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.

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.

A Few Good Men

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

I knew exactly what I needed.

I needed a man.

(Now ain’t that just a mouthful?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

Jeff: the best brother.

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

Ian: the best date in the universe.

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

Jeremy: the most understatedly wise.

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

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

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

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

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

Brendan: the truest soul mate.

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

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

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

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

Chris: the best beloved.

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

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

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

Cal: quite simply, the best friend.

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

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

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

Why do you value Cal? Same answer.

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

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

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

...

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

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

Note from Dylan

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

Thank you, love!

Luck and All

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

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

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

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

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

And I will be vastly comforted.

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

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

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

(Well…)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why not you?

Pick lucky.

Buy low, sell high.

(Qvack, qvack.)



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

Eat Two Pints, and Call Me in the Morning

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

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

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

Say it in butter.

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

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

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

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

Woman down. Send reinforcements.

I had broken up with my boyfriend.

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

They circled the wagons, and they brought supplies.

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

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

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

“Are you particularly attached to this pepper?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living and Loving on the Morning Commute

I take the same bus every day, and the more or less similar cast of characters I encounter must have by now grown accustomed to my occasional bursts of laughter. They may think I’m the crazy girl who laughs at random, but mostly I’m just the crazy girl who’s listening to “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” on podcast and who has no interest in containing her mirth. Or maybe they don’t even notice at all—it is, after all, the MBTA.

Last night on the bus home, I was reading a back issue New Yorker, which was practically in shreds from having lived in my purse for a month. I was reading through David Brooks’ article entitled “Social Animal” when I came to a sentence that made me laugh out loud: “Living is an inherently emotional business.”

It’s times like that when I’m tempted to return to my adolescent vocabulary and respond with a monosyllabically inclined phrase like, “Um, duh?”

It’s easy to find obvious statements like that amusing when your life, and the emotional business therein, is on a more or less even keel.

This morning on the bus, however, I wasn’t so much thinking about David Brooks or the inherently emotional business of living, though I was in the trenches of the latter. This morning I was frantically firing out emails and texts to a tiny network of friends, trying to get news about our best friend and wracking my brain for the name of the city where he is stationed in Japan.

The name came to me in a flash—Sasebo—after I had finished leaving a message for my best friend, the other female quarter of our four-person whole. I launched my smartphone map function and typed in the name, reflecting in a sort of detached way that I had never searched for a place so remote before. The map, having blinked away from Boylston St. in Boston, resolved with a little dot on the far southwestern end of Japan. I had just read on my news app that the earthquake had hit the northeast.

It is always strange to me when an emotion takes on an intensely physical form, when my body responds first and most strongly, almost drowning out coherent thought. In the moment when Sasebo showed up on my phone, far from the epicenter, I felt like my bones had suddenly lost their density and a huge breath escaped me, like a ghost had been exorcised.

Most of my friends, including the man whom I have called my “twin” for twelve years and who is now stationed in Japan as a Seabee, know that I am intensely reactionary. I like to think that as I get older, I can get my rationality to the scene of the event almost as quickly as my emotions, that my reason can wrestle down my initial spike of panic. It is a weird duality, now that my reactions come in twos:

THAT STUPID CREDIT UNION ATM DIDN’T GIVE ME MY MONEY!
Calm down, go inside, ask at the desk. Call your bank. They’ll know there’s an error.

OH MY GOD I FORGOT TO SEND IN MY RENT!
It’s only the second of the month. It’ll get there in a day. You’ll be fine.

However, in those nauseating moments of perspective, when the small, stupid problems with which we busy ourselves daily fall away in the face of something potentially shattering, my voice of reason has a hard time keeping up:

THERE’S BEEN A CATACLYSMIC EARTHQUAKE IN JAPAN—IS HE OKAY?
(Radio silence.)

The panic, the fear that feels like I swallowed a cold, smooth river stone, is so massive that it flattens my fledging rationality. The irony is that for the last twelve years, my rationality has not been self-generated. It had an external source: my twin, my sardonic, reasonable best friend who joined the Navy straight out of college. It is only recently that I have been able to rein my hysteria in without prompting from him. And so I found myself doubly exposed in the middle of my morning commute: my own reason had deserted me, and the unexpected danger to my reasonable half had been the cause.

While a sick, dark feeling in the pit of my stomach persisted—and would not be dispelled until I heard from him—I had a sudden rush of embarrassment: for being the over-reacting, totally irrational, trying-to-cover-up-the-fact-that-I-am-crying-on-the-bus girl. I felt stupid—not to mention inconsiderate—for having texted his brother. It was a large, messy and headlong reaction, and I thought for a moment that he himself would be rolling his eyes lovingly at me, across the length Pacific and the continental US combined.

But then I realized maybe my embarrassment was also a little unreasonable:

My fear for his safety, his wholeness, is equal and opposite to the enormity of happiness I experience when I see him for the first time in months. He is fairly accustomed to my launching at him for a hug (which usually resembles more of a slide-tackle than an embrace), and he’s become very adept over the years at catching me as I flail joyfully. The persistent dread I felt until I got his email was the mirror image of the continuous thread of our friendship: a perfect, platonic partnership between a very reactionary girl and a very amused, unflappable boy, now a woman and a man, slightly less reactionary and still unflappable, respectively.

So I think this morning, when he got my email, he probably didn’t roll his eyes, because he knew that my enormous fear was just a symptom of my even greater love, that for every second of extraordinary fear I was remembering every second of blissfully ordinary happiness. When I step back and look at a bigger picture of our lives in the context of others’ lives, I experience a humbling, crushing awe and empathy for the loved ones of service men and women who live every day with the fear that nearly crippled me this morning.

And I wonder if maybe David Brooks got it backwards: that in fact conducting emotional business, the intense and messy and embarrassing work of loving and fearing and figuring it out every day, is the only way you can really, inherently live.

It is a MESS. And it is worth it.

Chicka-Cherry-Cola Culture (or, Confessions of a Teenage Mutant Awkward Turtle)

Before rolling up my jeans and stepping into the bathtub, I put on a definitive mix in the bathroom. We’re talking Spice Girls, Will Smith, Savage Garden, N’Sync, Backstreet Boys, Sublime: the works. My best friend was kneeling on the floor, arched at a seemingly impossible angle to get her head over the rim of the tub. Her hair was nearly down to her butt, and I wondered if there was enough brown goop in the bottle to cover it all. As we both wailed along with perfect inflection to “Say You’ll Be There,” I stepped into the tub and began slathering her head with hair dye.

It could’ve been ten years ago. But it wasn’t. It was five weeks ago.

My best friend and I have been dyeing each others’ hair for most of the eleven years of our friendship. In one particular instance, I, being of less than sound mind and stubbornly brown hair, decided to go blond. Halfway into the box-recommended time, my better half peeked under my shower cap and gulped, “I think we should rinse. It’s looking more orange than not.” Between the two of us and over the course of our adolescence, we covered more than half of the color wheel on our respective heads, with varying forms of red, orange, purple, and a batch of neon yellow stripes. We’ve also endured varying pierces, fake tattoos, real tattoos, terrible haircuts, braces, glasses, episodes of severe eyeliner, and one botched leg-waxing attempt.

And that’s just in the beauty department.

It isn’t any wonder that her husband has a hard time keeping up with us when we’re together. After all, as I pointed out in my toast at their wedding, she and I have been together longer than they have. (I’m not that much of a jerk—I also added that he and I now had something very important in common: loving her for the rest of our lives, in very different capacities.) She and I speak in a kind of shorthand, collapsing eleven years of shared cultural, historical, and personal experience into a language with a fluent population of two. I must admit he is a very good sport, and I can’t blame him when he eventually backs away slowly, hands aloft in surrender. Good man, that.

My best friend and I are a matched set. I, for one, feel remarkably lopsided when I haven’t talked to her for a few days, like a nestled peppershaker without its salt: just a weird little figurine hugging nothing. We shared the travails of a deeply awkward adolescence and came out the other side similarly scarred, mutually stronger, and bonded for life. Sometimes I wonder if my proclivity for people of similar teenage awkwardness traces its origins to her: I look for people with similar scars, because we’ll probably have a lot more in common than people who don’t.

It’s an honest truth that I am just more comfortable with people who were uncompromisingly awkward in their teenage years: we of the early-onset acne, the bad bangs, who said we liked Tool, actually liked Cake, and secretly loved Billy Joel. We who watched Star Trek: TNG and had enormous crushes on Commander Riker, Counselor Troi, or both. We who appeared voluntarily in public wearing the comically outsized but mysteriously desirable “raver pants.” We, for whom the “Men in Black” dance was the equivalent of the “Thriller” dance. We who wanted desperately to be Full House’s DJ Tanner.

We, who were about to die from embarrassment for many teenage years, salute you.

As someone who was intensely self-conscious and deeply insecure, I spent a lot of middle school and high school trying to triangulate what I should like, what I shouldn’t like, and what I secretly did like. I tried to formulate who I was against other people: if I wasn’t a popular, beautiful person, then I wouldn’t like what they liked; I had to like something different. All of this is to say that my anxiety tended to get in the way of acknowledging the things that made me happy. I have a remarkable capability of getting in my own way sometimes.

It was so strange to get to college and suddenly, inexplicably, be able to own all of my likes and dislikes; to find that the things that I thought made me a mutant, whom only a best friend could love, actually made me kind of interesting. More miraculous still, some of my perceived “mutant” qualities weren’t even unique: I found people who had somehow reconciled a love of classic Paul Simon with a love of the Spice Girls at their peak. I found people who loved Star Wars and the Muppets, danced like maniacs, told fantastic bad jokes, and used big words with joy and without pretention.

It was like the promise land for a weary nerd like me.

To this day I take sincere comfort in finding something of a late ‘90s vintage in common with a peer. Popular music tends to be a good jumping off point: say “chicka-cherry-cola” to just about anybody of my generation and odds are that person will know exactly what you’re talking about. It is no longer shameful to like things that were popular and things that weren’t, all at once. I came into my own in college, and every time I freely admit to something that would’ve made me die of embarrassment years before—yup, I own a Star Wars shirt, and I bought it XXXL at Baby Gap—I feel like I’m redeeming an episode of angst gone by.

It’s an amazingly freeing feeling to simply like the things I like and be fine with who I was, even if only in retrospect. I always do remember, though, that at least one person always liked me in the depths of my awkwardness.

She’s a woman who recognized my toenail polish color, which I applied more than ten years after we met as tragic teenagers. She knew that the color was an homage to a polish from years before, one that I stole from my sister when we were fourteen. She even remembered the unlikely name of the color (“Daisy the Pig”) and commented on it as we were getting her into her wedding dress.

I may not have been sure of much, but I was always sure—at fourteen, twenty-four, and beyond—that since she is the half that makes me whole, I couldn’t ever really be any more than half bad, and therefore never a total loss.

Unpacking

Last fall, one of my best friends called me on a Sunday morning to get some advice on a relationship. There were many moving parts to both the relationship and our conversation, but I remember something she said very clearly: “I don’t think I’m as happy as I could be.”

Which is, I have come to realize, perhaps the bravest statement of all, particularly when one intends to do something about it, as she did.

For a long time, I thought that achieving happiness was, very simplified, the act of assembling all of the things you were supposed to have. When your collection is complete—Education, Job, House, Romantic Lead —happiness is when you can sit back and admire the full set.

(If there were a top 25 playlist for my therapy sessions, this phenomenon would most certainly be on it.)

In my own pursuit of a full set (insert obvious joke, as needed), I became more preoccupied with simply filling the roles and less with the quality of the things and people with which I filled them. My junior spring, I had my first college boyfriend—and with him the satisfaction of having something in that particular box. Unfortunately, I reasoned somewhere in the more injured parts of myself that the act of having that box filled was worth his consistently debilitating treatment of me.

A few years later, entering an abysmal job market with a liberal arts degree, I accepted a job that I knew was a terrible fit and spent the subsequent sixteen months being kicked around by my bosses. Frequently during those months, I would go home, plug in my phone, sit down on the couch, and weep. Being screamed at on the phone, having my education thrown in my face, and generally being humiliated and degraded—I thought that was just the price of filling the Job box. It is a strange thing to get used to: feeling obligated to be grateful for something that makes you miserable.

Disturbing trend, isn’t it?

Though my advice-seeking friend probably does not suffer from my special brand of near-pathological myopia regarding ridiculous boxes, we somehow eventually arrived at a similar realization. In my case, when I started dating my next boyfriend, I began to have some point of comparison to the one before him and was downright horrified at what I had put up with. Likewise, when I dismally applied for another job and miraculously got it, I had to adjust my expectations for the better—the first time I gave something to my new boss, and he told me it was perfect and thanked me, I very nearly burst into tears of gratitude. When you’re in a bad situation and you have to make the most of it, maybe it’s not the best idea to examine how wretched and absurd it is on a regular basis. However, when you’re in that situation by some form of choice, when you tell yourself that this is one of those things that will make you happy and it doesn’t, it is surprisingly difficult to lift up your head, look around and realize that you deserve better.

My friend was in a more subtle and perhaps more insidious situation where she was middlingly happy but believed that she could be happier. Maybe I lack that sense, or, more likely, maybe out of cowardice and my obsession with those goddamn boxes, I decide to ignore it. In either case, it wasn’t after the fact that my friend lifted her head up and looked around—it was when she had that box filled, but knew she was not as happy as she could be.

Let me tell you, the force is strong with this one.

It’s a fairly terrifying leap of faith: letting go of something that makes you kind of happy so you can go after something that may really, truly blow your socks off. Letting go of any kind of happiness is painful, and I've come to believe that the letting go and the leaping towards something that may or may not be there is the hardest and bravest thing you can do for yourself. I don’t think my friend has necessarily found that which will leave her stunned, sockless, and ecstatic, but I believe it’s out there for her, and I know she’ll get there.

And I? I need to think outside the box. Literally. Suddenly I imagine a scene of empty packing boxes, labeled with all of the things that I think will make me happy. Have you ever jumped full force on an empty box? For items that seem so upstanding and solid, they collapse with surprising ease (particularly when one adds a few extra stomps for good measure). And so I jump up and down inside my head, collapsing these ridiculous boxes that have been taking up entirely too much space in my mind.

Maybe in the future that will make it easier for me, if necessary, to lift up my head, look around and decide that I deserve better.

The Unbearable Lightness of Ian

The best line in a Robert Frost poem, as far as I’m concerned, involves neither roads less traveled nor birches. The line comes somewhat unexpectedly at the end of “Hyla Brook” when he says, “We love the things we love for what they are.”

I have the firm belief that every now and then the universe reaches down and smacks me upside the head, effectively saying, “Hey you. Pay attention.” My discovery of that line was one of those moments. Sometimes the self-evidences in life aren’t so evident to me; fortunately, the universe seems to be looking out for me.

How many times have I thought in my life, about some romantic interest, “This guy would be perfect if…” I am not the only heterosexual woman of my generation to have the distressing tendency to take a romantic interest in, for lack of a better term, “fixer-uppers.” My own beloved father was a fixer-upper, and he and my mother make each other incredibly happy. I guess it isn’t that strange that, working from that model, I’m drawn to guys who would be perfect if only…

Granted, some of those guys in memory were not worth the price of the caulk. However, for some guys, it was incredibly unfair of me to have ever hoped that they would change. That change may have only been the alteration from “not in love with me” to “completely in love with me,” but it’s a change nevertheless.

I have a friend named Ian, but I never call him Ian. His last name happens to coincide with a ubiquitous cereal brand, so it’s the cereal that stuck. I recently ran into him when I was visiting my college for Homecoming weekend. Stepping within a fifteen foot radius of him is one of those dependably marvelous experiences, like getting a package in the mail when you aren’t expecting one or sinking into a hot bath after you’ve been cold all day. He’s a cookie straight out of the oven: he’s just that wonderful.

Naturally, when we first became friends, I was quite interested in his being in love with me. Unfortunately, he was not.

One of the best decisions I’ve made in my life of friendships was to let go of wanting to nudge Ian towards a version of himself who would be madly in love with me. As we became better friends, I reflected that, in fact, we were remarkably unsuited for each other. The best thing we could do for each other was to be friends, and we are wonderful friends at that.

Ian is one of the only men I have met who can really, truly dance. In my experience, dancing is a lot like speaking a foreign language: you have to be willing to screw up, look or sound like an idiot, and just move on. Ian intrinsically lacks self-consciousness, so as a result, he has become an amazing dancer. One of the happiest places in the universe, I have discovered, is half way through a particularly pretzel-shaped spin with Ian holding both of my hands. I have absolute faith that the strange and impossible weaving of our arms will suddenly and miraculously release, like a human slip-knot, and I will be exactly where I should be, spinning with a grace I could never accomplish on my own.

That is a very happy place.

You can’t pin Ian down—he’s too buoyant. His enthusiasm is an incredible, enormous, weightless energy. And it’s catching. When you enter that radius around him, you get lighter. Seeing him recently just reminded me how really loving someone is function of accepting their own terms of being. It’s only unbearable to love someone if you’re holding out some hope that he or she might change.

Fortunately, I’ve come to my senses, and I love the Ian I love for who he is.