I have found something rare and wonderful, completely by accident, and I have absolutely no idea what to do with it.
As a matter of observation, things that are rare are not often simultaneously sturdy or robust. That’s not the sort of thing you can really test, either: someone hands you a Faberge egg, you are not likely to assess first-hand how well it bounces. You believe, through some instinct or education, that this thing in your hand is rare because it is frail—uncommon and valued because of its proclivity to be broken.
Approaching the matter scientifically, Darwin might have you believe that something rare is doomed—fragility will eventually and inevitably be selected against. How many creatures will we never know about because they couldn’t quite bear up against climate, predators, environment, or the distance between Boston and New York?
Okay, I may be referring to a very specific species that is at risk for that last one: a population of two that may or may not be viable in the long run.
Most relationships don’t stand up against selection pressures—from both within and without. You could say a selection pressure from within is just the act of being picky: the female bird is so not impressed with that particular feather display. Move along, pal. Relationship selection pressure from without has nothing to do with choice: if some manner of jungle cat eats the male bird, the female, no matter how much she approved of the male’s plumage, would seem to be shit out of luck.
I take no issue with my chosen bird’s plumage. When he met me on the corner of 34th and 8th this weekend, I saw him before he saw me, and I took a minute to simply admire him. Those are some fine feathers, let me tell you.
I know I am in trouble when Frank Sinatra starts singing in my head—that generally means I have passed out of the realm of reason and straight into fantasy, replete with imagined embraces in fog and fedoras. For the last few days, Frankie has been singing a George Gershwin standard, which begins: “There are many, many crazy things that will keep me loving you, and with your permission, may I list a few?”
The request for permission was probably a rhetorical exercise; it’s entirely possible that whomever Gershwin was writing about never knew such a list existed. In that possibility, I feel George’s pain. One of those selection pressures that could crush this fledgling romance into extinction is the act of my listing those many, many crazy things that keep me loving him… so I write them to the ether, on a whim:
I love the way your eyes crinkle up when you grin, like a cheeky little kid who’s quite pleased with himself for having been caught covered in peanut butter. I love your selective use of anachronisms when you talk. I love how the universe saw fit to create you with a breathtakingly perfect blend of irony and self-awareness—the personality version of a dry martini—which goes so well with your corduroy blazer. I love that I love your friends and your favorite book. That you are excellent at receiving gifts. That you drink ‘dark and stormies,’ which are awful. That you have expressed strong opinions about my shoes (you hate my Tevas, which recently broke and made me think of you). That you remember certain places where I have left pieces of myself. That you see me, my lowest common denominator self, who prefers blue jeans, talks too much, and is filled with obscure Star Wars facts, and you like all of those things. That sitting across the table from almost every date I have had in the last year, I have thought that I would rather be with you.
The memory of all that? No, they can’t take that away from me… but I don’t want the memory of it. I want the reality of it. Unfortunately, reality is the biggest threat to our population of two; something along the lines of “cause of death: blunt force reality.” Love and evolution aren’t mutually exclusive: I believe the best kinds of relationships evolve. Sometimes I worry, though, that giving something time can cut both ways: if you don’t make something happen, how can you make anything happen?
I’m not quite ready to drop the egg and see if it bounces; I don’t know that he’ll ever know of this list of many, many crazy things. But sometimes Nature does give me hope: there is miraculous footage of ducklings essentially BASE jumping out of their nest high in a tree.
They are fragile and wonderful too. And they bounce.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
The Courtesy of Rejection
June 16, 2008
Learning proper etiquette was a big part of my upbringing. In my family, you knew the order in which to place orders at a restaurant (based on seniority, which translates to a combination of age and gender) and which bread plate was yours (left, same number of letters and two in common with ‘loaf’). Thank you notes for Christmas were always posted before New Years.
Now, entering that murky but decidedly threatening realm dubbed ‘the real world,’ I find it mercilessly bereft of etiquette, and I have absolutely no recourse.
I graduated college in June with a degree in Art History and have found myself virtually if expensively unemployable. Deciding not to go straight to grad school and not being investment banker material, I began to apply for entry-level administrative jobs at museums. I have been applying for nine months, trolling museum websites every few days between classes and internships, then full time at home after I graduated. Nine months worth of applications adds up; I would say I have applied for roughly eighty jobs.
I have been officially rejected by two of them.
It has been a long road since January, when my peers and supervisors at my college museum were assuring me I was destined to get a great job. I started out hopeful, even though the word 'recession' began to flicker on the edges of my consciousness. There were fewer jobs, and arts budgets were being cut. I still had faith.
Every week I would fire out more applications. Writing a single cover letter would eat up hours. I tried to go with a form letter: one for development positions, another for education positions, etc. I found that was a lot like a technique I tried to use in grade-school for my thank you notes: “Dear ___, Thank you for the ___. I really love it.” The form method in both cases flopped.
Each cover letter I would send was an interesting façade of fact and enticement covering outright desperation. It is true, I have good qualifications, but what I could not say outright was how I wanted a job so badly that I would work longer and harder than anyone else just to prove it.
One museum rejected me in a single line of email text: the position has been filled. Another sent me a form rejection, thanking me for my interest though they could not at this time offer me the position. I clung to this rejection as so much kinder than the first. By now, however, I would gladly welcome anything as short as the first. Key word: anything.
The logical side of my brain tells me that the human resources departments cannot possibly keep track of all applicants and coordinate mass rejection. This side of my brain also seems to laugh wryly and say, “Welcome to the real world, little girl.” I am not particularly fond of that side of my brain of late.
After all, I tortured myself over each cover letter: how to appeal most articulately, how to show my talents, how to stand out in the crowd. My resume is my little masterpiece, recording the things I have worked so hard to accomplish: awards, honors, magna cum laude, experience in the field.
The image of that resume languishing in someone’s email trashcan breaks my heart, but then, as an art history major, I am probably overdramatic with my images.
I walked around my college campus with an intoxicating self-assuredness. I understand that it is part of the deal to be squashed back down to where I belong: the absolute bottom of the food-chain, the new college-grad. I have found that the word “internship” in fact translates out of the erudite dialect of museums into a reality of unpaid, well-qualified labor.
Unlike most commencement addresses promise, I am abundantly aware how I cannot change the world, since I can’t seem to find an opening. I do not want to be an investment banker: I want to work in a museum. I want to talk to people about art. I want to communicate to my own generation how art is a record of what makes us human. I want to help others feel the new-love butterflies that I feel when I look at El Greco’s “View of Toledo.” I want to start an outreach program to fund the livelihood of students who would have internships at the Met but cannot afford to live in Manhattan. I want to break the closed socioeconomic circle of the art world, because as I see it, art belongs to us all. I have faith. I have a mission.
I just don’t have a job.
Learning proper etiquette was a big part of my upbringing. In my family, you knew the order in which to place orders at a restaurant (based on seniority, which translates to a combination of age and gender) and which bread plate was yours (left, same number of letters and two in common with ‘loaf’). Thank you notes for Christmas were always posted before New Years.
Now, entering that murky but decidedly threatening realm dubbed ‘the real world,’ I find it mercilessly bereft of etiquette, and I have absolutely no recourse.
I graduated college in June with a degree in Art History and have found myself virtually if expensively unemployable. Deciding not to go straight to grad school and not being investment banker material, I began to apply for entry-level administrative jobs at museums. I have been applying for nine months, trolling museum websites every few days between classes and internships, then full time at home after I graduated. Nine months worth of applications adds up; I would say I have applied for roughly eighty jobs.
I have been officially rejected by two of them.
It has been a long road since January, when my peers and supervisors at my college museum were assuring me I was destined to get a great job. I started out hopeful, even though the word 'recession' began to flicker on the edges of my consciousness. There were fewer jobs, and arts budgets were being cut. I still had faith.
Every week I would fire out more applications. Writing a single cover letter would eat up hours. I tried to go with a form letter: one for development positions, another for education positions, etc. I found that was a lot like a technique I tried to use in grade-school for my thank you notes: “Dear ___, Thank you for the ___. I really love it.” The form method in both cases flopped.
Each cover letter I would send was an interesting façade of fact and enticement covering outright desperation. It is true, I have good qualifications, but what I could not say outright was how I wanted a job so badly that I would work longer and harder than anyone else just to prove it.
One museum rejected me in a single line of email text: the position has been filled. Another sent me a form rejection, thanking me for my interest though they could not at this time offer me the position. I clung to this rejection as so much kinder than the first. By now, however, I would gladly welcome anything as short as the first. Key word: anything.
The logical side of my brain tells me that the human resources departments cannot possibly keep track of all applicants and coordinate mass rejection. This side of my brain also seems to laugh wryly and say, “Welcome to the real world, little girl.” I am not particularly fond of that side of my brain of late.
After all, I tortured myself over each cover letter: how to appeal most articulately, how to show my talents, how to stand out in the crowd. My resume is my little masterpiece, recording the things I have worked so hard to accomplish: awards, honors, magna cum laude, experience in the field.
The image of that resume languishing in someone’s email trashcan breaks my heart, but then, as an art history major, I am probably overdramatic with my images.
I walked around my college campus with an intoxicating self-assuredness. I understand that it is part of the deal to be squashed back down to where I belong: the absolute bottom of the food-chain, the new college-grad. I have found that the word “internship” in fact translates out of the erudite dialect of museums into a reality of unpaid, well-qualified labor.
Unlike most commencement addresses promise, I am abundantly aware how I cannot change the world, since I can’t seem to find an opening. I do not want to be an investment banker: I want to work in a museum. I want to talk to people about art. I want to communicate to my own generation how art is a record of what makes us human. I want to help others feel the new-love butterflies that I feel when I look at El Greco’s “View of Toledo.” I want to start an outreach program to fund the livelihood of students who would have internships at the Met but cannot afford to live in Manhattan. I want to break the closed socioeconomic circle of the art world, because as I see it, art belongs to us all. I have faith. I have a mission.
I just don’t have a job.
Note from Dylan
Shortly after I graduated college, I sat down on my bed and wrote an essay called “The Courtesy of Rejection.” A lifelong Newsweek reader, I had written it specifically for their column “My Turn,” in which guest authors (read: the rest of us pedestrians) submit short essays about particular life experiences. I thought even if they never acknowledged my existence, they’d prove my point, so that would be some consolation.
A month and a half later, about three weeks before the economy collapsed, I got a call from an editor saying they’d like to publish the essay. I met with a team to do a photo-shoot a few days after that (no, seriously—a photo shoot), and I worked closely with an editor to perfect the essay for print. It wasn’t just the idea of national publication that made me deliriously happy—actually being paid to write seemed like some sort of miracle—but that museum directors might read it, deduce I was brilliant, and hire me. I signed the contract and faxed it in, believing everything was about to start going right.
(Cue the dire music.)
Three days before the essay was set to be published, one of the senior editors cut it without any explanation. The editor with whom I had been working told me over the phone. She was very kind as I tried (and failed) not to cry and suggested maybe taking a different direction with the essay, but I think we both knew that I wasn’t going to be published in the magazine. I had spent the last few months (and would yet spend several more) being rejected, but that one I think was the most painful from that year.
Understandably, my readership of Newsweek ended abruptly. Don’t get me wrong: I mourn for the print media, but my attitude towards that particular magazine became distinctly unsympathetic. My friends, bless their hearts, didn’t ask when the essay I had been so ecstatic to have published would appear, and I didn’t have the heart left to tell them that it never would.
I thought of that essay recently, more than a year now into the job I eventually got. I knew it was a bad fit even while I was interviewing, but when the offer came, I bounced off the walls anyway, because it was the opposite of rejection—finally. So now, many paradigm shifts later, I proudly publish one of my original essays.
Take that, Newsweek.
Monday, April 5, 2010
To Go—Bravely or Otherwise
During high school, I developed a weird little ritual, which I enacted every time an in-class essay was assigned. Generally speaking, as soon as the assignment was on the board or handed out, my classmates would begin scribbling furiously. At the time, I think we all knew that the exercise of in-class essay writing was part preparation, part adrenaline, and part bullshit. Fortunately for most of us, we were consummate bullshit artists. As they began writing, though, I would just sit. I don’t even remember if I would read the assignment, but I do remember the act of simply doing nothing. And one thought would cross my mind:
What if I just didn’t do this?
It was an uncharacteristically rebellious thought for me—especially in light of the fact that my favorite classes in high school were the classes in which these in-class essays were assigned. For whatever reason, though, I always felt the need to sit still for a few minutes and consider my alternatives. I knew in the most literal sense that no, the world would not end if I did not pick up my pen and begin to wax pretentious about the phallic significance of this or that (one teacher in particular had the reputation of giving an A to anyone who could find anything remotely penis-like in a passage of text). Many students in my school, though, myself included, believed in some sense that some world would in fact fall of its axis or explode in a flurry of singed Hemingway pages if we did not pass muster. Personal Armageddon is a miraculous motivator. After all, a paper wasn’t a paper: a paper was a grade, a grade was a transcript, a transcript was a college acceptance or rejection, and college… well, we didn’t really know what college was short of “monumentally important” for some obscure reason. Our priorities may have been completely wacked out, but it wasn’t a coincidence that our school could brag about a clean sweep of the Cal universities and Ivies alike—no matter if their graduates were emotional and adrenal messes when we got out.
It is in this context that my few moments of perspective were particularly out of character. Needless to say, though, after I took those few minutes, my adrenaline would kick in and I would begin writing frantically. Alas for missed opportunities.
My oldest sister told me once that there is a very well marked border between brave and stupid. She was referring specifically to an ill-advised bike ride I took once that left me hypothermic in the fetal position on my floor, but I think she’d be willing to extend the statement to a broader context. I would, however, pose a question: if you aren’t near that well-marked border, if there are no landmarks (“Welcome to Stupid—Population: Regrettably High”), how do you know when the ground you’re metaphorically standing on is brave or stupid?
All of my in-class essay exercises in latent bravery came back to me this weekend while I was on the road. A large family gathering had necessitated a car-swap scenario that had me driving my grandfather’s SUV back out to their house in Lexington. Not owning a car myself, the act of driving has become a rare high for me—it hints at an autonomy and independence I don’t ordinarily have. I have borrowed that particular SUV, an ancient and noisy gas-guzzler, many times to drive north back to school to ski or see friends. And on this recent Sunday night, I found myself in that car again, windows down and radio up, pointing north on I-95. And that traitorous thought came back after years of dormancy:
What if I just didn’t do this?
What if I didn’t take the exit towards my grandparents’ house? What if I just struck out north and left everything behind? The idea was as intoxicating as it was implausible.
In a weird way, over the last couple of months, my thinking has changed. It’s not so much the where anymore that is the draw—it’s the act of going and the fact of gone that you leave in your wake. Another adult who’s been at this longer than I have told me recently that maybe it is brave to be out on my own, working every day, not really liking my job: doing the hard thing every day, even though it’s hard, is brave. As I hit the turn signal on Sunday night with an emphatic swear, I didn’t feel brave. I felt like a coward as I exited towards Lexington, and the feeling of freedom stayed on I-95 and headed north without me.
I used to be an exclusively goal-oriented person. The promise of where I wanted to go was the fuel that got me there. After a couple rough years of economic realities, though, my intended destination is starting to waver. All sorts of questions are invading and eroding my certainty, the most corrosive of which is: What if what I think I want will not actually make me happy?
In high school, I drank the cool aid and pushed myself to the point of breaking—but I got what I wanted: the acceptance letter to the school that had fueled me the whole way. No matter what I was thinking at the beginning of class, I always turned in the essay at the end. Now, with my faith in my goals faltering, I’m stalling on the way there.
The high school chapter of conventional wisdom more or less worked for me. The twenty-something chapter says that you get a job, you pay your bills, you apply to grad school. Essentially, you do your time and work towards what you want. Sometimes I wonder, though, if what I want takes into consideration the common models of wisdom, or if what I want is trapped inside the common models.
Yes, it would be stupid to abandon job, apartment, and possessions and pretty much commit grand theft auto with my grandfather’s ’95 Explorer. Perhaps bravery for the sake of bravery is stupid. The ‘bravery’ that tempts me always seems to be reactionary: I want to use the convention in my life as a push-off to launch myself in the other direction. It doesn’t necessarily follow, though, that what I’m launching myself into will make me happy, or that the act of launching makes me brave. So I always turn in the essay, I always exit towards Lexington on Sunday nights, and I am praying that whatever qualifies staying the course—bravery or stupidity—will eventually be worth it.
It is comforting to know also that north isn't going anywhere.
What if I just didn’t do this?
It was an uncharacteristically rebellious thought for me—especially in light of the fact that my favorite classes in high school were the classes in which these in-class essays were assigned. For whatever reason, though, I always felt the need to sit still for a few minutes and consider my alternatives. I knew in the most literal sense that no, the world would not end if I did not pick up my pen and begin to wax pretentious about the phallic significance of this or that (one teacher in particular had the reputation of giving an A to anyone who could find anything remotely penis-like in a passage of text). Many students in my school, though, myself included, believed in some sense that some world would in fact fall of its axis or explode in a flurry of singed Hemingway pages if we did not pass muster. Personal Armageddon is a miraculous motivator. After all, a paper wasn’t a paper: a paper was a grade, a grade was a transcript, a transcript was a college acceptance or rejection, and college… well, we didn’t really know what college was short of “monumentally important” for some obscure reason. Our priorities may have been completely wacked out, but it wasn’t a coincidence that our school could brag about a clean sweep of the Cal universities and Ivies alike—no matter if their graduates were emotional and adrenal messes when we got out.
It is in this context that my few moments of perspective were particularly out of character. Needless to say, though, after I took those few minutes, my adrenaline would kick in and I would begin writing frantically. Alas for missed opportunities.
My oldest sister told me once that there is a very well marked border between brave and stupid. She was referring specifically to an ill-advised bike ride I took once that left me hypothermic in the fetal position on my floor, but I think she’d be willing to extend the statement to a broader context. I would, however, pose a question: if you aren’t near that well-marked border, if there are no landmarks (“Welcome to Stupid—Population: Regrettably High”), how do you know when the ground you’re metaphorically standing on is brave or stupid?
All of my in-class essay exercises in latent bravery came back to me this weekend while I was on the road. A large family gathering had necessitated a car-swap scenario that had me driving my grandfather’s SUV back out to their house in Lexington. Not owning a car myself, the act of driving has become a rare high for me—it hints at an autonomy and independence I don’t ordinarily have. I have borrowed that particular SUV, an ancient and noisy gas-guzzler, many times to drive north back to school to ski or see friends. And on this recent Sunday night, I found myself in that car again, windows down and radio up, pointing north on I-95. And that traitorous thought came back after years of dormancy:
What if I just didn’t do this?
What if I didn’t take the exit towards my grandparents’ house? What if I just struck out north and left everything behind? The idea was as intoxicating as it was implausible.
In a weird way, over the last couple of months, my thinking has changed. It’s not so much the where anymore that is the draw—it’s the act of going and the fact of gone that you leave in your wake. Another adult who’s been at this longer than I have told me recently that maybe it is brave to be out on my own, working every day, not really liking my job: doing the hard thing every day, even though it’s hard, is brave. As I hit the turn signal on Sunday night with an emphatic swear, I didn’t feel brave. I felt like a coward as I exited towards Lexington, and the feeling of freedom stayed on I-95 and headed north without me.
I used to be an exclusively goal-oriented person. The promise of where I wanted to go was the fuel that got me there. After a couple rough years of economic realities, though, my intended destination is starting to waver. All sorts of questions are invading and eroding my certainty, the most corrosive of which is: What if what I think I want will not actually make me happy?
In high school, I drank the cool aid and pushed myself to the point of breaking—but I got what I wanted: the acceptance letter to the school that had fueled me the whole way. No matter what I was thinking at the beginning of class, I always turned in the essay at the end. Now, with my faith in my goals faltering, I’m stalling on the way there.
The high school chapter of conventional wisdom more or less worked for me. The twenty-something chapter says that you get a job, you pay your bills, you apply to grad school. Essentially, you do your time and work towards what you want. Sometimes I wonder, though, if what I want takes into consideration the common models of wisdom, or if what I want is trapped inside the common models.
Yes, it would be stupid to abandon job, apartment, and possessions and pretty much commit grand theft auto with my grandfather’s ’95 Explorer. Perhaps bravery for the sake of bravery is stupid. The ‘bravery’ that tempts me always seems to be reactionary: I want to use the convention in my life as a push-off to launch myself in the other direction. It doesn’t necessarily follow, though, that what I’m launching myself into will make me happy, or that the act of launching makes me brave. So I always turn in the essay, I always exit towards Lexington on Sunday nights, and I am praying that whatever qualifies staying the course—bravery or stupidity—will eventually be worth it.
It is comforting to know also that north isn't going anywhere.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
The Gift of Patience
Patience (lower case p) and I never spent much time together—I am many things, but patient isn’t one of them. Anyone reading this who knows me is probably nodding sagely. I did, however, have occasion to spend four years of my life with Patience (capital P), who happened to be a very temperamental mustang mare. Before I met this particular mustang, I imagined them to be very large horses, but Patience was in fact rather low to the ground. She was, for lack of a better descriptor, compact: short of leg, broad of attitude. Anyone who knows me is nodding sagely again, because that description sounds remarkably familiar to them. She was, in many respects, my equine other half.
I guess it’s not hugely surprising that I’ve always had an affinity for horses; I grew up reading fantasy novels, and what’s a fantasy novel without extensive travel on horseback? I also took to it more readily than the other extracurriculars that were available when I was a child—not graceful enough to dance, not athletic enough to play soccer, not nearly coordinated enough to be a gymnast without endangering myself and others. I guess I had the blunt force of personality and stubbornness that suited me to be in the saddle. My nerdy roots served me well in my chosen activity when I picked up an introductory trick from an author who clearly knew her way around a horse.
The way you introduce yourself to a horse is to blow your breath into its nose. Literally. Considering the fact that a human breathing into another human’s face generally indicates that one is prone on the floor and the other is (hopefully) trained in CPR, walking straight up to a very large animal and blowing at it may seem a little odd. I’ve done it, though, many times, and it has surprising (and somewhat surprised) results. The horses to whom I have introduced myself in this way suddenly stand very still, and it’s strangely clear that you’ve got their full attention. After they take in your breath, they give you theirs in return with a huff of warm air. It’s a strange and wonderful intimacy to have with someone you’ve just met.
Not that all of my interactions with horses have been serene and intimate. I’ve been scraped off on walls, dumped in the dirt, bitten, kicked, bucked off, stomped on, snotted on, and knocked over with a purposeful bump of a hip. My first instructor, though, was a very wise woman, and if there were no bones erupting from my skin after a fall, she’d put me right back up in the saddle again. I learned to go back because, at the end of the day, the alternative was not being on a horse, and why the hell would I want that?
In high school, I worked for a barn down the road from my house, and that was where I met Patience. I probably spent more waking hours at the barn than I did at home. Aside from the perk of free saddle time in exchange for labor, the barn gave me a very concrete purpose. I had expected to go to the same high school as my sisters, follow an established path, excel in a certain way, and make my own mark in a familiar setting: that was the plan. The plan was not, by any stretch of the imagination, to move to California and get thrown into an insanely competitive school full of kids who had grown up in Berkeley. I had been preparing to measure my success by a certain metric, and that metric was suddenly, cruelly gone. It may not have been healthy, but it was a fairly straightforward arrangement to do my damnedest to best my sisters’ high school achievements. That had been my purpose; it was how I would know when I had succeeded. Now that was gone, and I didn’t know what the hell my purpose was.
Except to throw hay over a fence in the morning. To mix a bran mash for Bandit and wait for him to finish so I could put him back in his paddock and go home to get ready for school. To ride Patience around and around in the ring. To hose down the horses in the worst of the summer heat. To shovel shit. Every day.
And every day, it was absolutely worth it.
When a friend of mine was killed in a car accident my senior year, I hid at the barn. Lots of people were willing to tell me what I was feeling, why I was feeling it, when I should stop feeling it, and as a result, I was not willing to spend time with lots of people. The horses were boarded at a larger winter facility, and I spent a lot of time in those weeks squatting in Patience’s stall. They were all trained as therapy horses, and for some reason, they knew—and I mean really knew—exactly when they had a child in the saddle, and when they had what the barn called an “able bodied rider.” I like to think Patience saved up for me: for every docile moment in lessons, she’d give me maybe a minute and a half of hell when I was in the saddle. I also like to think that during that winter, she knew I was in trouble—I never got a single bite, crushed toe, or even a laid back ear. Instead, she stood by mildly while I sat in the wood shavings, arched her neck in ecstasy when I rubbed her girth line, and, in one very memorable instance, crooked her head over my shoulder and waited quietly while I hugged her neck and sobbed like I would break in half.
There are very few expectations in a barn, short of adherence to a feeding and watering schedule. We are expected to make so much of ourselves so quickly, and the age at which we are expected to do it just keeps getting younger. Even when you’re simply reflecting your own frightening expectations back at yourself off of other people, it’s still easy to burn in the glare. It’s understandable, I think, that as a teenager, sometimes I just got tired of wondering what people thought, how I was measuring up, looking around and wondering what was another person’s judgment of me and what was just a reflection of my judgment of myself. Thankfully, miraculously, for a few years I found a place with no reflective surfaces and the good company of horses.
Recently I went to a concert given by Jeffrey Foucault, who is my favorite musician on this earth and a friend of mine in a very loose sense. Jeffrey has a very particular way with words, such that when he sings, it’s like the Holy Spirit walks in, sits down, and orders a beer. On this particular night in February, he sang a new song in which a line contracted my ribcage around my lungs:
Last night I drank the breath of horses.
And I thought about how many hours I spent, soaked in sweat, dirt under my fingernails, smelling to high heaven and swearing to Patience I’d sell her for meatballs and carpeting if she didn’t stop yanking her lead rope. In every one of those hours I was drinking the breath of horses.
Time well spent.
I guess it’s not hugely surprising that I’ve always had an affinity for horses; I grew up reading fantasy novels, and what’s a fantasy novel without extensive travel on horseback? I also took to it more readily than the other extracurriculars that were available when I was a child—not graceful enough to dance, not athletic enough to play soccer, not nearly coordinated enough to be a gymnast without endangering myself and others. I guess I had the blunt force of personality and stubbornness that suited me to be in the saddle. My nerdy roots served me well in my chosen activity when I picked up an introductory trick from an author who clearly knew her way around a horse.
The way you introduce yourself to a horse is to blow your breath into its nose. Literally. Considering the fact that a human breathing into another human’s face generally indicates that one is prone on the floor and the other is (hopefully) trained in CPR, walking straight up to a very large animal and blowing at it may seem a little odd. I’ve done it, though, many times, and it has surprising (and somewhat surprised) results. The horses to whom I have introduced myself in this way suddenly stand very still, and it’s strangely clear that you’ve got their full attention. After they take in your breath, they give you theirs in return with a huff of warm air. It’s a strange and wonderful intimacy to have with someone you’ve just met.
Not that all of my interactions with horses have been serene and intimate. I’ve been scraped off on walls, dumped in the dirt, bitten, kicked, bucked off, stomped on, snotted on, and knocked over with a purposeful bump of a hip. My first instructor, though, was a very wise woman, and if there were no bones erupting from my skin after a fall, she’d put me right back up in the saddle again. I learned to go back because, at the end of the day, the alternative was not being on a horse, and why the hell would I want that?
In high school, I worked for a barn down the road from my house, and that was where I met Patience. I probably spent more waking hours at the barn than I did at home. Aside from the perk of free saddle time in exchange for labor, the barn gave me a very concrete purpose. I had expected to go to the same high school as my sisters, follow an established path, excel in a certain way, and make my own mark in a familiar setting: that was the plan. The plan was not, by any stretch of the imagination, to move to California and get thrown into an insanely competitive school full of kids who had grown up in Berkeley. I had been preparing to measure my success by a certain metric, and that metric was suddenly, cruelly gone. It may not have been healthy, but it was a fairly straightforward arrangement to do my damnedest to best my sisters’ high school achievements. That had been my purpose; it was how I would know when I had succeeded. Now that was gone, and I didn’t know what the hell my purpose was.
Except to throw hay over a fence in the morning. To mix a bran mash for Bandit and wait for him to finish so I could put him back in his paddock and go home to get ready for school. To ride Patience around and around in the ring. To hose down the horses in the worst of the summer heat. To shovel shit. Every day.
And every day, it was absolutely worth it.
When a friend of mine was killed in a car accident my senior year, I hid at the barn. Lots of people were willing to tell me what I was feeling, why I was feeling it, when I should stop feeling it, and as a result, I was not willing to spend time with lots of people. The horses were boarded at a larger winter facility, and I spent a lot of time in those weeks squatting in Patience’s stall. They were all trained as therapy horses, and for some reason, they knew—and I mean really knew—exactly when they had a child in the saddle, and when they had what the barn called an “able bodied rider.” I like to think Patience saved up for me: for every docile moment in lessons, she’d give me maybe a minute and a half of hell when I was in the saddle. I also like to think that during that winter, she knew I was in trouble—I never got a single bite, crushed toe, or even a laid back ear. Instead, she stood by mildly while I sat in the wood shavings, arched her neck in ecstasy when I rubbed her girth line, and, in one very memorable instance, crooked her head over my shoulder and waited quietly while I hugged her neck and sobbed like I would break in half.
There are very few expectations in a barn, short of adherence to a feeding and watering schedule. We are expected to make so much of ourselves so quickly, and the age at which we are expected to do it just keeps getting younger. Even when you’re simply reflecting your own frightening expectations back at yourself off of other people, it’s still easy to burn in the glare. It’s understandable, I think, that as a teenager, sometimes I just got tired of wondering what people thought, how I was measuring up, looking around and wondering what was another person’s judgment of me and what was just a reflection of my judgment of myself. Thankfully, miraculously, for a few years I found a place with no reflective surfaces and the good company of horses.
Recently I went to a concert given by Jeffrey Foucault, who is my favorite musician on this earth and a friend of mine in a very loose sense. Jeffrey has a very particular way with words, such that when he sings, it’s like the Holy Spirit walks in, sits down, and orders a beer. On this particular night in February, he sang a new song in which a line contracted my ribcage around my lungs:
Last night I drank the breath of horses.
And I thought about how many hours I spent, soaked in sweat, dirt under my fingernails, smelling to high heaven and swearing to Patience I’d sell her for meatballs and carpeting if she didn’t stop yanking her lead rope. In every one of those hours I was drinking the breath of horses.
Time well spent.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, March 15, 2010
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.”
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.”
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