arrogant high school freshman, I had a surplus. It eventually became a joke between us that at first, all I could hear was her saying to me that I didn’t know everything. When I stopped blustering and started listening, I could hear the other half of her wisdom: that no, I didn’t know everything, but ignorance is not lack of knowledge. Ignorance is refusing to gain more knowledge because you think you already have it all. Basically, once I realized she didn’t think I was a moron (which, in many ways, I was) and that she was in fact trying to help me, we became very close. I would come into her office when writing a paper (for any class, not just hers) and soliloquize at length on a completely disorganized heap of ideas, which were swirling around in my head.

She would listen patiently, and when I had worn myself out, she would ask, “What are you trying to say?”

Surprised out of my stream-of-consciousness, I would reply in the form of a thesis statement.

She would smile beatifically and say, “Good. Write that down.”

Throughout high school and college, I always began essays and papers by typing her words on the top of my brainstorming page:

What are you trying to say?

Good. Write that down.

Two things I know about myself are that I love the English language in its various literary incarnations, and that I love to teach. Karen used to let me take over small parts of the weekly grammar lessons, and when my enthusiasm at the chalkboard translated into someone’s understanding how an indirect objected works, I experienced a satisfaction that has proven to be difficult to match. Several years later, I gave a gallery talk in conjunction with an intern show I had curated at my college museum. I got the same rush as in freshman English: watching my explanation of a topic change the way people understood it.

One could logically deduce from all of this that I should be pursuing a career teaching English or art history. And believe me, I’m thinking about it. I think to myself that if I could just be one person’s Karen Wallace, if I could spark one student’s lifelong love for Fitzgerald or McCullers the way Karen did mine, that would be a career well-spent.

It is at this point in my thinking that my punctilious self-awareness clears its throat to get my attention. It may be fun to fantasize about a fulfilling, rosy life of teaching attentive, passionate students, but at a time when I need to be making real decisions about graduate school and how to afford such opposing forces as higher education and sustenance, I need to be honest with myself:

I would love to be someone’s Karen. But, truthfully, would that be enough?

The truth is that teaching is hard. At a dinner party I attended recently, a friend of mine commented dryly that she did not pass a day in her first several months of teaching without at some point bursting into tears. And she’s a lot more even-keeled than I am. I am someone who thrives on positive reinforcement, and I am abundantly aware that in most cases, teaching is a thankless job. Aside from ungrateful students, you also face hefty school politics, a tiny, fiercely competitive job market, and insane workloads. Thinking about all of these things, the rosy glow of teaching pales somewhat, and I find myself wondering if this is really something I want to pursue.

And so I face the vermouth issue. On the one hand, it’s possible that I’m not giving myself enough credit. Maybe I am tough enough to teach. Maybe letting myself give up just because something looks difficult is cowardly. On the other hand, I’ve learned the hard way that idealism is something very easily crushed, and that thankless jobs have indeed left me on the floor of my apartment in helpless, defeated tears.

It’s times like these that I find myself not so much “yawping” as “wembling.”

One of the things I have learned in (mostly) becoming an adult is that one often has to assign value to slippery, complicated things if one is to make any decisions. When I was choosing an apartment, I literally had to put a price on my preference for privacy. When I left my old job for my new one, I decided that losing sixteen months of hard work and walking away from valuable recommendations was worth less to me than working in the field I had originally set out to pursue. At some point in the near future, I’m going to have to decide how brave I really think I am, and how much realistic value I can place on the idea of being one person’s Karen, and many other people’s Just Another Lame Teacher.

One of the things I loved most about Karen was the combined power of her incapacity for bullshit and her immense capacity for kindness—kindness that inspired almost unreasonable patience with a pretentious student like me. I like to think she believed I contained multitudes.

What I have to do now is take my self-awareness and decide exactly of what those multitudes are capable.

(For fantastic coverage of English grammar from a real-live teacher, who has also faced the Dead Poets conundrum, please see Missed Periods and Other Grammatical Scares.)

Intolerable Acts of Irony

Two weeks ago, while on a London adventure with a good friend, we were walking down the street in Borough Market when I lunged across the cobblestones to make a jovial point. Instead what I made—or rather, what my ankle made—was a resounding SNAP as my foot turned under me. I went down like a ton of bricks. I was even wearing sensible shoes.

Though I managed to salvage the trip—in large part due to the unwavering devotion and saintly patience of my friend—I spent most of the rest of my time in England swollen and grumpy. I was also afflicted with one of those obnoxious little ironies in life: that while generally I do enjoy being at the center of attention, I also enjoy not being at the center of attention when I so desire. I spent most of that week getting a lot of attention, and I hated it. Try going unnoticed while hobbling around on European Tiny Tim crutches.

God bless us every one indeed. Oy.

I think of myself as being high maintenance as it is, and that embarrasses me. Add “outright helpless” to that, and I just want to die of shame. My ankle may have been sprained (and the size of a cantaloupe), but my pride was severely fractured.

So what do we learn from this particular experience?

First, and perhaps most importantly, that sensible shoes may not save you from physics and cobblestones.

Second, when I am hurt and embarrassed, for some reason I immediately default to being grumpy or downright angry.

Third, I find irony in my day to day life to be deeply annoying.

Upon further reflection, I find the second two items to be more closely linked than I had originally anticipated.

I have been thinking about irony, off and on, for about ten years. Such are the perils of loving Modernist American literature. I loved The Sun Also Rises when I was seventeen, but when I read it at twenty-four, I began to realize how much of the irony I had missed on the first go-round. In college, I understood irony in terms of the Lost Generation—how it was a device employed by authors and poets to distance themselves from a pre-war conviction or sentimentality, which, post-war, rang false. In academia, I understand the use of distance, and even contradiction, between statement and meaning.

In my personal life, I think it sucks.

Not surprisingly, there’s a lot going on in the why behind that thought.

In my family, growing up, whenever one of the daughters would seem to consider the wisdom of saying something in front of our parents—a swear, a dirty joke, etc.—our dad would say, in the same pedantic tone every time, “You are responsible for everything that comes out of your mouth.” I’ve noticed a phenomenon in which a person, usually a person of high education and liberal leanings, will say something really obnoxious—along the lines of acutely annoying or vaguely offensive—in blasé tones. Implicit in this unfortunate statement is that the speaker is being ironic; that is, whatever he or she is saying is inherently excusable because it’s being said with irony.

I’m sorry, but sometimes that dog don’t hunt.

I understand the concept of engaging a topic you do not like—an idea, a policy, a person—with irony as a way of expressing your disdain or opposing views. I also very much understand that you can have too much of a good thing. My sister, an English professor, tells her students that irony in American culture died with Johnny Carson, but has perhaps been reborn in John Stewart. Irony as those two men have practiced it is characterized, in my mind, by restraint; the knowledge that they could really let loose, but a dry raise of the eyebrows is in fact enough to get the point across. Irony as I have experienced it off-screen is often characterized by the idea that the distance between speaker and statement is effectively a “get out of jail free” card for being smug, offensive, and generally insufferable; restraint has nothing to do with it.

And so I would say to everyone from the writers of the New Yorker to the deep-feeling denizens of higher education: exercise restraint. Less is more. Irony is not carte blanche for being an ass.

Now, inevitably, we come to the more bruised, more honest portion of my complaint. Irony in the New Yorker or smug college students is avoided easily enough: close the magazine or put in your headphones. However, when irony gets personal, I get grumpy. In the broadest sense, it is not often that we find stories with strong doses of irony—Shakespeare to Hemingway and everything in between—in which the characters are happy. As I recall, Othello didn’t make it out so well, and “content” isn’t exactly an adjective I would use to describe many Modernist characters. Shocking though it may be (and here I exercise sarcasm rather than irony, since there’s very little distance between my statement and me), I don’t want to live an ironic life. I want to live a happy life.

I have no idea where that sentiment fits on a post-(post?)-modern spectrum. Maybe it’s just trite. And true.

The truest truth is that irony in my personal life makes me vulnerable, something I do not enjoy. I spent most of my early life as a fifth wheel; kind of a “two, and two, and you” scenario, in which my parents were one pair and my sisters another. Occasional torment in school didn’t help my acceptance issues. As a result, I’m still very (overly) sensitive to exclusion, to the sense of being on the outside. When my professorial sister lays on the irony, with all the confidence in the world, sometimes I don’t think what she’s saying is funny. I think it’s offensive, because again, I don’t think irony is carte blanche. The irony opens up this yawning gap between us, and on my side of the gap, I feel like I’m being excluded because I’m not funny enough, not smart enough, or not cool enough to get it. And so, true to form, when embarrassed and hurt, I get just plain grumpy.

I always, always think of the Emperor’s New Clothes during acts of intolerable irony, and yet I’m still not quite able to call foul, even though I know the moral of the story as well as anybody else. Because maybe there is something there that I don’t see, and that possibility makes me scared.

Isn’t it ironic. Don’t you think?

Hemingway, Ulla, and a Promise in Purple Pen

When I finished my favorite book for the first time, I wrote myself a note on the last page in purple pen:

It's March 13th 2003 and I will go to San Sebastian before I am old to escape my problems.

I was seventeen when I wrote that, having fallen ass over teakettle (as my mother would say) for Hemingway’s writing when my American Lit class read The Sun Also Rises. I visualized “before I am old” as a period sometime in my twenties or thirties. It would be a time when I would be a Grownup: an older, confident version of myself who possessed stability, purpose, and means. I imagined myself walking around my life with a look on my face that indicated, quietly and unostentatiously, that I knew exactly what I was doing.

By now I’ve done a pretty good job of perfecting that look, but then, I’ve always been pretty good at bluffing.

Being a Grownup (capital G) kind of snuck up on me, and I think I’ve finally figured out why. During the wintery months of my first job out of college, I became one of those “head down” people, literally and figuratively. Gone was the intoxicating self-confidence of the undergrad, and my adult confidence was nowhere in sight. I had pictured it so carefully—this could not possibly be it. Where was that look I had so been looking forward to? The self-assuredness?

Little did I realize at the time that being a Grownup isn’t primarily a function of attitude or facial expressions. It’s the grubby day-to-day of paying rent, making dinner, and doing one’s best to confine one’s tantrums to one’s own apartment (hopefully with the door closed).

On most week days during the Great Rude Awakening, I never really walked. I either plodded or scurried. I worked in an environment where nothing I did was ever right or correct—never entirely. It was the perfect recipe for a drink called something clever like “Emotionalatov Cocktail” or “Secretary Kamikaze”:

Take one lifelong straight-A student (this ingredient also contains a shaky baseline of self-confidence and thrives on adult approval). Scrape down what remains of her undergrad self-confidence (brutal job market works just as well as a lemon zester). Pour in one job, containing three supervisors, none of whom practice positive reinforcement of any variety and two of whom practice emotional abuse of several varieties. Add copious amounts of bourbon. Let sit for several months. First ingredient will slowly dissolve.

During one of those months, in which I felt like I was in fact dissolving a little every day, I happened to glance in the window of a bookstore as I scurried by. I stopped dead in my tracks and fairly sprinted through the door. There she was on the floor, without a care in the world: my new life line.

Her name was Ulla.

In addition to being a lifeline, Ulla was also principally a one-year-old golden retriever with a particularly laidback attitude. As I came to understand later, I was not the first person to come tearing through the door at the sight of the puppy. She may actually be one of the most brilliant sales tactics I have ever witnessed. What I didn’t realize at the time was how effective she really was.

Ulla belonged to the owner of the bookstore, which happened to be a travel bookstore called The Globe. Periodically, I would find myself dissolving a little faster than usual and make my way back to Ulla’s doorstep. Here, finally, was something I could not possibly screw up: rubbing a puppy’s belly. Her thumping tail was all the positive reinforcement I needed, and she filled the dog-shaped void in my heart, since I was in no position to own a dog myself. Eventually, as I scrubbed on her head or scratched her behind the ears, I looked up and started to notice my surroundings. The cover art of the books was enough to spike my adrenaline: Turkey, New Zealand, Spain, Thailand, Germany—books showing me not only the places I had always wanted to visit, but also what I would see when I got there, and perhaps some suggestions on where to eat.

It’s a little weird to pull up Google and type in “map of Europe.” I had a general sense of the geography, but now, sidling up to the idea as if moving too quickly would scare it away, I wondered—hypothetically—if one could realistically hit a handful of cities in one week. And which cities? In how many countries? On what trains? Staying in which hotels?

You know. Hypothetically.

What started as a purely hypothetical exercise quickly evolved into something more substantial when I got one of my best friends on board. We mutually agreed on some combination of Spain and France, but couldn’t quite find the right variation on an itinerary, swapping around foreign cities like puzzle pieces we were trying to fit together:

Paris. Bordeaux. Provence. Nice. Madrid. Barcelona.

San Sebastian.

The moment I realized that we could make a realistic constellation between Barcelona and Paris, with a stop in San Sebastian right in the middle, it was like the cosmos had suddenly, miraculously realigned, and somehow, I was back on track.

I headed to Ulla’s bookstore shortly thereafter and started buying maps.

Seven months later, I watched a dense bank of fog creep in over the tarmac as I waited for my flight at Logan. I was, in theory, flying out in less than an hour on the edge of a hurricane that had decided (with terrible timing, in my opinion) to barrel up the east coast that day. In my mind, this whole exercise was still not real; it was still a hypothetical. It was surprisingly hard for me to believe that in several hours I would be walking down Las Ramblas rather than heading back to work. Oddly enough, in the intervening months between my San Sebastian revelation and the flight that would get me there, I had managed to find a new job, one that in no way resembled a “Secretary Kamikaze.” The daily life I thought I would be fleeing actually wasn’t so bad—it was, in fact, quite good. But my months of scurrying, head down, had become a habit, and I still had a sinking feeling that this whole thing—the new job, the cool trip—would blow up in my face.

And so it was that I sat in my window seat, all bemused and amazed, as that plane hauled itself out of the soup ten minutes ahead of schedule. When the flight attendant came down the aisle, I skipped my usual seltzer and went straight for champagne. I felt that when the universe really does pull you through, it doesn’t hurt to stop and make a toast in her honor.

Several hours and one connection later, I landed in Barcelona under a cloudless sky.

A few days after that, in San Sebastian, I followed Hemingway’s directions with an almost religious zeal: walking “around the harbor under the trees to the casino [now a government building]” to a café in the cool shade. And I “sat out on the terrace and enjoyed the fresh coolness in the hot day, and had a glass of lemon-juice and shaved ice and then a long whiskey soda. I sat… for a long time and read and watched the people and listened to the music.” (Actually I had a lemon ice, which is the closest I could get, and a whiskey with Pellegrino, fun to act out in broken Basque.)

Back in high school, something about The Sun Also Rises chapters in San Sebastian and Jake’s short break from his insane, mundane, hurtful reality, had tugged on me in a way that was very personal. The promise I signed in purple pen, the deal I made with myself, was that someday I would be able to walk away, if only briefly, from a disappointing everyday life, the one that I always imagined a little differently, high school or otherwise. By the time I got to that café, I wasn’t so much walking away from something as sitting down and marking a moment of intense, exactly perfect happiness. I had literally owed it to myself, because after all, I had made a promise.

Later that evening, before we went for dinner by the water, I pulled out my Hemingway and wrote a new note below my old one:

It's September 7th 2010 and I am in San Sebastian, escaping fewer problems than I thought, but ecstatic to be here nevertheless.

A few days after I got home, I went back to the bookstore to see Ulla, the best sales dog in the world, who had reminded me that there were in fact some things I couldn’t screw up and some things—like a trip to San Sebastian—that I could get incredibly right.

I was talking to the salesperson as my eyes drifted over some new potential adventures, and she asked me what had inspired me to go.

“Hemingway,” I replied. I squatted down next to the dog to get a better belly-rubbing angle. “Well, Hemmingway and Ulla.”