Hic Sunt Pheromones

I knew a guy in college who had radioactive pheromones.  At least, it always felt that way, because whenever I would come within a certain radius of him, my IQ would seemingly plummet, and all of my attention would be devoted to eliminating any physical distance between us.  My reason, shouting dimly in the background, would rein me back barely within the confines of common decency, but the compulsion was a force to be reckoned with.  It was entirely puzzling, because once I exited the radial range of those pheromones, I would regain higher function and wonder what on earth had happened to me.  He was good-looking, to be sure, but there were a lot of good-looking boys who didn’t have this effect on me. 

 

I eventually decided that it had to be chemical.

 

There is a whole host of issues that falls outside of reason.  Essentially, in the map of my rational mind, these are the areas marked hic sunt dragones: here be dragons, including pheromone sandpits and gut reactions.  Hormones, adrenaline, instinct, and intuition all percolate beneath a neat little world of reason and empiricism, and I think it’s when the one tries to find meaning in the other that things get unnecessarily complicated.

 

Take the aforementioned male specimen for example.  As I experienced strong—ahem—compulsions, my brain tried to make sense of them.  We live in a culture where it is colloquially acceptable to assert that your body is “telling” you something: that you haven’t been sleeping enough, that you’ve pushed your endurance too hard, that someone shouldn’t be trusted.  For a while I thought my body might be aware of something my brain was not: that he was special somehow, that the strength of my attraction was indicative of something my brain had not caught on to yet.  The sensation feels different from intuition, but it is hard to resist for the same reason intuition is hard to ignore: something about it is powerfully instinctive, and often, instinct is trying to tell you something important.  I thought maybe the intensity of our chemistry was telling me that in spite of his idiotic tendencies, he was worth pursuing romantically. 

 

I’ve gone through a few versions of this scenario since then and started to notice that my brain’s desperate need to organize the universe also extends inward to the land of instincts and hormones.  These feelings, these unexpected chemical interactions, must mean something.  Right?

 

Maybe not.

 

As it turned out, all my instinct was telling me in the case of this guy was that I should bang him over the head and drag him back to my cave, so to speak.  It’s instinctive all right, but I think it’s also a felony when taken literally.  Fortunately, reason intervened before I went too Neolithic, but I still managed to make a fool of myself by trying to make a boyfriend out of a caveman.

 

I began to think that the common saying “better living through chemistry” should come with a few caveats.

 

Recently, I was biking home from campus on my new commute.  Now, instead of a forty-five minute bus ride, I have a fifteen minute bike ride on a well-maintained path beside a babbling brook.  (It’s almost embarrassing—but not quite.)  As I coasted down a hill, hair on end and bike humming away beneath me, out of nowhere I suddenly felt an intense sensation of contentment bloom in my stomach.  It felt certain, and in my first month in a new place in a new graduate program, the certainty had a borderline narcotic effect.  My brain instantly interpreted it as an indicator that I had made the right decision by coming here.

 

Only at a stoplight did I stop to examine that thought, in light of what I’ve learned about chemistry and rationalizing.

 

First, I hadn’t exercised in an obscenely long time, so my body was probably just overwhelmed with exercise endorphins.  Second, and more importantly, I have been trying to move away from the idea that there is a right decision, a right path, and if you choose correctly, you get some sort of cosmic prize or positive reinforcement.  I made a decision, I invested in it, and I am (so far) pretty happy here.  That doesn’t mean, though, that there was one road to happiness, and through luck or skill I happened to choose correctly.

 

The problem is that my brain wanted to desperately to believe that my body had told me exactly that.

 

I believe in intuition and, with some chagrin, I believe in signs from a benevolent universe.  I also believe, though, that it is dangerous to depend on chemical combustions and planetary alignments to prove ourselves right.  If you want a sign, you’ll probably find one.  What bothered me was that I had thought I was utterly and completely certain about my choice—why then did my brain seize on some chance endorphins as additional proof?  Probably because I’m never quite as certain as I think I am, and I think that’s where I run into trouble.

 

I am in a new place, doing a new thing, starting a new life.  Of course I’m terrified, but that just means that this is all important to me.  I chose my choice, and that has to be the thing I depend on.  If the universe or my hormones wants to send me some additional chemical signals, that’s fine, but I need to have faith in the choice first, and the signals second.  I also need to remember that sometimes chemistry is just chemistry, and just as my brain is not all-knowing, neither is my body.

 

My life is complicated enough without the messy business of self-auguring. 

 

One complication is that there is a man in my life right now who seems to have those magical pheromones (just how many of these men are there, anyway?).  This time, though, it’s not just proximity I want—I also have an irrational desire to bear his children.  I swear, I go a little cross-eyed whenever I smell him.  Incidentally, he happens to be a great human being as well (not a Neolithic bone in his body, as far as I can tell).  Nevertheless, when I exit that fatal radius, my brain knows that something isn’t quite right yet.  I think I understand by now, at least in theory, that for a thing to work, the chemistry and the reason have to line up.  I’d love to find meaning, find proof of something, in my chemical reaction to this man, but I also have to admit that there are a lot of things I still have to understand in the misty realms between mind and matter, rationality and pure chemistry.  So maybe his smelling good is just a function of good hygiene and excellent taste in cologne, and neither of those things should effectively lobotomize me, nor indicate anything about his suitability as a partner.

 

In the meantime, I resolve to have faith that somewhere between the Neolithic and the neurotic, there really is an adult in here who will be able to figure this stuff out.  

Of Pretty and Pigs

There is a lovely set of children’s books, which I read while babysitting my niece, about two pigs named Toot and Puddle. This charismatic pair of pigs lives in the woods, though one of them enjoys traveling to far off lands. I remember an illustrated scene in which the traveling pig encounters a foreign tribe of boars, which I believe he identifies as the Pig Brothers of Wildest Borneo (or something like that). While the American pig looks on with some trepidation, the Pig Brothers, resplendent with tusks and colored feathers, examine him with expressions of mild amusement and polite interest.

Shortly after I read these books with my niece, I traveled abroad on an art history program and came to understand something very, very important about myself:

I am a Pig Brother of Wildest Borneo.

(No, seriously.)

I came to this epiphany after several weeks of painful observation. I myself traveled as I am comfortable, wearing hiking boots and a Key Biscayne 10K shirt from 1982. By contrast, many people on my trip sprang from that elusive pool of women who seem to have no pores, no bulges, and some sort of direct communion with the Vogue mother ship. It must be stated that some of these women were wonderful human beings, albeit poreless and bulgeless. Nevertheless, in terms of pure aesthetics, in my own mind I suffered greatly by comparison.

That is, until I stopped comparing apples to oranges—or, if you will, pigs to boars.

I do not buy expensive sunglasses, because I sit on them and they break. I do not wear high heels, because I have previously fallen off of low-heeled shit-kicker boots and broken an ankle. I accept that by the time I start to wear a fashion, it has been out of stylish circulation for many months, and I grudgingly acknowledge that while my oily skin does me no favors now, I will probably age well. And yes, I have a regrettable tendency to bulge sometimes.

The good news, though, is that over the last several years, I have begun to worry about these things… well, at least a little bit less than before.

The truth is that I am happiest when I am sitting by a campfire or swimming in a river, soggy undies be damned. My tusks and feathers are Tevas and cargo shorts. Life does not get much better than sitting on a beach with a few beers, my fellow wild Pig Brethren, and a couple of beached kayaks.

I am not pink, I am not polished, and I am more likely to play in the mud than those who are.

Anyway, it takes all kinds.

This is all beatific and self-affirming on the face of it. However, this weekend I walked into a situation in which I was the only one of my kind: pretty, pink, poreless pigs as far as the eye could see. And suddenly I was a little less certain of my tusks and feathers.

I had been hauled into the opening ceremonies of my cousin’s bachelorette party. Citing fiscal constraints (rather than my abject horror), I declined the party bus and table service portions of the evening. I arrived at a screamingly luxurious apartment building, the interior of which looked like a very stylishly appointed mental institution, and entered an apartment in which any woman there could have been the prettiest woman in most rooms.

And there they were, all in one room.

When they started taking off their tops to don the bright pink “party” shirts, I’m fairly certain several boys in the immediate vicinity spontaneously entered puberty. The resident pug was in imminent danger of death by stiletto, and the radiant heat from so much bared, tanned skin made the ambient room temperature soar.

I found myself lurking on the edges of the room, trying to become invisible, though I knew I was painfully obvious in rolled up khakis, flip flops, and a blue-streaked pixie cut. I was that person: poking earnestly at my phone because I had no idea what to say or who to look at, which is not a problem I often have. A few of the women were friendly, but this was clearly a tribal activity, and I was just a random cousin, far out of my own frame of reference. I may as well have been wearing a sealskin parka on Fiji. I felt actively bad about myself and entirely furious with myself for feeling that way.

I think the question comes down to this:

What is it about being surrounded by things that you aren’t that makes you feel bad about the things that you are?

To add insult to injury, my biggest frustration was the knowledge that I didn’t even want these things. The life I lead and the way I look are in line with the things I value. I generally like who I am—I am a Pig Brother! I am happy to be a Pig Brother!

At one point, I fled to the bathroom and examined myself in the mirror. Except for the addition of a bright pink bachelorette shirt, I was exactly the same person who had walked out of my apartment earlier that night. As I looked at myself, it was almost like my vision briefly returned to normal: there I was, looking the way I do—on purpose—and that was just fine. I knew that this return to sanity was fleeting, because I would eventually have to leave the bathroom and go back into the smooth-legged, short-skirted fray.

Thankfully, as the party bus departure neared, I was able to excuse myself and make a run for my Subaru. Before I left, my lovely bridal cousin, who has no pores, no bulges, and a good heart, told me it had meant the world to her that I came. I told her I had been glad to and silently reflected on the things we do and the lies we tell to the people we love.

Back in my own territory, I walked to my apartment in the pouring rain. I had figured by that point that I needed to stop judging myself and just lick my wounds for the night, which one can do to fuller effect when one looks like a drowned rat. I came in thoroughly soaked and very thankful to be back in my own country, the small island refuge of one rather shaken Pig Brother.

What bothered me most about that night was not that I felt out of place—after all, I was out of place—but how small I felt, how inferior. What the hell was going on here? When I had made all of this progress towards figuring out who I am, had I missed some small corner of my personality? In an amongst all the things I believe, was there some traitorous little value that had hidden in plain sight, secretly longing to be someone I very clearly am not?

These are more or less rhetorical questions that indicate how rattled I was. I bank on knowing who I am, on believing that this person I turned into is the most genuine version of myself. I think the thing that frightened me most is that the nasty, niggling insecurities I experienced at the party brought to light the fact that my idea of self may not be quite as whole as I thought. There are fault lines along old injuries from the time before I embraced the inner tusks and feathers, when I still wanted to be blonde and devastatingly pretty and before I realized my own beauty takes a different tack and always will.

Maybe it’s naïve to think I would ever completely shed those old desires, even if I’ve come to value and want something very different for myself. After all, I came to be who I am now in part because I eventually did something constructive with those insecurities, hauling them out into the sun and realizing with some surprise that the things that I thought were so embarrassing were actually just the things that made me interesting.

And so a Pig Brother was born.

I hate the idea that I would only be comfortable around people who are just like me—how boring is that? In the end, though, I know that all of this is just some learning curve or another, so perhaps in case I’m feeling a bit less than enlightened in certain pretty, pink situations, I should have an escape route on hand. In the case of my lovely cousin’s wedding, I was pleased to discover that there is a swimming hole in the woods within walking distance of the reception.

So if I really need to, I can return however briefly to my own element, kicking off my heels and playing happily in the mud.

Right Time, Wrong Me

Last night I accidentally caught the first five minutes of My Best Friend’s Wedding on TV. I say “accidentally” because I had clicked out of my BBC America on-demand, and I made the terrible error of not immediately turning off the TV to do my dishes. I never even really liked the movie—I find it irritating when people behave like assholes and idiots and yet are still somehow considered adorable as protagonists. Nevertheless, I briefly remembered the amusing opening scene with Rupert Everett and decided that five minutes couldn’t hurt.

I believe these are what people call “famous last words.”

The plot had established by this time that Julia Roberts (the apparently adorable asshole protagonist) had received a call from her best friend, with whom she had a marriage pact. The pact was to be called into action by a certain age, which she is fast approaching as the movie opens.

And what, ladies and gentlemen, is that certain age?

Twenty-eight.

As soon as the words were spoken on screen, something in my stomach curdled, and the rational voice in my head commented I really would’ve been better off doing my dishes.

What followed was a truly pyrotechnic hissy fit in my living room, after which I called a friend to holler at her about the injustice of the romantic universe. She empathized and agreed. When the movie came out in 1997, we were both in our early adolescence, a time at which twenty-eight did seem like a theoretically reasonable time to be thinking about your marriage back-up plan. Now, a year and a half shy of twenty-eight myself, I have a slightly different take on the matter. Hence the hissy fit.

There were, as usual, a lot of moving parts that contributed to my unexpected hysteria, not least of which is my recently having given up an indulgent and questionable marriage pact with a friend. Compounding matters is the fact that over many of these moving parts hangs a general air of embarrassment: it is horrifying to me that romantic comedies still influence (or at least inflame) the romantic expectations I have for myself.

My friends and I laugh and scoff at so many of the logistical details in these movies: the unemployed ingénue who lives in a high-ceiling one bedroom in the North End; the twenty-eight year old who has somehow already become a renowned food critic; and the writer who can afford five hundred dollar shoes. These conceits are preposterous, and I know it. These are not the women I want to be, most importantly because these women do not exist. Not only are they fictional characters, but in many cases, even the fictional lives they lead are simply implausible: I just can’t suspend my belief that far.

All of this is good, sound logic—the hard-earned knowledge that comes from actually having to live in a responsible, sustainable reality. I have learned the distance between a happy life out here in 3D and a happy life in a work of mannered pop culture.

At least, in some areas:

I laugh at the logistics, and yet I still flinch at the mention of twenty-eight as an appropriate age for back-up plans.

When it comes to careers and expensive shoes, I’ve generally managed to reconcile my expectations with reality (it helps that I have very little use for expensive shoes). When it comes to my love life, I feel… inadequate. Exposed. And in a very painful way, somehow fundamentally flawed.

After all, it’s not just romantic comedies that are affecting my expectations anymore. It used to be that wedding announcements came from my friends who were a few years older than I am, or from friends who got married ahead of the curve. Now we are smack dab in the middle of said curve, and it feels as though I am caught in an avalanche of announcements and wedding albums. And I’m not even in a relationship—nor have I been for a long time. I am so far away from the commitments my friends are making that the idea starts to feel like a mirage, alluring but unattainable.

I’m the right age, I’m the right demographic, but I still can’t quite seem to get the whole relationship thing right. Sometimes I wonder if it’s simply me that’s wrong: that there is something about me in particular that is inherently undesirable.

Which is so absurd and pathetic I can barely bring myself to write it. It is so frustrating to understand how ridiculous these emotions are but to have them anyway. I remind myself repeatedly of what I know: that my life does not run by a script, that I am beholden to no romantic deadlines, and that in times of stress or sadness I simply figure it out. I am capable. I am adaptable.

But at the end of the day, I am also still single.

(And around and around I go.)

Perhaps what’s so embarrassing about this situation is that I feel like I’m going through a second adolescence, in which I am constantly and apocalyptically convinced there is something wrong with me. As it turns out, there wasn’t anything wrong with me in my first adolescence (other than too much eyeliner); it was simply a matter of finding the right environment: a place in which and people with whom I finally became myself. That sounds very plausible in terms of finding a partner: right place, right time, right people. The issue is that I can’t predict those circumstances, and the only thing I know for sure is that at the end of the day I will still be entirely myself. And that self hasn’t had a great romantic track record.

Part of me believes that these anxieties will be laughable in retrospect, and I have spent most of my twenties trying to learn how to not be ridiculous in my own present. I don’t know why I am so convinced that because it hasn’t happened yet, it ultimately won’t.

I was talking with a friend recently, who had been wronged by a spectacularly inconsistent man-child. After describing a familiar trajectory of events leading to disappointment, she admitted to me—with the same evident self-consciousness and hopelessness I experience—that it’s hard sometimes not to believe that she herself is the problem, that there is something about her that is essentially unlovable.

This, coming from one of the most beautiful, charismatic, intelligent, wickedly funny, and completely lovable women I know. I was hit simultaneously with horror and relief: horror that she would think that about herself, and relief that—thank God—I’m not the only one. What I told her was that I felt oddly hypocritical denying with all my heart that she was unlovable, when I directed the same self-doubt at myself. Still, I told her I honestly did not believe that there was a world in which she would not be entirely, ecstatically loved by someone really wonderful.

The funny thing is, she believes the same for me. We just can’t quite seem to believe it for ourselves. I suggested to her that rather than trying to trust in our own unknowable future, that we trust each other. The logic is just twisted enough for us to conceivably buy it—like a faith redirect. We each see the other as an intelligent, clear-minded person, so if that person believes that there isn’t anything wrong with us… who knows?

She might just be right.

Meanwhile, I will work on becoming a person who experiences a healthy proportion of joy to jealousy when a friend gets married. I will try to remember that sometimes I have to hold onto who I am just a little bit harder than usual and not get carried away by things I don’t really want or believe anyway. And in case that doesn’t work, I will make an effort to turn off the TV a little bit sooner.

I will also try to remember that just because it hasn’t happened yet, that doesn’t mean it won’t.

Because one of the things I still really do believe is that if it’s right, then it only has to happen once.

Well Lived, Well Loved: A Tribute

About a month ago, I walked into my grandparents’ apartment and handed my grandfather a plastic baggie from behind his armchair. He held it up to examine its contents: three thick, brown ponytails, each about fifteen inches long.

“You did it!” he congratulated me. I’d been threatening to cut off all my hair for the better part of a year. What I had learned from getting a tattoo is that the longer and more loudly you threaten to do something out of the ordinary, the more ordinary it is when you finally do it.

I came around to stand in front of my ultimate patriarch, and his eyebrows rose as he saw the broad swath of indigo blue I had dyed into what was left of my hair.

After a moment, he asked dryly, “What’d you do, fall on your head and bruise your hair?”

I’ve gotten quite a bit of positive reinforcement concerning my hair since I cut it, but his stamp of approval will always be my favorite.

Later that night, I was on the couch, trying not to get in anyone’s way. My parents, my aunt, and my grandmother were all exhausted, on edge, and trying to hide all of the above. When I came that night, I had brought a bouquet for my grandmother, and someone had put the flowers in a vase on the coffee table. Grandpa was sitting in his armchair across the room, coming in and out of awareness, when he suddenly caught my eye and nodded at the arrangement, which was dripping with lilacs.

“Nice flowers,” he said simply, and quirked a wry smile at me.

All I had to do was smile back.

It was an entire conversation in two words and two nearly identical grins.

In a way, those last two interactions—the hair and the flowers—were perfectly representative of our relationship: sarcastic, dry, understated, but always with an essential underpinning of love and approval. Our exchanges that night were so much more genuine than the constant, fearful refrain of my telling him I loved him, which I had been doing with more and more panic as he got sicker and sicker. He already knew that I loved him—of course he did.

And anyway, self-conscious sentimentalism just wasn’t his style.

I wish so badly that I could draw together some definitive statement, a coherent narrative, about what my grandfather’s life meant to me, but it all comes out in bits and pieces: ski lessons, angel food cake, shuffling cards, Ford Explorers, and the smell of mothballs. I think I’ve come to realize that the whole of his life in my life was so massive, so integral, that it’s difficult for me to wrap language around it.

But I wouldn’t be his granddaughter if I didn’t try.

Spending time with my family in the weeks after he died, I noticed that we all tried impersonating his voice and intonation, as though there simply wasn’t enough of him in the stories we were telling. We wanted to hear him, to be comforted by him, to keep the sound of him present in our lives. Over the weekend of his memorial service, one thread in the countless stories became clear: the events in our lives may have been separated by decades and continents—from stories beginning with “so there I was in Pago Pago” to Indiana canoe trips ending up in jail—but our experience of his immersive, unconditional, dryly hilarious love was constant.

What I began to understand intuitively a long time ago, but only articulated after he died, was how much that love said not about us, but about him.

Recently, I got a new phone, and my voicemails didn’t transfer over. Before they were lost in the ether, I managed to record onto my new phone the only one I wanted to save; the one I knew was there, but that I didn’t have the courage to listen to until recently. Grandpa was nearly deaf for my entire life, and in spite of a successful cochlear implant, he still didn’t spend a lot of time on the phone. As a result, he only called when he himself had something important to say. In this case, he had just learned about my GRE scores, and he was calling to congratulate me and to tell me that he was sure I would end up in Williamstown yet. At that point, Williams was still my first choice, and when I got the message, I wept with relief, because if he believed it, maybe I could let myself hope too.

Months later, he was honest to God equally as thrilled when I accepted an offer from Colorado.

What he wanted for me was not prestige. Prestige is inherently selfish, and there has never been a man in this world less selfish than my grandfather. What he wanted for me, what he wanted for all of us, was that we do everything we could do be the best version of ourselves: to be responsible, to be kind, to be honest, and to be happy. He was invested in nothing more than our integrity and our happiness. When I think about what that meant about his own integrity, his lack of ego, and the breadth of his love for all of us, it makes my chest truly, physically ache.

And that doesn’t even begin to cover the fact that he was the funniest, most charismatic old fart you ever met.

Every deck of cards, every ski lift, every voting ballot, every hiccup, every mint julep, and every piece of angel food cake I will ever encounter for the rest of my life will belong to him. He will be there every time I turn a card face down and smirk at the relative I have just beaten at gin, asking casually, “What's the name of the game?”  Every time I purse my lips and arch one eyebrow to show amusement or correct a bill for being less than I owe, I’ll be channeling him directly.

I’ll try to make him proud, at least a little bit every day, and I will miss him every day for the rest of my life.

I guess that’s just the name of the game.



In loving memory of
Jack Roberts
1923-2012

Manifesting My Destiny (or, 2,000 Miles to Graceland)

For several months I’ve had a very short, detailed fantasy on loop in my head:

I am standing outside of my building, having left my beloved apartment for the last time. I am wearing a Fraggle Rock t-shirt, beat to hell jean shorts, and my Tevas. My hair is about fourteen inches shorter than it is right now, and some of it is dyed dark blue. It is a nondescript day in August. I take one last look at my building, and then climb into a Subaru Forester, which is loaded with my absolute essentials: my favorite Modernist and fantasy books, a Brendan Willis original print, two African violets, one guitar, and a road bike. I turn on a meticulously crafted travel mix—starting with the excellent Alkaline Trio cover of the Muppets’ “Movin’ Right Along”—and shift into first gear.

Then I hit the road, going due west.

This fantasy was convenient even before I had decided on a graduate program, because most of the schools to which I had applied are located west of my current location. Exactly how far west varied by program, from a few hours by car to several hours by plane (or a few days by Subaru). Nevertheless, what I was focusing on in that fantasy wasn’t really where I was going, but simply that I was going: the visualized moment of taking the next step, of manifesting my destiny by going west.

And really, in this day and age, can you get closer to a covered wagon than a Subaru Forester?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

My decision to accept one particular offer didn’t end up happening overnight; it happened over an unseasonably warm, sunny day in Colorado. On visits to my other prospective campuses, one university had left me lukewarm and the other had given me hives. The Colorado campus gave me the warm tinglies—the emotional zap I had quietly given up on as having been a onetime occurrence with my undergraduate experience. The people in the program were laidback and friendly, the setting was beautiful, and the program itself was interdisciplinary and creative.

These empirical facts were also complemented by a veritable avalanche of signs from the benevolent universe: a puppy in the art history department corridor, the announcement of Colorado’s first Trader Joe’s opening near campus next year, and Peyton Manning’s signing with the Denver Broncos.

I felt like looking up at the sky and yelling, “THE AUDIENCE IS LISTENING!”

My bliss and relief were very nearly musical in proportion: had there been an overturned rowboat in my immediate vicinity, I would’ve tap-danced on it. We’re talking Rogers and Hammerstein happiness, here.

When I got back from Colorado, I mapped out the drive from Here to There. Looking at the sterile map that Google so helpfully provided, I was surprised at how straight the line was (well, mostly: think “kindergartener with a crayon” straight—a few deviations but generally correct). Another intriguing detail was that the trip itself clocked in at almost exactly 2,000 miles. Something about the roundness of the number appealed to me, as though it was meant for literature or song: walking two moons, walking a thousand miles to fall down at your door, having reason to believe we all will be received… this place was on its way to becoming my own personal Graceland.

Then something very unexpected happened: my application was accepted at the highly prestigious program, the one that had given me hives.

I’d like to say that I had the courage of my convictions, and that the decision I had made on that sunny day in Colorado stuck. I’d like to say it, but I can’t.

The short version is that, for about a week and a half, I indulged my inner coward.

Here’s the long version:

In my life, I have almost always prioritized the achievement of a goal over the quality of life on the path to achieve it. I realize now that this habit has been primarily a function of fear: it’s easier to think about unhappiness as part of getting to a future goal than to deal with it as an aspect of the present. Better to focus on the future, when the unhappiness will have somehow been justified in retrospect.

In a twisted way, this system has ended up working for me. After a miserable high school experience, I got into Dartmouth. After almost two unbearable years at my first job, I transferred within the university to my current job at the museum.

Missions accomplished… kind of.

This logic would lead me to believe that I should suck it up and commit to two lonely, hive-ridden years at the highly prestigious program, all towards the goal of getting my Dream Job. I would do what I had always done: I would draw another straight line between my goal and myself, and follow it no matter what.

So if I had such faith in that straight line, why did my shoulders feel two sizes too small? Why was I shaking out my hands to get rid of the quivering feeling? Why was I having a bloody anxiety attack just thinking about this supposedly sound decision?

It was a rough week and a half as I tried desperately to dig myself out, taking a good long time to realize that the seemingly impossible had happened:

I had finally learned some subtlety.

I had learned that my own experience could not be reduced to simple math; that in fact there was not a single, unidirectional line between point A and point B, and that success was not necessarily equivalent to travel on that line. (Hell, there isn’t even really a point A, or a point B for that matter.) I finally acknowledged that my misery in high school did not get me into Dartmouth; that the satisfaction I find in my current job does not make the damage of my old job disappear (I still dream in power-point and wake up in a cold sweat, irrationally fearful I did not print the right slides for a supervisor I haven’t worked for in two years). I slowly began to allow the possibility of new decisions to coexist peacefully with those that came before it; that by taking what I’ve learned and trying something different, I wasn’t simultaneously devaluing the decisions I had made up to that point.

All of these things came to me slowly. Naturally, it took a firm kick in the ass to push me back up to that ledge again and make the leap, and there is no one in this world that can kick my ass quite like my oldest sister.

“There is not one, single way to get where you want to go,” she said sharply on the phone, her exasperation finally getting the better of her patience. “Stop thinking about one, single dream job—what do you want to do?”

Reluctantly, I pulled my brain away from the specific title, position, and museum, and the idea that one graduate program could and would get me there.

“I want to jump up and down in front of art for the rest of my life,” I told her. “I want to design arts programming for middle schoolers and high schoolers, in a museum that has to do new, risky things because it can’t rest on its laurels and prestige. I want to be somewhere passionate and scrappy.”

“Okay.” She knew I was pulling back from the self-loathing, self-pitying hysteria and starting to think like an intelligent human being again. “Then be scrappy.”

At that point I realized, as my sister had intended, that in describing the things I wanted in a job, I had also described the things I had found in the program in Colorado. Then, to drive it home, she hit me where it hurts: directly targeting the place from which revelation emerges, the place where she knows I keep my truest truths.

She asked: “Where are your people?”

My people: my eccentric, eclectic, campfire-building, rock-climbing, banjo-playing, Teva-wearing brethren. The people I found in college and in whose company I finally, thankfully, started to become the person I secretly always wanted to be, whose upcoming incarnation will be a blue-haired Fraggle Rock fanatic in a Subaru. It’s the same person I envisioned heading west to graduate school to manifest a destiny I hadn’t been brave enough to imagine fully: the one where I have somehow found the faith to live in my own present and believe that there is more than one way to get to a goal, which itself is allowed to change.

“My people are in Colorado,” I said, finally letting myself make the right decision.

The relief and bliss returned almost immediately. I also realized with no small amount of irony that in moving away from a metaphorical straight line, I had invested in traveling a literal one: the one I had mapped, Here to There.

What I know, of course, is that the fantasy won’t play out exactly as I had imagined it (this is another one of those subtleties I’ve managed to pick up). I cannot at this time speak to the specific whereabouts of my Fraggle Rock t-shirt three months from now. When I leave, I’ll have to drive east first, to drop off my key, and chances are that I’ll swing about six hours out of my way to make a pilgrimage to Pizza King Pizza in Indiana. Such are the perils of planning, travel, destiny, decisions, and driving west in a fully-loaded Subaru.

Regardless of detours, though, I’m pretty sure that somehow I’ll end up in New Graceland right on time.

Bill and Grace

When I was a small child, a new priest came to our church. Buddy had grown up Southern Baptist but had become an Episcopalian priest, and he recited the liturgy with the most fabulous, paint-peeling Southern accent. I found that his accent lent him an air of authority, or at least credibility, because most of my mother’s best friends—the village of women who helped bring me up—were Southern. At that time in my life, I perceived Southerners to be a generally no-nonsense, loud, and comforting lot of people in my life. Maybe that was part of why I absorbed what I did.

I remember a significant amount of the Easter mass from the year when I was four years old. The church was packed, and we were sitting on the left side of the aisle as a result, which was deeply disorienting (we always sat on the right). That day, Buddy gave the sermon, which was about the story of the resurrection: how the women went to the tomb, only to find the stone rolled back and the tomb itself empty. There to greet the women was an angel.

And according to Buddy, that angel’s name was Bill.

“When the women got to the tomb,” Buddy told us, “there was an angel, settin’ on the rock and swangin’ his legs. It was Angel Bill. And when the women were most amazed, he just looked down at them and smiled and said, ‘Jesus ain’t here no more.’”

Up until that point in my life, I had understood church as one of those innocuous things that Mom and Dad made us do, like clearing our plates after dinner or refilling the dog's water dish. It was just kind of part of the deal, part of our family culture. At some point I learned the term “Cradle Episcopalian,” and it made sense to me: regardless of the particular state of your faith, you had been going to church since you were a baby and could probably recite the Nicene Creed backwards and forwards.

But suddenly, here was a priest who was making these stories… well, kind of funny. Relatable. And in their own very flawed and human way, joyful.

Many, many years later, I went to Italy to study art history and found myself staring at countless frescoes, mosaics, and altarpieces depicting the scene of the women at the tomb. I would always take a private minute to grin, because I knew the Buddy version of the story and could greet that angel by name.

I said quietly, more than once in many a Roman basilica, “Hey Bill.”

In the Renaissance paintings, the angel was always perfectly beautiful, with balanced, serene features. Mannerists elongated him and took some liberties with the physics of the human body: a slightly uncomfortable, stylized beauty. If the painting were Baroque, the angel would still be beautiful, but dramatically lit and probably gesturing expansively. Nevertheless, the angel that always appealed to me most was Bill, who in my mind always looked a lot like Buddy, swangin’ his legs on the rock.

A few months after I got back from Italy, I got a call from my mom. Buddy, barely forty, had died of a heart attack.

I had not seen or spoken to the man in more than fifteen years, but that afternoon I felt a horrible creak and ache inside my ribcage. I understood, as I’ve understood before when someone I love dies, that something truly wonderful had just gone out of the world, and I cried for a good long time.

Later that day, I found Buddy’s widow’s address and wrote her a letter, describing to her my trip to Italy, my memory of the Angel Bill, and how large an impact her husband had had on my faith. She wrote back to me, a kind and wonderful letter, and included with it Buddy’s interpretation of the Ten Commandments, a photocopy of his own notes.

What I remember about what he wrote was that he saw the distance between an immaculate, haloed ideal and the lives we actually lead down here in the mud. For instance, he believed that “loving your neighbor as yourself” didn’t mean that you had to be everybody’s best friend all the time. Because, really? For the majority of us, that would drive us absolutely up the wall—and for better or worse, the whole “thou shalt not kill” thing would still apply in all cases. Buddy’s interpretation of loving your neighbor was simply wishing him or her well; that you didn’t need to drain all your own energies in harmful relationships. You just had to honestly wish good things for that person, and let it go.

I think Buddy chose the right vocation because he understood, better than anyone I have ever met, what it means to be human: to be creatures who are so intensely flawed but capable of such incredible grace. And that grace itself is not immaculate and perfectly coiffed and serene and capable of wearing white clothing without dumping mustard all over itself. Grace is messy because living a life is messy: it is funny and irreverent and stained and broken and sad and angry and constipated and waiting and hopeful and hungry and perplexed and flailing and trying to figure it out.

Grace is my contentious big sister wrapping me very firmly and protectively in her arms when I broke up with my boyfriend. It is clam chowder turning out right, and my best friend’s baby kicking in her belly when I sing “Bohemian Rhapsody” to him at the top of my lungs. Grace is taking time to be acknowledge and own the sadness of my grandfather’s illness and gloat mercilessly when I beat him at cards. Grace is loving someone with every cell in your marrow and wanting to strangle that person at the very same time. Grace is remembering from when I was four years old that the angel on the rock is named Bill.

I do not and have never believed that any one religion has cornered the market on truth, what it means to be a good person, or how to lead a good life. From my own experience, being kind, being funny, and picking up after yourself are probably the best recommendations I can make on that score—and none of those things is inherently or exclusively Christian. I generally loathe talking about my faith because I figure that what I believe is my own business—it’s between me and my higher power—but what I do think is important, especially as I get older, is how I live my life and the standards to which I hold myself.

Sometimes I feel, as I wait for people to tell me where the next stage of my life will take place, that I’ve fallen off the ride and everything is swirling around me; I have no idea how to be in motion again. My lack of patience is painful . I should be handling this more calmly. I should be more adult. I should be better.

Then I think about Buddy. I think that he would say that somehow I am being patient, in my own way, and that I don’t have to like it. I can be angry and scared, and if I’m not nasty to people and don’t kick too many things, it’s okay. We make our own sense of things, and we do the best we can. I myself am not serene and perfectly coiffed: I just didn’t come out of the box like that. So why should I expect grace in my life to be that way?

In the Episcopalian baptism, part of the blessing goes like this: “Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere.” Regardless of faith or whatever you do or don’t believe in, I think there are worse things to hope for than a discerning heart and the courage to persevere. I myself, just shy of two years old and deeply displeased with the entire situation, kicked, screamed, and generally raised hell (if you’ll pardon the term) throughout my own baptism. But now, twenty-five years later, those are the things I’m seeking: a discerning heart, to recognize when better is in fact better and when it’s just silly, and the courage to persevere in the face of things difficult, heartbreaking, and downright uncomfy.

Knowing at all times, of course, that both Angel Bill and Buddy have my back.

The Waiting Game

Last week, I went on what I thought at the time was a really great date. I had just flown in from a trip to California, so I didn’t really know which end was up at that point, time zones and bicoastal travel being what they are. Nevertheless, I went, because he had promised to get me through my jetlag with beer and banter. I’m not built to resist that kind of charm and alliteration.

At the end of the date, as we walked towards our respective trains, I pointed out that his had just crested the hill a few blocks away. In the romantic comedy in my head, he would’ve shrugged and said with a debilitating smile that there would be another along in a few minutes. In reality, he gave me a quick hug, wished me luck with my jetlag, and made a run for it.

I stood there for a moment, bewildered, and then grumpily went to catch my own train. A warning bell had chimed ominously when he had used the phrase “good luck.” Something about it seemed decidedly valedictory. My confusion only grew when he texted me a few minutes later, saying he’d had a great time and wishing me luck once more.

One of the things I’ve learned in my spotty dating experience is that you can analyze every word, text, emoticon, and gesture (and believe me I do), but the surest sign of a successful date is very simple: it was a success if he asks you on another one.

Eight days of radio silence later, I grudgingly conceded that I had been blown off. I had spent the intervening weekend with my best friend in Chicago, pestering her and her husband mercilessly for their own analysis. Her husband, when I described the timeline, had winced noticeably at the lack of communication since our date. There are few things, I find, as indicative as an honest man’s wince.

Last night, I got a text from my best friend, asking me, against all hope, if the guy had texted. I told her no, he hadn’t, but that she and I both already knew that he wouldn’t.

“What a dumbass,” she responded.

“Yes,” I acceded. “On the bright side, he’s balding and I’m over my jetlag.”

(I never claimed to be graceful in defeat.)

Obviously, this guy's hairline had nothing to do with my opinion of him. I had really liked the schmuck, but since the feeling did not turn out to be mutual, I gleaned whatever shamefully petty, positive spin I could from the situation.

It is entirely possible that I regressed, more than usual, to this particularly nasty side of my personality because I am currently waiting on acceptance or rejection in other high-stakes areas of my life. I have, as of this moment, been accepted into two of the four graduate programs to which I applied. This is hardly a bad state of affairs, but the issue I’m dealing with right now is that I’ve had no word from my top choice program in nearly six weeks.

In dating, I know what one week of radio silence means. In applying to graduate school, I have no frame of reference for such things. At least they didn’t wish me luck.

Meanwhile, the strain of being optimistic, grateful, circumspect, and patient have nearly driven me bat-shit bonkers. None of those qualities come naturally to me, and I feel as though my seams are starting to stretch and show. Every time someone asks me about my applications, my tone pitches upwards towards my falsely thoughtful registers, and I nod with the equanimity of someone who has calmly acquiesced to this arbitrary, excruciating process.

In reality, I want to lock my door, rip out my wall fixtures, smash all my dishes, and then nurse a large Scotch while weeping in the debris. And I don’t even know for sure that I’ve been rejected.

Ironically, in the case that I am rejected, my alternative will be the realization of a fantasy I’ve had for years: I’ll shed my suit skirts, strap on my Tevas, hop into a well-placed Subaru Forester, and head west. There is nothing wrong with that picture—it is a truly fantastic alternative. But desire is a funny thing: will the rejection from the program I want so badly cast a pall over the others, regardless of how enthusiastically they greet me? Will the rejection of the one I really want make the acceptance of the others less valuable? What does that say about me if that’s the case?

I'm not entirely sure I'm still even talking about graduate school.

People get accepted and rejected all the time, and they generally figure out how to deal with it, with dinnerware more or less intact. A small, rebellious part of me is actually rooting for the necessity of going west: to take the hit, roll with it, pick myself up, and make an alternative work. More than that: to find that maybe the alternative could be unexpectedly wonderful and somehow exactly what I needed. I'm always surprised when one of the voices in my head is that brave.

Sometimes, guys don’t call and schools don’t accept. The waiting, in both cases, is probably the worst part: the time in which you can rationalize every hour of silence and convince yourself of every outcome imaginable. But the answer comes (thankfully graduate schools guarantee you a response; guys, not so much), and you figure out how to live with it, regardless of what it is. “Living with it” can range from making petty quips to adjusting your attitude towards realizing you may not have gotten what you want, but what you got was kind of amazing nevertheless.

And so, in the meantime, we wait.

Good luck with that!

Lightning, and Other Surprising Combustions

Ten years ago this summer, I got out of a rental car on the south side of the Dartmouth green, looked around, then glanced sheepishly over at my dad, who had been driving.

“Oh,” I said to him. He eyed me dryly over the hood of the car, and I grinned. “Well…yeah. Call off the search.”

When we had originally set out on my college tour, Dartmouth hadn’t been on the list. My dad’s reasoning had been that I didn’t need to take the tour if I could give the tour, on account of having spent so much time there when my sisters were students. However, when we drove up the east coast that summer, it came as a surprise to me that there were other colleges out there; beautiful, interesting places where I could be very happy. Honest to God, this laughably obvious concept had never occurred to me, and it was quite intriguing.

The official logic that put Dartmouth back on the tour list was that now that I had some context, I could reevaluate it realistically, apples to apples. Personally, I think my dad noticed that I was getting starry-eyed at Princeton and got a little nervous.

As it turns out, he didn’t have anything to worry about.

When I got out of the car that day on my college tour, I had the odd sensation of both novelty and familiarity: the new adventure tingles and the coming home comfort. In retrospect, and very self-consciously, I recognize this sensation as being remarkably similar to falling in love: the perfect, inexplicable, and elusive combustion of chemistry and certainty, pheromones and faith, even if the latter turns out to be misguided. In this case, my faith was well-placed, and I ended up spending four very happy years in the still North.

I remember that when we arrived in town that day, the sky had been ostentatiously blue, and the air had had that golden, syrupy summer hum to it. As we left later that afternoon, the sky turned black and a whopper of a thunderstorm let loose. Always a fan of storms, I took it as a weird benediction from the universe and felt inexcusably smug in my certainty.

A week ago today, I got out of a rental car in another tiny Northeastern town, looked around, and waited.

And felt nothing but anxiety and a damp, drizzling rain.

Since I began looking at art history graduate schools, my affiliations had crept slowly towards this particular institution, buried deep within the Berkshires and recognized as one of the best programs in the world. Almost without noticing, I started to build a very familiar fantasy here—a few blissful years of getting a top-notch education in the wonderfully isolated woods of New England—and it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep things in perspective. To be honest, I’m not sure what I was expecting when I got to town, but I was certainly expecting something: not a thunderstorm, maybe, but at least a spark.

After a less than stellar interview, as the drizzle turned into a freezing downpour, I sat in my rental car and sobbed on the steering wheel. I was at a complete loss: usually interviews are my strong suit, but my answers had sounded flat and over-generalized, even to my own ears. At the time, there was nothing I could do, other than pull myself together, pick up a strawberry milkshake, and make my way back to Boston.

At home that night, installed on my couch with an emergency glass of Scotch from the good bottle, I tried to reevaluate and tease out exactly what I was feeling, because “just plain shitty” did not seem terribly insightful. Some things were pretty easy to discern: I was embarrassed and unexpectedly vulnerable from falling flat in my interview, since charisma with strangers is usually one of my strengths. The possibility of rejection now loomed rather than flickered; instead of an untried idea, which I could dismiss with the right distraction, it was practically corporeal.

So I drank Scotch, sulked deeply, and called them by name: on Nausea, on Embarrassment, on Likely Rejection! On Bitter Disappointment, and Outright Dejection!

But after my foray into dealing with issues through sarcastic rhyme, I realized, with some surprise, that there were a few emotions left in the reindeer barn (so to speak). I approached with caution.

What I found, upon closer inspection, was that not all of my disappointment was self-directed. In fact, I had been a bit disappointed in the program itself. As my interviewer described the program to me, noting fondly that many students had wept over their impossible German distribution in the very chair in which I found myself, I did not experience a desperate, passionate need to be one of those students. (It’s a miracle: in the last few years, I seem to have unexpectedly stopped finding masochistic satisfaction in being miserable—progress!) The tiny, intense program, when viewed from the ground instead of from my own mind, suddenly felt claustrophobic.

As soon as I thought this, my mind turned back on itself sternly: was I discounting the program and finding fault with it because I thought it was doing the same to me?

Somehow, unexpectedly, I think not.

I have a very vivid memory from the interview that would eventually lead to my first miserable but necessary job out of college. By that point, as I neared a solid year of job applications and rejections, I had been willing to sell myself on almost anything. But after that interview, I went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded out loud.

I didn’t have a good answer then, and my answer for the next sixteen months relied on a deeply unsatisfying sense of obligation and responsibility: I was there because I had to be there.

Now, though, I think I’m experiencing an entirely new luxury: the possibility of an alternative. Part of the anxiety that had plagued me throughout my interview may have actually been that same question: what the hell was I doing here? I just hadn’t been expecting that particular sentiment to be part of the conversation.

I had assumed lightning would strike again, and now I was dealing with the unexpectedly enlightening aftermath of the fact that it hadn’t.

I woke up the morning after my graduate school interview with an expansive sense of freedom. Fantasies about school in California, Colorado, and London spooled themselves out in my mind as the program in the Berkshires shrank back down to a more manageable size. In reality, it has always been one possibility out of several, but now I’m finally thinking about it that way. I’m still nervous about letting go of this prearranged comfort zone, the idea of an ideal, but I never anticipated how intoxicating it could be to have the opportunity to change my mind.

And here I thought being intensely stubborn would always serve me well—who knew?

There was another possibility, another scenario that could have played out ten years ago on the edge of the Dartmouth green. There was a chance I could have looked around, glanced over at my dad, and shrugged. No lightning? No big deal. There were a lot of other great places out there.

Maybe what I’ve learned in the interim is that in waiting for the lightning to strike, you cheat yourself out of some fairly exhilarating autonomy; that there can still be such a thing as “the place I’m meant to be,” but that I get to decide what that is. As it turns out, I’m the one who chooses my choices. I have no idea where I’ll end up getting into graduate school, and I’m sure there are many more hysterical emotions in the barn yet to be named (and rhymed!), but I like the idea of letting go of preordination, getting over the idea that there is only one right answer, and taking that finicky lightning into my own hands.

Because really, who wouldn’t mind controlling their own personal weather?