Call Me Sentimental

Several years ago, when my family was still living in California, my dad came into the family room to find me curled up on the sofa, alone in the dark watching Die Hard on TV. He didn’t say much to me at the time, other than to indicate his general approval, and walked back to the room he and my mother shared. There, on the couch in the bedroom, my sister was also watching Die Hard. The way my sister tells it, she looked up and asked where I was, and he told her I was also watching Bruce Willis blow things up. Then he got a funny look on his face and gently placed his hand over his heart, saying proudly with a sigh of contentment: “My babies.”

Sentimentality is a funny thing. More often than not, it is defined in very judgmental terms, like “extravagant or affected feeling or emotion” and “emotional response disproportionate to the situation.” Basically, you’re overreacting. I think, though, that sentimentality is a very personal thing, a unique soft spot that, when prodded, triggers intense emotion. To anyone else, it may seem like an overreaction, but only you have the incredibly complex intersections of personality and experience that make certain cues meaningful. My father loves having daughters, make no mistake, and our parents raised us to raise hell, but it is understandable that he would take joy in knowing we love some of the things he does. He left his mark on us in innumerable ways, but finding two daughters happily watching Bruce Willis bleed and swear is one of the more obvious signs that we really were listening.

It is odd that sentimentality is generally more disdained than romance, as if only romantically motivated soft spots are permissible. To me, sentimentality is in many ways the more docile, manageable sibling of romance. Both can make ordinarily rational human beings act very strangely, but more often than not, it is romance that makes us veer into the realm of the ridiculous. After all, it’s not for nothing that the phrase is “fool in love.”

So you’re in love. That’s great. You’re doing cartwheels and wearing bells on your shoes, in the more or less figurative sense. I recently dove head-first into a very googley-eyed state of mind (or more accurately, I dove straight out of my mind), only to come up sputtering and coughing a few days later. What can I say—I’m a romantic and an optimist. Also not for nothing are we called “cock-eyed optimists,” so when in love, I tend to be an idiot who can’t see a damn thing coming. Swell.

Crawling out of my most recent near-relationship experience, I had a bit of an epiphany: I needed to change tacks. Instead of pulling a hard and short-lived U-turn into cynical rationality (usually by way of a pint of Ben and Jerry’s), maybe I just needed a detour into sentimentality. Romance is exhilarating, but after a while, it can be exhausting, and even tedious. Roller coasters are only fun in moderation, and I seem to have become a sort of dating adrenaline junky. My hope was that I could get my irrationality fix with sentimentality, and perhaps come out the other end with fewer bruises.

So what are the things that make me happy—what are my non-romantic soft spots? I’ve been enduring a bit of a rut lately as part of what I’ve come to call the “post-grad existential twenty-something blues” (which is possibly why I’ve been dating up a storm), so I took stock. To put myself in the proper frame of mind, I went back to the first mix I made in high school, heavy on Dave Matthews, Guster, the Indigo Girls, and other bands I had forgotten I liked so much. High school was a pretty miserable experience, so I became very adept at finding things that made me happy in a very immediate sense: things that didn’t fix the problem (i.e. being in high school) but made the duration a bit more bearable. By some miracle, none of these involved anything illegal or illicit, but they got the job done.

First and foremost, I drove. While it may not have been terribly sustainable, my best hours in those four years were spent winding around back roads of Contra Costa County in my manual black Jetta. I was essentially inseparable from that car and love it still to this day. I perfected the Cherry Coke slurpy (three eights coke, five eighths cherry, for the inquiring mind) and always paid with exact change. I baked scones periodically. I worked at a barn and took comfort in the company of horses, who don’t expect anything from you other than that you show up on time to feed them. I may not have fit in very well or ever had a boyfriend in those years, but in my car, windows down, slurpy in hand, with my riding gear stinking up the trunk magnificently, I found a zen kind of happiness that only I could make for myself.

It’s that kind of happiness that I’m looking for, but now, several years later, the scenery has changed vastly. My beloved Jetta remains back home at my parents’ house, and I don’t know of any small, accessible barns in the area (though I have found a 7-11 near my apartment, so the slurpies are less of a problem). In any case, my needs have changed a bit since I was seventeen.

My current job doesn’t exactly use my brain to its full capacity, so recently when I picked up a New Yorker to read at the airport, I was amazed at how wonderful it felt to think critically again. I ordered a subscription when I got home—I had almost forgotten how being intelligent and liberal aren’t passive occupations. I tried a new recipe the other night and damn near burned my apartment down, but as I was hopping up and down hysterically fanning my smoke-detector, I realized I was having a pretty good time. The next day I sought out some new recipes and made a shopping list. I have discovered that going to a matinee alone is incredibly liberating, and I don’t even have to go through the motions of sharing my Whoppers. I have devoted the entire butter drawer in my fridge to York Peppermint Patties, and I buy myself flowers from my favorite shop every couple of weeks. Daffodils may be sentimental, but they also happen to make me really happy: mission accomplished.

As I learned in high school, but forgot until recently, finding yourself in a less than blissful situation doesn’t necessarily doom you into constant misery. I feel like it’s dangerously easy to spend my twenties waiting for the big things to happen, THE BOYFRIEND or THE JOB, and moping with an air of expectation until they do. I’ve been chasing after romance like it would fix everything else that’s wrong: the panacea for being twenty-four. For the moment, though, I’m tired and sentimental for zen, slurpy happiness, which fortunately I can recreate on my own.

After all, I learned from my dad a long time ago that even by myself, the Bruce Willis warm-fuzzies are an entirely acceptable cause for joy.

Shakespeare, Meg Ryan, and Beards (Oh My)

I never cared much for Romeo and Juliet. As an awkward teenager, with whom no one ever fell headlong, prose-spouting in love, I developed (in addition to intimacy issues) specific theories about models of love: which are good, which are bad, and which are profoundly obnoxious. It’s possible my predisposition against the main characters came from my inability to relate to them—my fifteenth year was spent in combat boots and black eyeliner, not sighing on balconies (not that I didn’t want to, mind you). I found the angst tedious—I had enough of that on my own. I wanted something with a little more punch, because to me, the truest part of love is the fighting for it. In the R&J model, when the going gets tough, the tough… drink poison. Where the hell is the romance in that? Melodrama by any other name would annoy as thoroughly.

Fortunately for me and my fledgling theories, there was a great deal more Shakespeare to be had, and I found the satisfying model I was looking for in Much Ado About Nothing.

Admittedly, Much Ado has the sappy, tortured romance between Hero and Claudio, but the Benedick/Beatrice interaction was really what took me. It had, after all, a very auspicious start: Beatrice is whip smart and doesn’t give a flying iamb about what others think. The smart I could do. The confidence… well, I could work on it, but the relatable potential was there.

In addition, the proceeding banter, the “merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her,” appealed to me enormously compared to all of the kissy pilgrim talk betwixt (er… between) R&J. After all, the sex is in the banter. The chemistry and the crackle in a “skirmish of wit” are, let’s be honest, intellectual foreplay. If a man ever said to me “I would my horse the speed of your tongue,” I make no promises about my resulting actions.

So you’ve got the strong, smart woman. You’ve got the banter (and, by extrapolation, the promise of rockin’ sex). And then, when the going gets tough, the tough don’t spout poetry: they just lay it on the line. In her worst hour, when Beatrice is broken-hearted and mad as hell that dumbshit Claudio has slandered her cousin, Benedick says to her: “I do love nothing in the world so well as you: is not that strange?” In that worst hour, he doesn’t know how to fix it, but damn can he love her.

Granted, much drama ensues (he’s not so thrilled when she wants him to kill his best friend), but in the end, he stands with her, she’s right, Hero is vindicated, and everybody’s happy.

Vastly simplified, my devotion to Much Ado foreshadowed my love for most of Austen: how could I not love a plot where a smart, strong woman gets to keep being smart and strong, maintains her principles, AND gets the guy? Juliet just ends up dead.

There’s a catch, though, as there always is. Regarding the choosing of a mate based on facial hair (I’ve chosen for worse reasons), the Lady Beatrice has the following to offer: “He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man: and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him.” Sort through all of the more and less thans, and the math works out to precisely zero men. She didn’t seem to have any problems with dying single, then partying it up with the bachelors in heaven. My outlook on that particular scenario is not so rosy. Like I said, I’m working on the confidence thing.

I was walking towards a first date recently (that relationship was good, then fantastic, then not, in short order) when a few neural impulses collided and I thought to myself that I should send a hopeful prayer out to Meg Ryan, patron saint of romantic comedies, to bless this date. Something like “forgive me Meg, for I am single: it has been two years since my last real relationship.” I think it’s safe to say that this sentiment is regrettable, flawed, and a troubling indicator of how I’m looking at my love life. In their day, Shakespeare’s plays were popular entertainment. As I was formulating all of my romantic theories with Shakespeare, my own popular culture was more or less reinforcing my ideas; many romantic comedies are, to a greater or lesser extent, based on the Much Ado template of how a smart (albeit neurotic) woman banters, battles, and is betrothed.

Beatrice, in her speech on beards, is generalizing, and I, in my theories of relationships, am doing the same. Sometimes, when I’m being perfectly honest with myself, it seems like I’m looking for someone to play the Benedick role. I have set the parameters and am waiting for someone of the correct dimensions to fill the part, as if that would help me know love when I see it. It seems so much easier and more logical to line up all of the things you would like in a mate (or even a date), as if you were handing the universe a Christmas wish list, but at the end of the day, what are the odds that any one person will meet every criterion on that list? Or even that the criteria on the list are what should be on the list in the first place? (I’ve always been pretty good at specifying what I want, but whether what I want is good for me or not is an entirely different matter.) In trying to make it easier for myself I have actually made it much more difficult.

Maybe the truth is that no matter how you spin it, or set up models, or pray to mid ’90s romantic comedy patron saints, it’s just not easy to find someone who fits. That seems like such a self-evident statement to make, but sometimes I’m so wrapped up in theories and fiction (because Much Ado and Meg Ryan have at least that much in common) that I miss the most obvious truths.

I seek my own Benedick insofar as I want someone who will be able to bait me, banter with me, and love me even when I’m spitting flames at him. I leave the rest to the grace of the universe— the beard is negotiable.

“For man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.”

Break It Down (Again)

Early on in my short and uninspired career in math, I remember an exercise my math class did to break down numbers into the lowest primes whose product would be the original number. For example, 24 can be broken down to 8 and 3, and from there to 4, 2, and 3, and from there to 2, 2, 2, and 3. I liked this way of thinking because in a way it made everything potentially understandable. It was satisfying to me that many big, scary numbers could be reduced to a less intimidating combination of 2s, 3s, and other, more manageable primes.

Though I mostly left math behind many years ago (does balancing my checkbook count?), I held onto that idea. After all, the biggest, grisliest problems I encounter in my life are often combinations of things. Insecurities from one area of my life meet up with previous mistakes, concerns for the future, and even maybe a recent bad hair day, and suddenly I’m staring up at one very large, ugly, and complex knot of issues. While it is often tempting to simply turn tail and run from these monster problems, it is also sometimes satisfying to pick up your metaphorical baseball bat and beat the damn thing until your primes start falling out: the real, basic problems. (A therapist, I should note, might take issue with the image of beating one’s problems until their parts fall out, but I believe in reality a therapist does pretty much the same thing—though admittedly with a little more finesse.)

Daniel Jones, editor of the Modern Love section of the New York Times, recently broke love down into its primes. As if I weren't already thoroughly enamored of this man, he also referenced Star Trek in his introductory explanation: “If I were Spock from ‘Star Trek,’ I would explain that human love is a combination of three emotions or impulses: desire, vulnerability and bravery. Desire makes one feel vulnerable, which then requires one to be brave.” (See below for a link to this article.) So there they are: the 2s and 3s of love, albeit with a Vulcan twist. After some thought, I came to the conclusion that even those primes are still a little bulky—and maybe I in my hubris could break them down a little more, or at least define them a little more thoroughly for myself. After all, science didn't stop with Einstein.

Desire I understand. To return to my linguistic roots for a moment, Lord have mercy do I understand desire. It may be a little redundant to break desire down into its primes—I think it’s already pretty primal as is. To make a brief attempt, though, I think desire is pretty much the distance between your lack of an attractive something and the attractive something itself. Raise that distance to the power of pheromones, and God help you.

Vulnerability required a little more thinking from me—I got the sense that there were more moving parts to this one (after all, for me the only moving parts in desire tend to be my falling all over myself and what results when my falling all over myself is just fine with the other person). I believe that everybody has a certain amount of personal armor, in a greater or lesser state of repair, and that there are, by necessity of design, gaps in that armor that we have come to call our weaknesses, or, as a whole, our vulnerability. So exactly what is it that we’re guarding ourselves against? Pain doesn’t seem like an adequate answer; rather than being a prime, that to me looks like an infinity symbol. It’s just too big of a thing to understand. And so, true to form, I gave it a bit of a thwack to see what fell out, and I came up with three things: disappointment, humiliation, and loss.

In a lot of ways, I think that these are the things that go bump in the night when you’re a grownup; they are the things that scare us the most. To frame it conceptually, disappointment is what happens when the distance between your lack and the thing that would fill that lack (desire, see above) becomes too great. The desire snaps and the void across that now unconquerable distance is called disappointment. Humiliation is a subtractive process: you are made smaller by the exact amount that measures how much you care about other people’s opinions. And then, of course, there is loss.

Loss is more than simply an absence. It is a hole in yourself, shaped in the image of the thing that was once there and is now gone—an emptiness that still has the ability to shape you. Loss has mass, it has character. I’ve seen pictures before of trees that grew up around bicycles, bushes that have absorbed chain-link fences. I think loss is like that: we can absorb it into ourselves, but we can’t change it, and it’ll always be there within, foreign and painful.

And so, in the face of vulnerability, the noun that is the state in which we find ourselves because of disappointment, humiliation, and loss, why the hell would you then move to bravery? Is love really worth the physics of vulnerability?

For whatever reason, my immediate answer is yes, though I couldn’t give you a logical reason to save my life. Maybe we’re trained by family, culture, even our own instincts that love, and everything that goes with it, is worth the risk; that the stakes are so high because the prize is so great. And now I come to define bravery: bravery is the mass of your faith that love will be worth it combined with the acknowledgment of your own vulnerability, multiplied by your velocity moving through life. And hell, square it for good measure.

I’ve whipped myself into a linguistic and physics frenzy trying to describe all of this, but maybe it just goes back to primes:

Lay out your 2s and 3s, all of the basic components of exactly who you are: flaws, virtues, sapphires and gum-wrappers. And maybe there’s a person who will look at all the primes and see the product. Suddenly you’ll know in your bones why relativity makes sense, and all at once you’ll be mass and distance and energy and in love.


(For Daniel Jones' brilliant ruminations on the subject, please see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/fashion/14modlove.html?pagewanted=2&sq=modern%20love&st=cse&scp=3)

The Idea of Order and Peter Jennings

I took a course in college on the poetry of Wallace Stevens with a brilliant and eccentric professor (the best kind there is). Occasionally during class, for no apparent reason, he would launch into a completely unprompted tirade against Christmas. The seven or eight members of the class, myself included, would sit and listen, vaguely confused and a little horrified, as our professor would rail on about how the holiday was never as good as it was when you were a child, and after such complete and whole satisfaction in childhood, the dissatisfaction in adulthood was all the more awful. We, being only lately out of our teen years, generally didn’t believe him and would wait for him to get back to Stevens. In the last couple of years, though, I think I’ve begun to see what he meant.

When I was a child, for whatever reason, I developed a very black and white sense of rightness and order in the world. Certain things were supposed to happen in a certain way, and if they did, all was right and good in the universe. (Isn’t it amazing how you can track control issues to an early age?) So then, for Christmas, it was almost as simple as a checklist: tree, presents, family, Eggs Benedict. All present and accounted for? Success!

It was much the same for everyday items as well. I grew up in a remarkably nuclear family: my dad would be home at 6:30 every night for dinner, which was always a meat, a starch, and a vegetable, and all six of us (two parents, three daughters, and the dog) would be at the same table to eat. Dry cleaning on Saturday, church on Sunday, and the Nightly News during the week. A+B+C= stable childhood.

It’s difficult for me to track exactly when these things started to change. Some things were obvious, like when my sisters went away to college and we moved away from my childhood home. Others were more subtle. It’s hard to tell when adult worries started to get in the way of simple, childish satisfaction. This last Christmas I found myself with my head in my hands at the airport about to fly home. Anxieties about sibling tensions, traveling relatives, in-laws, a sister’s wedding plans, and the revival of old hurts and battles nearly made me turn around and head back to my apartment. I couldn’t help but think back to my crazy Stevens professor and started to wonder if he had been right.

Childhood seems to escape slowly, almost like air from a bike tire. It’s easy to qualify that loss in terms of siblings marrying, houses sold, friends made and lost, but I believe the attrition actually comes from many more sources, uncountable small losses that invariably carry you forward into adulthood. I only came to that conclusion the day Peter Jennings died.

On the morning of September 11, I sat on my parents’ bed and watched, sickened, as the towers fell. My father was at work, or rather making his way home from work by then, along with almost every other commuter in San Francisco. My mother had gone to the bank to withdraw cash, not knowing what the wake of the attacks would bring—in retrospect, it seems a little odd, but then, our normal now is having rainbow popsicle flavors determine our likelihood of being killed in an act of terrorism. (Still orange? Damn, I was really hoping for a purple one of these days…) I was alone in the house, trying to wrap my head around it, like trying to fold an origami cocktail napkin around a bowling ball, and looking back at me from the TV, I saw Peter Jennings trying to do the same.

We were an NBC family as I was growing up, and Peter Jennings had announced the news every night in my kitchen before dinner for years. I guess it isn’t all that surprising that I sought comfort in that newscast: if anybody could explain this to me, it would be him. I was almost sixteen at the time, but I hung onto that four-poster bed and his voice like a little kid. I had come to trust him like I trusted Christmas morning or weekday dinner: it would be there, it would make sense, and everything would be okay. Even though that particular morning would never be okay, in a small way for me, Peter Jennings made it a little better because he was on screen and kept talking. And desperate for solace, I kept listening.

Four year later, he died of lung cancer.

Historically and particularly in the last year, celebrity death has become a very strange, publicized phenomenon. Generally, I find sensationalized death unrepentantly tacky. Nevertheless, when Peter Jennings died, I felt that I personally had suffered a kind of loss. He had not only been part of my childhood, but also in a weird way, he had been with me that horrible morning. With his death, my childhood idea of order suffered another inevitable blow.

So what is it that we do on the far side of childhood, having passed through the angsty border territory of adolescence? I for one have slowly let myself trust Brian Williams for my nightly news. I have to laugh at myself when I suffer brief, ridiculous moments of anxiety when he has the night off—such things will happen. It was a valuable revelation that perhaps we don’t find order as adults; we have to make it for ourselves. My childhood stability was so comforting because I was fortunate enough to come into a world where it was already in place. There is good news, though, for adulthood: there can still be dinner, news, dry cleaning, and Christmas trees—I just have to arrange them myself.

Sprechen Sie "dog"?

I've noticed that whenever I've started to learn a language in a classroom setting, the building blocks arrange themselves differently from how they do if you're picking it up on the linguistic hoof, as it were. When in Italy on an art history study program, I found that I very seldom used the basic classroom building blocks-- ho una penna (I have one pen)-- but instead learned what was absolutely necessary to get by in an everyday setting-- vaffanculo (go f**k yourself) and vorebbe una birra, per favore (I would like one beer please). Such is the difference between learning and doing.

Back in a high school or college classroom, though, the first orders of business tended to be, for whatever reason, weather and family members. That it is unlikely I would ever walk up to a German person and say enthusiastically "Das wetter ist nett, ja?" seemed not to matter to my German professor. (I did, however, pick up from a German classmate the very useful phrase "ich habe doch keine anung-- verpiss dich," meaning "I have absolutely no idea-- piss off.") I suppose family members were a little more practical, but the language introduced to describe family-- generally father, mother, sister, brother-- was always very limiting, I thought. The colorful line drawings of families in their various capacities always seemed to be missing something to me, and I wondered: Wo ist der hund?

Where is the dog?

Our most beloved corgi left us more than two years ago. He was named for a 1950’s film noir actor, but was more commonly referred to as “Booger.” Even now, when I go home, getting up from the couch, I will check to make sure he is not sitting in his spot immediately below my feet. I listen for his collar and his brisk, businesslike trot across the hardwood. My parents’ house has an uncomfortable emptiness to it, and I honestly believe it is not because all of their children are grown. I believe it is because they don’t have a dog.

My family and I are, quite simply put, dog people. While we thankfully never reached crazy dog breeder levels of devotion (watch the Westminster dog show sometime-- some of those people are just plain weird), we also never saw the role of "family dog" to be essentially transferable; that is, we never thought that as long as a canine is in the role, one is pretty much as good as another. In fact, after our golden retriever, with whom my older sisters grew up, died at the ripe old age of fourteen, my parents never thought they could have another dog, because they had had the definitive dog. How can you replace the canine love of your life?

The truth is, you can’t. In a few years it became clear to my parents, however, that I needed a dog. There are all sorts of theories about how having a pet teaches responsibility, etc., but I don’t think it was about that. There was something elusive, some quality I just wouldn’t quite understand, if I did not grow up with a dog. It’s an environmental thing, something you need to soak into your skin at a young age, like a first language.

Since the thought of another golden was too painful for my parents, we looked into corgis at my grandmother’s suggestion. This suggestion eventually led us to a breeder and to our beloved Booger. The three of us, my mother, father and I, were down on the floor with him in about four seconds flat. My mother confided in me later that she never thought she could love another dog as much as she had loved our golden, named for a Welsh word meaning “beloved,” and she had been right and wrong. She loved them both intensely, but not in the same ways. After all, you never love two people in the same way, and in our family, you never love two dogs the same way.

Now, out on my own, living in a small studio apartment in the city and working a nine to five, I realize the folly in my wanting a dog. I couldn’t be a good dog owner. I’m barely a good plant owner (my African violet is much sturdier than it looks, let me tell you). But I still ache, really, honestly hurt for a dog. I’m that person who will ask to pet your dog with an almost pathetically hopeful expression on my face, and almost before you say yes, I’ll be down on the ground in a wool gabardine suit skirt speaking some language of endearment that only vaguely resembles English.

No dog will ever replace my Booger; I don’t think I could ever have another corgi. But I do know that I have this untapped reserve of dog love in my heart. I am putting down tentative roots as an adult: I own a sofa, I dust things, I hang pictures. In short, I’m making a home. And there will be a dog out there, someday, who will be miraculously shaped just right to fill up this odd hole I have in my life.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts. I never learned to speak enough Italian or German to differentiate linguistically between “house” and “home,” but in English I could tell you that home is a lot of things, which combine into a very powerful whole. And for me, one of those parts is inevitably going to shed and need to go out to pee in the middle of the night in the middle of the winter.

So then, standing by the back door in a draft, waiting for the dog to do his business so I can go back to bed, I’ll know that I’m really home.

From the Archives: Daughters of Eve

On a bus traveling north from Boston, a little more than a year ago, I committed a cardinal sin.

I was sitting with a friend, who happened to be on the same bus, headed back to our college in New Hampshire, talking about my long weekend. I had traveled south with my then boyfriend to meet his best friend, who was only in town for a few days. This was a week after I had spent Mother’s Day with his family. Our inevitable break up, cued by my graduation from college and his departure for New York, began to waver in my mind. At that point I was still desperately applying for jobs in the arts and didn’t know where I would end up. Ironically, I was one of the few people I knew who didn’t want to end up in New York. Quite frankly, it had no allure for me. I grew up in a small Midwestern suburb, and my one trip to New York, passing through on my college tour, hadn’t been very convincing. I was miraculously immune to its pull on my peers.

Unfortunately, I was not immune to the pull of this boy.

There had been, in our previous discussions, a hypothetical “we,” should my eventual job placement take me to New York. He flat out refused to consider long-distance, and up until that point, I had flat out refused to consider New York (though, in retrospect, I guess he had never asked me to consider it). Nevertheless, on this late bus with my friend, a very strange thing happened. I was in love with someone who had treated me well, which was a new experience for me, so I was in uncharted territory. Suddenly my thinking began to roll towards New York. Rationalizations started flooding in, and picked up momentum: New York was as good a place as any to find a job in the arts; I was more likely to find a job there; my sister was there… They were good reasons. They just weren’t reasons that made a difference to me. I was only thinking about being able to hold onto this love I thought was so special.

What do we know about Eve’s daughters? Nothing, because, in the strictest biblical sense, they didn't exist. Nevertheless, if such a daughter did exist, I wonder what she would have been like, the sister of Cain and Abel. She might have had to be a paragon of virtue, at the lecturing of her mother. Eve had had to suffer for her sins, so God help her (no pun intended), her daughter would not commit the same sins and suffer in the same ways.

Still, that original sin: it was pretty damn important. Eve is immortalized in that sin in Western art ad infinitum. In a way, that sin made everything else possible—so there is a certain sanctity of the sin itself. But, perhaps, not so for Eve’s daughter.

My parents are happily married. It reads like a fairy tale. They grew up across the street from one another. I wear the ring he gave her when she was sixteen. They’ve been together thirty-five years, and they are happy. In light of what I came to realize as I got older, I wonder how hard Cinderella or her Prince ever had to work for their happiness.

Both of my parents have compromised, but my mother’s more often than not is held up as the golden standard which, implicitly, I must never, ever emulate. She has moved seventeen times in her married life. She has left homes and started over, following my father, who followed his job. She has changed, and changed for love. Many of our mothers, raised in the ‘50s and ‘60s, followed similar paths. They were not primary: their husbands were. And now we, the daughters of these Eves, must be primary in our own lives. We must follow our own dreams first, we must not compromise.

Our own commitment to our dreams must bear up under our own expectations and those of our mothers’, who live vicariously through our unwillingness to bend, and never for a man.
So on that bus, as the inertia of my enthusiasm roiled in my brain, I committed the cardinal sin of my generation of women: I changed for a guy. More than that, I changed my dream. My dream had never included New York, but suddenly I rationalized that it could. I was compromising for love.

As it turned out, that hypothetical “we” in New York was apparently a hypothetical exercise and nothing more. Three days after I got off that bus, bright with the possibilities, he broke up with me. I thought I would break in half. If we can look at these situations without our mothers, we may see that we were willing to give a little, but our partners were not. But it inevitably goes deeper than that: I didn’t even have the cold comfort of my uncompromise to stand by. I hadn’t stood by my dream uncompromisingly. I had committed the sin, and I was alone.

I felt like a traitor to myself, this unyielding woman I was supposed to have become. It me feel pitifully weak. Love? I had been willing to compromise for love? It seemed ridiculous—this inconstant thing had swayed me from my constant goal. Eve stood in cold, silent judgment. I could not even have the sanctity of the sin: that was hers alone. I just had to deal with the compromises.

My mother is not Eve. She is a woman in love. Many months after my breakup, she asked me if maybe I hadn’t tried harder…? Maybe I expected too much perfection? I exploded. All over our living room, and with a furor I don’t think she anticipated. After all, it is an unconscious inheritance she has given me. It’s only me, alone in my head with my expectations, which in that instance, I failed.

There is little forgiveness in me—and my mother wonders why. Somehow I have formed the opinion that forgiveness is a weak emotion. I can’t forgive myself for thinking love would conquer all, or at least some. I can’t forgive him for being the most seductive apple. I can’t forgive Eve’s legacy, which I never asked for. I feel as though I am meant to be made of steel: unyielding, unforgiving, uncompromising. But somehow I know being an adult in love is about change, and bend, and give. If love makes you weak, and weakness is unforgiveable, where are we left?

For now, alone, confused sinners, trying to understand what compromise is acceptable.

Be Still, Van Morrison

A Bermuda triangle of circumstances has lodged the song “Crazy Love” quite forcefully in my head, and I am not pleased. I am trying to engage in healthy thinking habits, and as I involuntarily lean into the lyrics—I need her in the day time (I need her)—with the accompanying hypnotic, unjustified romantic feeling, my thoughts cannot be qualified in the healthy category.

Because he doesn’t give me crazy love. He gives me books. And a scarf (which, admittedly, I love crazily). And pieces of songs. And a headache, if I think about him too long.

Months ago, in my kitchen, he replaced my iPod with his own and cued up a song while I was making us dinner. If I had waited a moment longer, I would have been able to identify the voice as Van Morrison—a miraculous shot in hell, because my musical vocabulary is not as large as his. But I was curious and checked, thereby deleting a little coolness I might have gained in that moment. I have absolutely no memory of what the song was—just that it was Van Morrison, and since I am in very real danger of falling in love with this person, “Crazy Love” often comes unbidden into my mind when I think of him.

And it’s such a damn fine song. When Van Morrison, an Irishman, sings and it makes me righteous, somehow you know he’s not talking about brimstone and scripture righteousness. He’s talking about reggae righteousness, Bob Marley righteousness—righteousness that is downright sexy.

I am entirely capable of writing fictions in my head and knowing they are fictions. The problem now is that I am writing only partly fiction, and the actual truth casts its credibility over the parts that are not truth. It doesn’t matter that the basis of a horror movie was a bump in the night a hundred years ago; it’s still BASED ON TRUE EVENTS. The whole feels truer because the part of it is. So the fiction of he gives me love, love, love, love, crazy love becomes a little more believable when he gives me true things that are pretty wonderful as well.

The true things are that he met me when I was wearing gold leggings and snow boots, and shortly thereafter witnessed me dancing in the way that I really dance—like a Muppet on speed in tune with early ‘80s dance music. In spite of these true things, he was still interested in kissing me. We sent each other haikus and limericks on email for months—he even referenced a sestina once and my heart skipped a beat. He addresses his packages to me with a royal title in front of my name. I received a box of books from him, completely unannounced, for the autumnal equinox. He sent me a vintage silk scarf from my college—a thing which I did not know existed, but had I known, I would have gone crazy for the idea of having it. He has admitted doubt and nausea to me, and I have loved him very intensely in those moments.

These true things are like a butterfly exhibit—all of them exist, they really do, and they are beautiful: fun and light and whimsical and totally unnecessary and wonderful for the sake of wonderful. Unfortunately, other, more cumbersome truths exist as well. Like the fact that he is in med school in another state. Like the fact that we have never actually dated or been near each other for longer than two days at a stretch. Like the fact that in an event of a water landing, the truth is that I have no claim on him, and technically, he owes me nothing. Those truths are like cinderblocks in the butterfly house: they are ugly and heavy and much more tangible than butterflies. But at the end of the day, you can grab onto a cinderblock and sit on it. The same does not work so successfully with butterflies. I’d rather chase after butterflies to a soundtrack of Van Morrison, but we—the butterflies and I—have nowhere real to land.

It is difficult to believe only in the true things when they seem to point towards something that is not, strictly speaking, true. The truth is that the rest of the story will be fiction as long as I’m writing it alone. It takes two to write a real relationship. And in this case, unfortunately, Van Morrison is not a legitimate co-author.

So in the mean time, I feel crazy. And in love.