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

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

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

Then I hit the road, going due west.

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

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

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the long version:

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

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

Missions accomplished… kind of.

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

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

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

I had finally learned some subtlety.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She asked: “Where are your people?”

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

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

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

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

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

Bill and Grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Waiting Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What a dumbass,” she responded.

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

(I never claimed to be graceful in defeat.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so, in the meantime, we wait.

Good luck with that!

Lightning, and Other Surprising Combustions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somehow, unexpectedly, I think not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Brain/Gut Corollary

Sometimes, when faced with something simultaneously mundane and unexpected, I have noticed moments in which my brain can’t quite seem to keep up with current events. Even as I am experiencing something quite different from what I was expecting, my brain will briefly, stubbornly dig in, as if it is saying, “No, just wait a minute—that liquid in your mouth is apple juice. I promise it is. Just hold on a second.”

In this particular instance, I was about eight years old, home sick from school, when I shuffled downstairs to get something to drink to soothe my sore throat. In the fridge there was a tall glass of alluring, amber liquid. I thought it was apple juice, and for a few seconds my brain kept trying to convince me it was, until it finally gave way to the irrefutable fact that I had just taken a large gulp of beer.

My mother came downstairs to find me coughing and sputtering on the kitchen floor, and I was convinced (at least for another several years) that beer was some sort of punishment inflicted upon poor, unsuspecting mortals.

In retrospect, those moments are often comedic: the time in which your brain has to catch up, while the rest of your body knows exactly what is going on and begins dealing with the issue independently. After all, my tastebuds weren’t wrong: that was definitely beer. No two ways about it.

I notice this phenomenon occasionally when I’m dealing with my alarm clock.

When I wake up on a week day, of my own accord, my body is instantly suspicious. Usually I have to be hauled forcibly out of sleep by a very insistent alarm. It is immediately evident that not only do I feel more rested than usual, but also that the light in my bedroom looks brighter than it should. In times like this, I will roll over and look with some bemusement at my alarm clock. The time will usually read an hour later than I expect, because for some unfathomable reason my alarm didn’t go off, and I will spend a few seconds gazing in mild confusion at the clock, thinking, “That’s funny—this clock is wrong.”

While I’m thinking this, the chagrin will be mounting in my stomach, and when my brain finally kicks into gear, I’m usually already launching out of bed with an emphatic pronouncement like, “SHIT!”

So all right, maybe I’m a little slow on the uptake. It is interesting, though, that not infrequently do my brain and my body disagree—or at least believe in two separately, not entirely compatible ideas—and more often than not, my body turns out to be right. I observe this trend especially in dating: while my brain is churning out excuses for some guy’s not calling, my stomach and surrounding organs know that no, his arms have not fallen off due to a rare and exotic fungal attack. He’s just not going to call.

I know that I’m not the only person who possesses this kind of intuition: the most common expression is “knowing in your gut.” I think it’s interesting that the noun of choice in that phrase is “gut.” It’s blunt little word, and it seems to conveniently refer not to a specific anatomical locus, but to the general space in your body where emotions manifest. I tend to think of my gut as the space in between my organs, and it is subject to all kinds of interesting physics. Without any actual change of state, temperature, or location, my gut can freeze, melt, sublimate, tighten, or drop into my boots very convincingly. Also not for nothing can the noun “gut” also function as a very effective verb, meaning to eviscerate, disembowel, or just generally take all the inside stuff and make it outside.

There is an odd corollary, though, to the phenomenon of feeling something in my gut. Sometimes, very rarely, my brain will actually figure something out ahead of time. For whatever reason, I’ll know in advance that I’m going to feel something very strongly, even though I’m not feeling it yet.

This seems kind of self-evident: of course I can anticipate emotional events. Nevertheless, it is unusual that when I realize I have an emotional punch coming somewhere down the line, I don’t simultaneously begin to feel that punch.

Recently, my parents sold their house outside of Chicago. For the last few years, my dad has been working in Fort Lauderdale, and my mom has been holding down the fort in Illinois, in the house they lovingly remodeled as the place in which they would be grandparents. Ironically, though this situation might work for many married people (one partner in one state, another partner in a different state), my parents, after thirty-eight years of marriage, are still crazy about each other and couldn’t stand living apart. Fort Lauderdale was never really home, but eventually they decided that being together was more important than keeping the house, so they put it on the market.

This was not the house I grew up in. Still, it was the house to which I came home. The first day we moved back to Illinois, my two best friends came over to celebrate, and we all ate carry-out Chinese food. They both drove—maybe thirty minutes or so—when for the past four years, they had had to spend about five hours on a plane to get to me. That fact alone was enough to make that house sacred to me, but it also just felt right. It sits on a big front lawn, on a street lined with old growth trees, a few blocks up from your typical small, old Chicago suburb, complete with tiny train station. Our dear departed Bogart used to sit on the back porch landing, surveying his domain with benevolent grace, and when it got dark in the summer, the fireflies came out.

To be perfectly honest, what I had expected was for the house to be on the market for years, long enough for my dad to retire, and for my folks to simply move home. I was surprised when the house sold, after only a few months of being listed. It was an odd, abstract sensation—not being part of one of our family’s large, wrenching moves. There have been quite a few, and the ones in which I participated were horrible, drawn out affairs. When the various and inevitable dramas of inspections and contacts began to rev up, I felt an unflattering sense of relief: far away in Boston, installed in my little apartment, I didn’t have to deal with it. Sure, I talked on the phone with my mother, who was experiencing the same trauma I remember very well, but I didn’t actually have to be there in the thick of it.

When the house sold, I felt mild surprise, but not much else.

What my brain realized then was that eventually, I would feel more. A lot more. Intellectually I knew that there had to be fallout: there was no way that I could lose something I had loved so much and not feel it, even though I hadn’t had to live through all the nasty, real estate details of losing it like I had had to do before. So I shrugged, and waited.

And eventually turned out to be right.

One evening last week, I set my alarm for a few minutes later than the current hour, and sat on my bed to wait. That morning had been one of those times when I woke up and wondered why my clock was wrong (shit). I wanted to make sure my alarm clock wasn’t going to make a habit of not going off, so I set the time and waited. While I did, I killed a little time on my phone.

I puttered around in my apps, eventually bringing up a weather program I don’t usually use. When I first got my phone, I added to the weather app all of the places I thought I would need: home, school, Rome (just in case). As I waited out my alarm, I went through the varying locations. Boston came up first: no snow in the forecast. Damn. I swiped across to the next place.

Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

I started to cry. I had known it was coming, but the pain in my stomach was somehow still surprising.

Though belatedly, I had officially been gutted.

I Wonder

My entire family was perched on edges of furniture all around the family room. The tension was palpable, as I’m sure it was for many, many other Illinois residents on that particular night in 1993. With 3.9 seconds left on the clock, we all watched breathlessly as John Paxson’s feet left the boards and the ball arched gracefully away from his fingers.

Regardless of day to day belief system, everyone in Chicago believed in magic for the seconds in which that ball was suspended in midair.

It was game six in the NBA finals, and the Bulls were down by two against the Suns in the remaining seconds of the game. As Paxson’s three-point shot swooshed effortlessly through the net, my family room exploded, as did much of the Chicagoland area. Four years later, my family once again enacted a similar scene of joyful hysteria as the Bulls won their second three-peat. On that night in 1997, my sister’s new puppy had been snoozing peacefully in the kitchen when the cheering had detonated, and he awoke in sheer terror, bolted for the laundry room, and could not be coaxed out for a good long while afterwards.

I remember my childhood as a golden age of cultural Threes, specifically the double three-peats of the Bulls and the holy Disney trifecta of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. The funny thing is that I remember those basketball games as fondly as I do the Disney movies: my wonder at the fireflies encircling Ariel and Eric’s rowboat is only rivaled by my wonder at Paxson’s perfect three-point shot. They all shared a common, breathless hold over me; the rapture of experiencing something unexpectedly magnificent or beautiful.

Who says there isn’t grace in small moments?

Wonder, by nature and necessity, is brief, but it packs a powerful punch. I have vivid memories of wonder from my childhood, and they are odd, idiosyncratic instances, like the moment I realized I had gotten an American Girl doll for my birthday or the first time I watched Han Solo swoop in from space to save the day in the first Star Wars movie. These moments got rarer as I got older; a phenomenon which is unfortunate, trite, tried, and true.

The thing about wonder is that it is unadulterated: it is the complete and immersive sensation of surprise, joy, and amazement. As I thought about it, I wanted to make meaning out of the fact that “unadulterated” was such a significant word in how I defined the concept of wonder. To adulterate is to corrupt, debase, or make impure by the addition of a foreign or inferior substance or element. When I thought about what that meant in terms of wonder, my brain stuck on the idea that wonder could be corrupted by the addition of cynicism. In a way, wonder could be adulterated by… well, becoming an adult.

The etymology nerd within raised her gladius with a battle cry: To the dictionary!

Unfortunately for my convenient theories about adulterating and adulthood, it turns out that “adulterate” comes from the Latin word adulterare (to adulterate), which is ultimately derived from ad altero (to or towards another), essentially meaning false or unchaste. The English “adult” derives from adultus, the perfect past participle of adolescere, to grow up or mature.

While an interesting Monday morning Latin lesson, none of this particularly advanced my theory about the adulterating nature of adulthood. Curses, foiled again!

I had been thinking about all of this because recently, I had the odd experience of consciously choosing wonder over cynicism—I basically smacked my cynicism on the nose and commanded it to sit and stay. This was not a climactic moment in my life by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it was a lazy Sunday night, curled up on my couch watching the movie Tangled.

I had seen the movie once before, after reading the glowing review of a fellow blogger. Pixar lately has done a pretty good job of resurrecting the art of good story-telling through animation, and though Tangled is not a Pixar production, I had been willing to give it a shot. In my opinion, it was worth watching, since the chameleon sidekick alone made me laugh out loud.

There is one scene, the sort of romantic click moment in the movie, when thousands of paper lanterns are released into the night sky and reflected in the sea below. The scene, visually and thematically, has a lot in common with the rowboat scene from The Little Mermaid: there’s something about a world of music, water, and floating lights that just keys up enchantment and goosebumps.

Presumably, the presence of Prince Charming doesn’t hurt either, but that particular detail is where I nearly derailed myself.

Yeah, I began to think, because the good-looking, charming guys always turn out to have hearts of pure gold…

It was then that I pulled myself up short. As I had started to scowl, all of my goosebumps had evaporated, and the loveliness of the image withered as my cynicism overwhelmed it.

What was the matter with me? Was I really being grumpy over the fact that a Disney romantic lead turned out to be a winner? Seriously? I took time to pause and reevaluate.

Yes, it’s been an interesting couple of years, in which some of my expectations and assumptions have changed. Cynicism, which I’ve always possessed but which in the last few years seems to have run rampant, is in no uncertain terms a defense mechanism: it is the mental catch you develop to nip unrealistic dreams in the bud, before they can take root and potentially lead to disappointment. But when that cynicism seems to wriggle in to most areas of your life—including Sunday night Disney movies—isn’t that an indication it may have gone a little too far?

We temper humor with irony; we smother wonder with skepticism. We do so because to do otherwise would not only seem childish and naive, but would also make us vulnerable. I’m not sure when my concept of adulthood became so truculent and uncompromising, but the logic is flawed that says we can save ourselves from disappointment by ruling out the possibility of wonder.

I am in no way saying that I will henceforth skip about my life with a coterie of blue birds. However, I will make an effort not to dampen every hint of wonder with a strong dose of cynicism. After all, I very much doubt that positive reinforcement and cookies will fall from the sky to reward me for being a mature, immovable adult. I created these ridiculous expectations; I’m the only one who can dial them back.

I think that, not surprisingly, Jim Henson was the one who ultimately got it right. The Muppets are hilariously funny, with no small dose of irony and pratfalling. That humor, though, does not dilute, and in a strange way enhances, those small moments of wonder and grace, like Gonzo singing to the sky: “I’ve never been there, but I know the way—I’m going to go back there someday.”

Those are the moments when even my cynicism is humbled and quiets down to listen. To others it may sound unforgivably cheesy, but I like to think that it’s important to keep those instances of wonder sacred: to keep them undiluted, to enjoy the vulnerability and awe of experiencing something amazing, and to occasionally let yourself be fully wide-eyed and goose-bumped.

And so I will watch (next season, I hope) with joyfully bated breath as the magnificent spiral of a Peyton Manning throw finds the outstretched hands of Joseph Addai. I will be amazed as my very own best friend grows a whole new person inside of her. I will reserve the right to be, without rationalization, moved by the loveliness of floating lights in an animated movie.

And I will think to myself, What a wonderful world.

Adventures in Marketing

My dad has been in marketing for as long as I’ve been alive, and as a result, an odd fascination with advertising rubbed off on me at a very young age. I don’t remember my dad’s bringing his work home as something that took him away from me. Instead, as a special treat, when the marketing department would be interviewing new ad agencies, he would bring home the agencies’ demo tapes and ask me what I thought. I was completely smitten with one ad featuring the kid from Jerry Maguire engaged in an earnest conversation about marsupials, and equally horrified by one equating the distribution of Nintendo games in the suburbs to food packs in Africa. Dad agreed on both counts.

Many years into my marketing education, my dad gave me an interesting insight into the nature of the beast itself.

“The goal of marketing is to achieve trial,” he told me, as Brian Williams went on a commercial break one night. “After that, it’s up to the product people to make something that consumers will enjoy and buy again. But the exclusive purpose of marketing is to get the consumer to try it the first time.”

They are strange, self-aware moments in which I experience this phenomenon in action.

Take Apple for example. I think I was actually with my dad the first time I saw the TV ad for the Macbook Air: the manila envelope sitting innocuously in the clean, blank space with vaguely hipster music playing in the background. When the disembodied hand casually reached into the frame and pulled the impossibly slim and sleek laptop from the envelope, I very nearly went into convulsions. I’m a Dell woman myself, but in those few minutes, all reason abandoned me, and the only semi-coherent thought I had was along the lines of, “GIMME GIMME GIMME!”

My dad thought the entire process, from my eyes glazing over to full manifestation of consumerist frenzy, was hilarious. He would point out, though, that ultimately the marketing was not successful, because I never got to the essential trial phase. Nevertheless, any ad that can solicit rapturous effects like these cannot have been entirely off the mark.

What Apple was selling in that ad was not speed or endurance—it was beauty, pure and simple. As I convulsed, I was not concerned with the specs of the hard drive or the coverage of the warranty. Hopefully, if I ever got as far as purchasing, I would concern myself with those details, but what would get me to the store, credit card in hand, was that the thing was so damn pretty.

Armed with this understanding of advertising and how it does (or doesn’t) work, sometimes I eye myself in the mirror, faced with something of a dilemma.

The feminist side of my brain kicks into high gear at the very notion of thinking of myself as a commodity: something to market, to sell, to be consumed, purchased, or owned. I do not, in fact, think of myself as a commodity in the consumerist sense of the word. It's just that, for whatever reason, my brain seems to be hardwired to think in marketing terms: it’s the language by which I understand and conceptualize the phenomenon of desire, of wanting or trying to get someone else to want. I also do not think it is terribly surprising, or troubling, to want to be wanted.

How much, though, do I want to invest in my pursuit of being wanted? To put it another way, how much do I want to invest in (cringe) marketing?

Oddly enough, hair is a good example.

Though it is a non-descript brown, my hair is fairly thick, in good health, and falls midway down my back. However, the damn stuff has a distressing tendency never to stay put, so when it is down, I’m always pushing it back, smoothing it down, and generally fussing with it. Since I have absolutely no desire to deal with my hair constantly throughout the day, I simply circumvent the problem by wrapping it up in a tight twist and clamping it back. A few members of my family, who are female and of a slightly older generation, have actually mourned this in conversation with me: how it’s so lovely, and how I look so much softer with it down. One of them went so far as to tell me that I should leave it down, because men love women with long brown hair. Apparently it makes me look fertile.

Never mind a unique and challenging intellect, a wicked sense of humor, and quirky personality. No: men will be attracted to me because I look like I could really bear them some good, healthy children.

Oh dear God.

My horror was swift and righteous, not to mention loud. However, in all honesty, I think my horror was as loud as it was to cover up the fact that this particular comment had prodded a very troubling strain of insecurity, which I bury close to my spleen in the hope that nobody (not even me) will ever notice it. This unreasoning and embarrassing insecurity runs roughly along the lines of: What if my hair really is the best asset I have to attract a guy?

Like I said: unreasoning, embarrassing, and buried near my spleen.

Hypothetically, in the rare instance when my hair is down, if a man notices me in a bar, I do not think he would be musing to himself, “Wow, that girl looks fertile. I want to buy her a drink.” (At least, I fervently hope a guy would not think that, and if he would, that he would also exhibit other, easily identifiable red flags.) He may just like the way I look, which isn't a bad thing, and he may just be inspired enough to conquer the manifold fears and risks inherent in talking to an attractive stranger. This theoretical guy could potentially prove to have good taste in more important areas than looks, enjoying banter and obscure debates about the place of Fraggles in the Muppet spectrum. The thing he might like most about me at the end of our conversation could in fact be my big sexy brain, rather than my big sexy hair. But the question bothers me: was it the big sexy hair that got him to come over in the first place? Because if it was, my ‘marketing’ did in fact achieve ‘trial.’

By this point, my insecurities are wailing so keenly and my feminism yelling so loudly that the mental din is truly deafening.

My worry essentially comes down to this: if I value and invest uncharacteristic effort in beauty, towards the goal of being wanted, am I simultaneously devaluing everything else about myself?

There comes a point at which “uncharacteristic effort” becomes something a little more troubling. I could, in theory, teeter around on towering heels in tiny, sparkly items of clothing, adhering to some misogynistic fantasy of how an attractive woman should look (not to mention act). I could, but I never would: I'm in no danger of valuing that questionable desirability over who I actually am and the principles I have. I know who I am and who I am not: I don’t wear high heels, I don’t own party clothes, and I have no interest in pretending I do. Nevertheless, back in the gray area in which I perpetually find myself, I’m also a person who doesn’t wear her hair down. So when I spend the better part of an hour coiling my hair into unusual, Rapunzel resplendence, am I prioritizing desirability over reality? How do you determine which truth should be in advertising?

The truth is, I don’t know.

What I do know is that I’m probably over-thinking the entire issue.

I want to be wanted, but I also want to be wanted for who I am in reality (picky, right?). The reality is that I am a woman who wears heavy boots and likes terrible jokes, but also has a pretty good head of hair. And there might just be some discerning guy out there who likes all of those things, so maybe there’s a happy medium in and amongst all my episodes of angst.

To put the shoe on the other foot, I might muster up the courage to cross a bar and talk to a good-looking guy because, on some evolutionary level, his ability to grow a good beard speaks to his skills as a hunter/gatherer (or something). Still, if he’s unkind or idiotic, I have faith that my modern, reasoning brain will override my instinctual leanings and bail out.

But, if by some miracle, he too enjoys terrible jokes, or Battlestar Galactica, or any of the other wonderful, unanticipated weird characteristics that light up my brain and flip my stomach, I hope I would never be so shallow as to hold his having a good head of hair against him.