Of Pretty and Pigs

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

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

I am a Pig Brother of Wildest Borneo.

(No, seriously.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, it takes all kinds.

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

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

And there they were, all in one room.

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

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

I think the question comes down to this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so a Pig Brother was born.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

Point A to Point B, and Everything in Between

Last week, some coworkers and I grabbed sandwiches from the local deli and ate lunch at a picnic table outside our office. One of the women, about whom I normally have positive feelings, started to ask me about graduate school. As I felt my entire body go tense, I had to remind myself that, contrary to what I might believe sometimes, my anxiety is not immediately visible to everyone who might glance at me.

Leaning forward over the picnic table, as if she were anticipating a good answer, my coworker asked me what programs I was looking at.

I shrugged. “Don’t know yet. Maybe art history. Maybe education. Not really sure.”

When I am desperately trying to keep panic at bay, for some reason I also drop the subjects of my sentences and speak in fragments.

She persisted. “Well, where do you want to live? Like, where would you like to end up?”

Again I shrugged. “Charleston. Tucson. Denver. Indianapolis. Don’t know.”

“Well have you looked at programs in those areas?”

In my mind, my composure started to squeak uncomfortably, like a guitar string wound too tightly.

“Hey, I just don’t know,” I said more firmly, smiled and changed the subject. For the rest of lunch, I tried to smother my flailing anxieties with the fresh mozzarella in my sandwich.

What I had been doing without realizing it was emitting the visual and vocal cues that I had adopted during my senior year and immediately after: the admission of uncertainty, followed by a polite request—usually indicated by tone or body language—that the subject be dropped.

Looking at it from a reasonable point of view (a.k.a. not mine), it’s not an unusual thing about which to be curious. My coworkers and extended family care about me or at least are interested in what my plans are for the future. Since my fear of those very plans and that very future is mostly internal, they wouldn’t necessarily realize they had hit on a sore subject. The issue I sometimes face with those people, who are interested in my plans but don’t know me well enough to read my signals, is that they care enough not to accept polite deflection.

They have the best intentions, and I have a profound appreciation for how fresh mozzarella can come in handy in defusing my mounting hysteria.

Late in my senior year, it wasn’t uncommon for certain words or phrases to be banned from polite conversation amongst classmates. Words like…resume. And what are you doing next year? And So’s your old man!—wait, that’s The Music Man… but still: they all spelled Trouble with a capital T, and that rhymed with “me,” and that stood for, “Oh God, what the hell am I doing with my life?”

And I don’t know never seemed to be a good enough answer.

We are a generation of over-achievers. It seems slightly arrogant and more than trite to say it, but qualifying many of my contemporaries as “rabidly ambitious” doesn’t hit too far from the mark. My best friend mused in an email recently that our generation will probably never stop asking "what’s next?" because we were brought up to believe we could do anything and have everything. As we get older, that all-encompassing Everything evolves into a much more specific Something: the goal, the life we decide we want for ourselves. Mathematics leads us to believe that the best way to get from ourselves as Point A to our goal as Point B is a straight line, and then all of our "what’s next?" questions line themselves up along that path. So it would seem like all you need to do is choose a Point B—a goal, the life you want—and start moving forward.

As usual, the practice of personal mathematics and physics leaves a lot to be desired.

I’m the person who stands for twenty minutes in front of the mascara display, paralyzed by the excess of options. And from this point I am supposed to make major life decisions?

Awesome.

I realize the flaw in my formula: that I am assuming there can only be one point B. In a way, that’s how I think because that’s how I was brought up. My parents followed a straight line, and they measured out the distance in their minds after which they would be There, at Point B, when they could enjoy the fruits of their labor and the contentedness of having achieved the goal. By their measurements, they should be There. They are of the right age, their children are grown, and they have worked so hard to get There. But, in the quintessential Modernist bait-and-switch, there is no There, there. Jobs are still frustrating, bills still need paying, and life still isn’t easy, or at least as easy as they would’ve hoped by now. From early on in my own life I’m watching my parents experience a kind of existential crisis in the middle of theirs. And I wonder if they are asking themselves and each other what’s next.

The logical alternative to a Point B is a host of other points, C through Z and beyond. In reality, though, you do have to choose to a certain extent: what job you want and what degree you’ll need to get to be a viable candidate for that job. And which tests you’ll have to take to apply for the degree you’ll need to get to be a viable candidate for the job.

And the green grass grew all around, all around, and the green grass grew all around.

It’s about this point in the conversation that I start hyperventilating and looking for an emergency stash of mozzarella.

The most obvious fear is that I’m afraid I’ll make the wrong decision: get a degree that already stands a good chance at being economically useless (alas for the liberal arts) and then end up not liking the job I may or may not get. What I tell myself, when I’m pretending I’m a rational, mature human being, is that there is no law of physics that will make all graduate schools in the world instantly dissolve after I achieve that one degree I choose. (What can I say? Even when I’m pretending to be rational, I’m still sarcastic. The imagination only goes so far.) The point is that I can always change my mind and go back to school, seeking out another goal and another path towards it.

The less obvious fear, the bottom-dweller anxiety, is that I am afraid I won’t be brave enough to make the change: to go back to school and choose another life. I already know that change is hard and deeply scary, and I imagine it will only get harder and scarier as I get older. I’ve never been very brave by nature—I’m a lot of things, but courageous has never been one of them. So the panic I’m feeling now, closing off my airways and crocheting my intestines, is actually a manifestation of something I do know, not something I don’t: that if I choose wrong now, I may not be brave enough to undo and redo in the future.

The funny thing about Life (capital L) is that it is uncontrollable and inevitable. These are a few of my least favorite things.

So what do I do, other than curl up under my desk and eat my way towards lactose intolerance?

I think about my life so far, not as I’ve imagined it or planned it, but as I’ve actually experienced it: my actual, daily life (lower case l). I have experienced that if I have Cheez-Its in the house, I will eat them all in one sitting, so it is best not to keep Cheez-Its in the house. I have learned that my credit card spending has an ebb and flow throughout the cycle, so just because I’m having a slow week doesn’t mean I should buy that extremely desirable but ridiculously expensive dress. That relationships are hard: that there is not a foreseeable point at which I will experience complete romantic resolution and ride off into the sunset as the credits roll. Also, that my boyfriend is so much better than any romantic lead I could write for myself, because he’s real, and as an individual person over whom I have no control, he decided to love me. That only eating carbohydrates for breakfast will leave me ravenous by 10:30 am, and that those incredible, satisfying showdowns I imagine and script so carefully in the shower will never happen. That having good people in your life makes it better, whether you’re having a good day or a bad day. That happiness is not a constant state: you have a baseline of factors contributing to your general contentment, and an odd sprinkling of small elements in your day that can make you enjoy the whole shebang a little bit more. So for the love of God, pet that dog and shove your head in that lilac bush, because it will make you happy, and that is not a small thing.

Above all, though, I have experienced that there has not been anything yet that has killed me.

I have very wise friends. One, who knows exactly when to gently apply tough love, told me that thousands of people go through the graduate school application process every year and very few experience mental breakdowns. Another, while we were medicating our mutual bad day with blue-cheese burgers, told me that life is a collection of good days and bad days, and if you have more good days than bad, you’ve done okay.

I am responsible for who I am now, and who I’m becoming. However, I am not responsible for my Entire Future right here, right now. There is a place between taking no agency, blaming fate and old decisions, and assuming responsibility for my entire life as of this very moment. I seek that place, the middle-ground, because I imagine that the weather is very good there: an excellent climate for my chronic anxiety.

In the mean time, I’m going to smell lilacs and nudge my way into my future, buying a GRE book and perhaps a mozzarella sandwich and learning how to be okay with a scary answer to the scary question: “What’s next?”

I don’t know.

There and (Regrettably) Back Again

Around this time of year, I start sleeping with my windows open. As far as I’m concerned, there are few pleasures in life that rival sleeping in a warm cocoon of blankets in a cold room. On weekdays, however, the pleasures of a blanket cocoon are slightly compromised when one has to depart from said cocoon into a very chilly apartment in the morning. When my alarm clock goes off, I tend to hit snooze and glare for a few baleful moments at the general surroundings of Wednesday, or worse yet, Monday.

I was describing this phenomenon to a friend in an email when I added as an afterthought that an Apartment Gremlin would be the perfect solution to this problem. (I should note here that I choose the word gremlin more for the pleasure of its pronunciation in conjunction with the word apartment. As a deep fantasy nerd, I realize there are other creatures that would be much more appropriate: brownie, fairy, sprite, etc. Again, the nerdhood runs deep.) An Apartment Gremlin, in my mind, would wake up around 3 or 4 am and make the rounds in my apartment, closing windows. Consequently, I would be able to fall asleep in a chilled apartment and wake up in a blissfully warm one.

My mind grabbed the idea and ran with it.

I’ve always had a fascination with things small and magical. I can trace this inclination to the books my grandmother read to me as a child: all of the E. Nesbit stories, The Borrowers and its sequels, and anything by Elizabeth Goudge. These books were inhabited by fairies, helpful bees, elder relations of suspiciously magical character, and other invisible goings on, and all of them had the ability to make it seem as though magic, and its presence and dealings in everyday life, was the most normal thing in the world. It went even further than that in many cases: often the magical creatures were characterized by very human foibles, from general prejudices to outright fussiness. It’s entirely possible that the reason these books are mainly written for a younger audience is that children can accept more readily the idea that mixing magic and Mondays isn’t so outlandish. Harry Potter wasn’t the first British child to discover a world of magic coexistent with his own; he is only one of the most recent and, I might add, he seemed more surprised to find it than most of his literary predecessors. Most other young, British protagonists in fantasy books simply took magic as a matter of course. I think especially of Lucy, emerging from the wardrobe into Narnia and promptly taking tea with Mr. Tumnus.

The distance now separating me from The Five Children and It and all the other stories is a bit wider than the breadth of the Atlantic. When I fantasize anymore, I don’t often dream myself into Maria Merryweather’s perfect tower room or Arrietty’s sub-floorboard living room. I dream about mystical, perfect grad school scholarships and an herb garden outside of a grey house in Maine. In a way, these are the adult incarnations of pots of gold and fairy tale castles. We just ground them, hauling them into our world and putting coffee cups down on top of them so they won’t blow away.

Sometimes I wonder about the point at which we stop importing ourselves into worlds of fantasy and start bringing fantasies into our own realities; when the trappings of dreams must become more real to be more acceptable to the adult mind. It’s not that one is necessarily better than the other, but the difference is certainly startling. The change, though, isn’t necessarily permanent, and sometimes the wonder does come bubbling up.

As soon as I formed the idea—Apartment Gremlin—a remarkably detailed image came to mind and rapidly wrote itself into something like a story:

It is just before dawn in my apartment. The light is subdued, and the air is cold. There is a small cottage underneath my bed, which is conveniently set upon risers. The structure is mock-Tudor, fashioned from cardboard, plaster, whiteout, thatching, and scraps of cloth; particular attention has been paid to the windows, which are adorned with curtains within and shutters without. There are sturdy window boxes, which boast an assortment of Corsican mint and sweet violets.

From the tidy cottage a small figure emerges, stretching its arms over its head to work out the night’s kinks. It has a broad face, decorated with a beaky nose and determined eyebrows. It wears its sugar-floss hair in different colors, depending on its mood, and today has chosen a wealthy tuft of pale green. On its spindly body it wears indifferent brown trousers and a bottle green vest, which is decorated with a silver watch chain of which it is very proud. One may note that there is no watch upon the watch chain; gremlins take very little note of the institutionalized measure of time per se, but are quite fond of the lovely adornments humans give to the measure of time: arms of clocks, chains of old fashioned watches, and the brief and entirely insistent music the keepers make at an especially appointed hour. This gremlin’s personal watch chain was cleverly adapted from an old silver necklace chain, polished to enviable brightness.

Fully awake, the gremlin surveys the expanse of hardwood floor and mountainous furniture with quick, business-like approval, and clambers nimbly upwards towards the windows. At its polite request, the windows lower themselves silently, only making an apologetic, muted whump as they seal. It taps the radiator on its way to the kitchen, to politely remind it of its duties, and before the gremlin has had its tea, warmth has begun to creep back into the apartment.

It enjoys a meal of precisely one Cheez-It and a small cup of Constant Comment tea. I came to understand very early on that gremlins are not appreciative of thimbles as drinking receptacles and reserve special disdain for all things pink. As a result, I was obliged to find a doll’s tea cup, which was not difficult, that most especially had no pink decoration of any sort, which was surprisingly difficult. When I obtained a light blue china cup, the gremlin was exceedingly pleased.

Its first meal of the day is also its last, since gremlins have very short days: they do not favor brightness (and so avoid morning and afternoon), cannot abide darkness (and so avoid night), and their disfavor of pink predisposes them to avoid sunset entirely. They seem only to enjoy the few silver hours between true night and glaring dawn and in an adaptation, which may only be described as peculiarly British, they take particular delight in gloomy days with soaking rain. As a result, I often wonder about the gremlin population of Seattle and whether or not it is, in fact, an untapped resource.

After its meal, the gremlin casually retrieves a vicious looking shrimp fork from behind the toaster and descends competently to the floor. In the remaining time before true dawn, it stalks a now domesticated population of dust bunnies in their usual haunts. It feels no compunction in their slaughter, because (as it pointed out in our one conversation on the matter) there will always be more. I had experienced some surprise at its pursuit of the dust bunnies, their extinction not being a feature of the gremlin’s original contract, but (again, in our one conversation on the matter) it noted to me that the bunnies had themselves gone quite feral and that it enjoyed the hunt. It had also taken the difficult procurement of the blue cup to be a gesture of good will, and had been pleased to return the favor.

With the dust carcasses skewered on the bristles of a well-placed hand broom, the gremlin yawns (which, in gremlins, is primarily a function of stretching its feet luxuriously) and walks back across the floor to its cottage. The warmth of the obedient radiator has made it sleepy, and it takes a final cursory glance around the room before it enters its home and closes the door behind it.

I come back to my awareness at my desk, shaking off the curiosity about whether or not the gremlin has a mailbox. I feel predictably silly and surprisingly sad, and I realize that I miss the combination of wonder and everyday acceptance of the possibility of magic. It is simultaneously necessary and terrible that we grow out of it, perhaps only satisfied as the eccentric aunt or uncle who still secretly believes and provides a suitable and supportive backdrop for another child’s story.

I also realize regretfully that tomorrow morning, I will wake up with no cottage under my bed, the windows open, the room cold, and a rampant population of feral dust bunnies.

Dead Poets and Career Choices (an ode to Karen Wallace)

In my family, the story goes that at one point in the early stages of my aunt’s adult life, an older relative informed her that she should never let a man see her sleep before they got married, since she snored. She should also never beat a man at checkers, apparently. I got my own dose of advice, from a different relative but along similar lines, while I was demolishing an unfortunate crustacean at a family crab-feed: that I should probably have something on paper with my beloved before I let him see me eat shellfish.

On the one hand, all of the aforementioned advice positively reeks of chauvinism and values of antiquated femininity, in neither of which I place much value. On the other hand, I am well aware that I (perhaps only surpassed in reputation by my mother) am the creature with which mommy crabs threaten their baby crabs to make them behave. Eating crab and lobster combines for me three of my most favorite things in the world: eating in general, butter in particular, and competition above all. I take just as much joy in picking every last ounce of meat from the crab as I do in enjoying the spoils. I’m not kidding myself about how such a sight might affect a potential suitor: I’m intimidating enough as it is. Perhaps it’s best to wait a while before we go out for lobster.

Self-awareness is a funny thing. While it primarily involves honesty, it also involves some other components. It’s kind of like the gin to a martini: essential, but incomplete without supporting ingredients. One of those ingredients—in the martini metaphor, this might be the exquisite, gorgonzola-stuffed olive—is external perspective: someone to reach in from outside and point out something that is obvious from a distance but less so from within the confines of your head (an extraordinary best friend is perfect for this; a therapist also helps). The trickiest ingredient is the ability to gauge how hard on yourself you should be; the vermouth of the equation: too much and you run the risk of a wimpy martini, too little and you can barely kid yourself that you’re enjoying drinking this jet fuel.

Many of my exercises in self-awareness are harmless and sometimes accompanied by the warm, fuzzy feeling of figuring out that some of my quirks aren’t faults. For instance: yes, consumption of shellfish should wait until the preliminary stages of a relationship have passed. Another realization has saved me a lot of money: an item of clothing may be simultaneous desirable and totally unrealistic. Sure, I may like it, but I’ll definitely never wear it, so put the credit card away, stupid. There are some movies that will make me cry—as in, bawl my eyes out with loud, messy hiccups—and so should be watched alone. Among these are: Armageddon, Toy Story 3 (a recent addition), Moulin Rouge, and Dead Poets Society.

The last of these movies (no, I’d never call Armageddon a film) was on the other night, and I stood paralyzed in front of the TV, watching the last scene even as my tea kettle was shrieking to be unplugged in the kitchen. As soon as Ethan Hawke starts up from his chair, stuttering about how he knows it wasn’t Robin Williams’ fault, the floodgates opened. By the time the boys are standing on their desks, I was a blithering heap.

I myself was lucky enough to have an O Captain, My Captain, in the form of the inestimable Dr. Karen Wallace. I hated her at first: she had a very low tolerance for bullshit, and as an arrogant high school freshman, I had a surplus. It eventually became a joke between us that at first, all I could hear was her saying to me that I didn’t know everything. When I stopped blustering and started listening, I could hear the other half of her wisdom: that no, I didn’t know everything, but ignorance is not lack of knowledge. Ignorance is refusing to gain more knowledge because you think you already have it all. Basically, once I realized she didn’t think I was a moron (which, in many ways, I was) and that she was in fact trying to help me, we became very close. I would come into her office when writing a paper (for any class, not just hers) and soliloquize at length on a completely disorganized heap of ideas, which were swirling around in my head.

She would listen patiently, and when I had worn myself out, she would ask, “What are you trying to say?”

Surprised out of my stream-of-consciousness, I would reply in the form of a thesis statement.

She would smile beatifically and say, “Good. Write that down.”

Throughout high school and college, I always began essays and papers by typing her words on the top of my brainstorming page:

What are you trying to say?

Good. Write that down.

Two things I know about myself are that I love the English language in its various literary incarnations, and that I love to teach. Karen used to let me take over small parts of the weekly grammar lessons, and when my enthusiasm at the chalkboard translated into someone’s understanding how an indirect objected works, I experienced a satisfaction that has proven to be difficult to match. Several years later, I gave a gallery talk in conjunction with an intern show I had curated at my college museum. I got the same rush as in freshman English: watching my explanation of a topic change the way people understood it.

One could logically deduce from all of this that I should be pursuing a career teaching English or art history. And believe me, I’m thinking about it. I think to myself that if I could just be one person’s Karen Wallace, if I could spark one student’s lifelong love for Fitzgerald or McCullers the way Karen did mine, that would be a career well-spent.

It is at this point in my thinking that my punctilious self-awareness clears its throat to get my attention. It may be fun to fantasize about a fulfilling, rosy life of teaching attentive, passionate students, but at a time when I need to be making real decisions about graduate school and how to afford such opposing forces as higher education and sustenance, I need to be honest with myself:

I would love to be someone’s Karen. But, truthfully, would that be enough?

The truth is that teaching is hard. At a dinner party I attended recently, a friend of mine commented dryly that she did not pass a day in her first several months of teaching without at some point bursting into tears. And she’s a lot more even-keeled than I am. I am someone who thrives on positive reinforcement, and I am abundantly aware that in most cases, teaching is a thankless job. Aside from ungrateful students, you also face hefty school politics, a tiny, fiercely competitive job market, and insane workloads. Thinking about all of these things, the rosy glow of teaching pales somewhat, and I find myself wondering if this is really something I want to pursue.

And so I face the vermouth issue. On the one hand, it’s possible that I’m not giving myself enough credit. Maybe I am tough enough to teach. Maybe letting myself give up just because something looks difficult is cowardly. On the other hand, I’ve learned the hard way that idealism is something very easily crushed, and that thankless jobs have indeed left me on the floor of my apartment in helpless, defeated tears.

It’s times like these that I find myself not so much “yawping” as “wembling.”

One of the things I have learned in (mostly) becoming an adult is that one often has to assign value to slippery, complicated things if one is to make any decisions. When I was choosing an apartment, I literally had to put a price on my preference for privacy. When I left my old job for my new one, I decided that losing sixteen months of hard work and walking away from valuable recommendations was worth less to me than working in the field I had originally set out to pursue. At some point in the near future, I’m going to have to decide how brave I really think I am, and how much realistic value I can place on the idea of being one person’s Karen, and many other people’s Just Another Lame Teacher.

One of the things I loved most about Karen was the combined power of her incapacity for bullshit and her immense capacity for kindness—kindness that inspired almost unreasonable patience with a pretentious student like me. I like to think she believed I contained multitudes.

What I have to do now is take my self-awareness and decide exactly of what those multitudes are capable.

(For fantastic coverage of English grammar from a real-live teacher, who has also faced the Dead Poets conundrum, please see Missed Periods and Other Grammatical Scares.)

Hemingway, Ulla, and a Promise in Purple Pen

When I finished my favorite book for the first time, I wrote myself a note on the last page in purple pen:

It's March 13th 2003 and I will go to San Sebastian before I am old to escape my problems.

I was seventeen when I wrote that, having fallen ass over teakettle (as my mother would say) for Hemingway’s writing when my American Lit class read The Sun Also Rises. I visualized “before I am old” as a period sometime in my twenties or thirties. It would be a time when I would be a Grownup: an older, confident version of myself who possessed stability, purpose, and means. I imagined myself walking around my life with a look on my face that indicated, quietly and unostentatiously, that I knew exactly what I was doing.

By now I’ve done a pretty good job of perfecting that look, but then, I’ve always been pretty good at bluffing.

Being a Grownup (capital G) kind of snuck up on me, and I think I’ve finally figured out why. During the wintery months of my first job out of college, I became one of those “head down” people, literally and figuratively. Gone was the intoxicating self-confidence of the undergrad, and my adult confidence was nowhere in sight. I had pictured it so carefully—this could not possibly be it. Where was that look I had so been looking forward to? The self-assuredness?

Little did I realize at the time that being a Grownup isn’t primarily a function of attitude or facial expressions. It’s the grubby day-to-day of paying rent, making dinner, and doing one’s best to confine one’s tantrums to one’s own apartment (hopefully with the door closed).

On most week days during the Great Rude Awakening, I never really walked. I either plodded or scurried. I worked in an environment where nothing I did was ever right or correct—never entirely. It was the perfect recipe for a drink called something clever like “Emotionalatov Cocktail” or “Secretary Kamikaze”:

Take one lifelong straight-A student (this ingredient also contains a shaky baseline of self-confidence and thrives on adult approval). Scrape down what remains of her undergrad self-confidence (brutal job market works just as well as a lemon zester). Pour in one job, containing three supervisors, none of whom practice positive reinforcement of any variety and two of whom practice emotional abuse of several varieties. Add copious amounts of bourbon. Let sit for several months. First ingredient will slowly dissolve.

During one of those months, in which I felt like I was in fact dissolving a little every day, I happened to glance in the window of a bookstore as I scurried by. I stopped dead in my tracks and fairly sprinted through the door. There she was on the floor, without a care in the world: my new life line.

Her name was Ulla.

In addition to being a lifeline, Ulla was also principally a one-year-old golden retriever with a particularly laidback attitude. As I came to understand later, I was not the first person to come tearing through the door at the sight of the puppy. She may actually be one of the most brilliant sales tactics I have ever witnessed. What I didn’t realize at the time was how effective she really was.

Ulla belonged to the owner of the bookstore, which happened to be a travel bookstore called The Globe. Periodically, I would find myself dissolving a little faster than usual and make my way back to Ulla’s doorstep. Here, finally, was something I could not possibly screw up: rubbing a puppy’s belly. Her thumping tail was all the positive reinforcement I needed, and she filled the dog-shaped void in my heart, since I was in no position to own a dog myself. Eventually, as I scrubbed on her head or scratched her behind the ears, I looked up and started to notice my surroundings. The cover art of the books was enough to spike my adrenaline: Turkey, New Zealand, Spain, Thailand, Germany—books showing me not only the places I had always wanted to visit, but also what I would see when I got there, and perhaps some suggestions on where to eat.

It’s a little weird to pull up Google and type in “map of Europe.” I had a general sense of the geography, but now, sidling up to the idea as if moving too quickly would scare it away, I wondered—hypothetically—if one could realistically hit a handful of cities in one week. And which cities? In how many countries? On what trains? Staying in which hotels?

You know. Hypothetically.

What started as a purely hypothetical exercise quickly evolved into something more substantial when I got one of my best friends on board. We mutually agreed on some combination of Spain and France, but couldn’t quite find the right variation on an itinerary, swapping around foreign cities like puzzle pieces we were trying to fit together:

Paris. Bordeaux. Provence. Nice. Madrid. Barcelona.

San Sebastian.

The moment I realized that we could make a realistic constellation between Barcelona and Paris, with a stop in San Sebastian right in the middle, it was like the cosmos had suddenly, miraculously realigned, and somehow, I was back on track.

I headed to Ulla’s bookstore shortly thereafter and started buying maps.

Seven months later, I watched a dense bank of fog creep in over the tarmac as I waited for my flight at Logan. I was, in theory, flying out in less than an hour on the edge of a hurricane that had decided (with terrible timing, in my opinion) to barrel up the east coast that day. In my mind, this whole exercise was still not real; it was still a hypothetical. It was surprisingly hard for me to believe that in several hours I would be walking down Las Ramblas rather than heading back to work. Oddly enough, in the intervening months between my San Sebastian revelation and the flight that would get me there, I had managed to find a new job, one that in no way resembled a “Secretary Kamikaze.” The daily life I thought I would be fleeing actually wasn’t so bad—it was, in fact, quite good. But my months of scurrying, head down, had become a habit, and I still had a sinking feeling that this whole thing—the new job, the cool trip—would blow up in my face.

And so it was that I sat in my window seat, all bemused and amazed, as that plane hauled itself out of the soup ten minutes ahead of schedule. When the flight attendant came down the aisle, I skipped my usual seltzer and went straight for champagne. I felt that when the universe really does pull you through, it doesn’t hurt to stop and make a toast in her honor.

Several hours and one connection later, I landed in Barcelona under a cloudless sky.

A few days after that, in San Sebastian, I followed Hemingway’s directions with an almost religious zeal: walking “around the harbor under the trees to the casino [now a government building]” to a café in the cool shade. And I “sat out on the terrace and enjoyed the fresh coolness in the hot day, and had a glass of lemon-juice and shaved ice and then a long whiskey soda. I sat… for a long time and read and watched the people and listened to the music.” (Actually I had a lemon ice, which is the closest I could get, and a whiskey with Pellegrino, fun to act out in broken Basque.)

Back in high school, something about The Sun Also Rises chapters in San Sebastian and Jake’s short break from his insane, mundane, hurtful reality, had tugged on me in a way that was very personal. The promise I signed in purple pen, the deal I made with myself, was that someday I would be able to walk away, if only briefly, from a disappointing everyday life, the one that I always imagined a little differently, high school or otherwise. By the time I got to that café, I wasn’t so much walking away from something as sitting down and marking a moment of intense, exactly perfect happiness. I had literally owed it to myself, because after all, I had made a promise.

Later that evening, before we went for dinner by the water, I pulled out my Hemingway and wrote a new note below my old one:

It's September 7th 2010 and I am in San Sebastian, escaping fewer problems than I thought, but ecstatic to be here nevertheless.

A few days after I got home, I went back to the bookstore to see Ulla, the best sales dog in the world, who had reminded me that there were in fact some things I couldn’t screw up and some things—like a trip to San Sebastian—that I could get incredibly right.

I was talking to the salesperson as my eyes drifted over some new potential adventures, and she asked me what had inspired me to go.

“Hemingway,” I replied. I squatted down next to the dog to get a better belly-rubbing angle. “Well, Hemmingway and Ulla.”

Fathers, Daughters, and our Alma Maters

Two summers ago, I emailed my dad asking for directions to our mutual alma mater. I didn’t need the detail Google maps would provide; I just wanted the numbers and directions of the highways. He wrote back fairly quickly with the appropriate highways—all pointing north—concluding his directions with the final instruction, “And straight on ’til morning.”

There’s a lot going on in those five words.

Yes, we all get the reference. My oldest sister’s critical outlook has had such an impact on me throughout my life that I seem to have internalized it to a certain extent, and I hear her snort derisively on occasion in my head. She might posit that our father’s reference is a fitting indicator that in some ways he never did grow up and that our college (which, I might add, she also attended) is a kind of persistent, boy-child fantasy. I might posit, in return, that she should shove it. (You can imagine how crowded and noisy it gets in my head.)

The sad part, which the more cynically-minded might ignore, is that, with the exception of Peter, all of the children eventually left Neverland and could never go back. Admittedly, I still head back every now and then to see friends or ski, but it’s not the same place I left. It belongs to a new group of students, and rightfully so. We all have to leave college and grow up. I myself did it with remarkably little composure on the drive home after graduation, sobbing my way across all of Vermont and most of central New York. But I did it.

In the months following graduation, I was nothing short of a damn mess. Truth be told, I had never really had a solid plan for my post-college years. It generally involved working in some museum in a ridiculously well-appointed office and looking like a million bucks. How exactly I would get to that office was a bit nebulous. As I applied for jobs, day after day, I came to reserve a particular well of hatred in my heart for the “well-meaning adult.” This adult loves to offer unsolicited advice based on his or her own long-passed trials and tribulations, and the only thing you take away from those one-sided conversations is that the process is a crapshoot and success depends in no small part on luck. In my more sullen moments, I even developed a theory about “new adult smell”: how new college grads have it, and established adults can’t resist it.

I don’t imagine I was very easy to live with in those months, since I pretty much hated everyone who had graduated college before 2007. Everyone, that is, except my dad.

I would call him about the job search, sloshing back and forth between depression and outright rage, and he would listen. It was not the sort of listening that implies exaggerated patience with a hysterical child, nor was it the sort of listening that patronizes, because the child is taking his or her woes entirely too seriously. He was listening because he knew what it was like. A few times in his professional life, corporate restructuring had ended up putting him on the job hunt too. So when I would spill out my insides, which were full of anxiety, self-loathing, and resentment, he would say, “I know.” And the really incredible part, the part that miraculously made my misery a little better, was that he really did know.

It was usually at that point in my conversations with him when I really would break down and confess one of the marrow-deep, truest causes of my unhappiness: I missed college. I missed excelling in classes and knowing exactly where I fit in the world in which I lived. I missed having the majority of my closest friends within a ten minute walk. I missed the breathtaking beauty of the place itself, and the innumerable quiet places I had found where I felt a skin-expanding contentment.

My dad knew, he understood. He missed it too.

It was a vast relief for me to know that I was not the only one in my family who had ached, and in some way still did ache, for school. I had been ashamed that I missed it so much, as if it were in some way juvenile; that missing Neverland in some way meant that I had never left it and truly grown up.

I’ve come to realize that nothing is that simple, not even my hard-ass oldest sister.

Was I perfectly, incandescently happy for every minute of the four years I was in college? Of course not. Was I, on average, happier in those four years than I was in the two that followed? God yes. Do I believe my greatest happiness is behind me? No, and recognizing that fact is important.

I took for granted as a child that people in the same family have the same set of values. As we grew up, the necessities of personality and experience divided us to a surprising degree. It is not a whole lot of fun to feel judged for your values, especially for something you ostensibly shared, and the defensiveness that results causes a positive feedback loop that can set relationships back by years. College seems an odd point of contention, but believe me, it’s not the only one. It’s just one of the most obvious. My sister and I come slowly to understanding, but we’re trying. Sometimes, though, it’s nice to experience the effortlessness of a shared core, from which the most complete and comforting empathy emerges.

I went back to school for homecoming with a few friends this year, and while we were in the car, one of my best friends asked me if I thought other people felt the same way about their colleges, if this weird, intense bond is unique to alumni of our school. I told her I didn’t know. I absolutely believe other people can love their schools in a way that outsiders can’t possibly understand, but I also think that this one, particular strain of love and loyalty is distinctly ours. In a weird way, it’s a gift my dad gave me, one that I found for myself, and something we share and understand about one another. We understand that our school didn’t just give us four good years; it also gave us pack mates for life. My dad’s best friends from his fraternity stood up at his wedding thirty-seven years ago. They were also in the pews at my sister’s wedding six months ago. Whenever and wherever my friends and I gather, it’s like coming home: boxed wine, ‘80s music, and all.

College isn’t the only thing we share, and it won’t be the only thing that holds us together, but I’m grateful for what started it all. I’m also grateful I know exactly where to find it:

Three highways to the north, and straight on ’til morning.

The Little Chowder that Could

I will admit fully and freely that, as a child, I very much took for granted that my mother is quite a brilliant chef. Not only were her recipes delicious and diverse (I don’t remember ever having the same thing twice in one week—a feat in itself), but everything always came out at exactly the same time. I didn’t realize the vast skill and planning this took until, when I was a teenager, she went out of town briefly and I tried to make my dad dinner. The chicken was burned on the outside, frozen in the middle, the peas were soggy, and I don’t even want to think about the rice. The only thing I could think to do was tearfully yell at my dad (who, good man that he is, took the unwarranted abuse with great grace) and then make tuna melts.

My continued culinary learning curve generally depended upon having a very patient dining companion—patient not only with the more or less edible product of my endeavors, but also with my hysterics throughout the cooking process. My roommate in Italy was one such companion. She would look on calmly as I perched on a footstool (the counters were remarkably high in our tiny kitchen), frantically trying to whisk a sauce into submission and yelling at the stubborn lumps. There was much rejoicing when I finally hit upon a successful recipe: Dijon and Balsamic vinegar marinated chicken. I also found out that one cannot go wrong with basil, tomatoes, and fresh mozzarella. Like I said, it was a learning curve.

Once I had mastered a few simple meals, I realized the next major step in my cooking career would be the mastery of our most sacred family recipes, the ones that invariably meant home. I knew that at some point, somewhere between my basic sustenance and my mother’s mastery, food became more than what you chew and swallow for nourishment. It became a ritual, a two-way comfort mechanism. There were things I could not take with me, like the way my house smells or the feel of the back-porch floorboards on my feet, but I could take the recipes with me and try to make a new home with them.

A week after starting my first job, I told my sister over the phone that I was completely lost. Having vast experience with being far from home for work, she told me that whenever she is settling into a new place, the first thing she does is make her steel-cut oatmeal. The food and the ritual of preparation are comforting in their familiarity, their predictability. She asked me what thing meant home to me.

“Meatloaf,” I sniffled into the phone.

“Then make meatloaf.”

So I did. The act of pouring, squishing, and patting was the same as it always had been, and the homesickness got a little better.

Months later, I made my first batch of pilaf in my new apartment. I had inherited my grandmother’s pots and pans, and making her recipe, the staple carbohydrate of my childhood, was a little unnerving. The recipe involves the very strict admonition NOT TO PEEK, and I waited with no small amount of anxiety without touching the lid. When the required time had passed and I uncovered the pan, I think I actually wept a little bit because it looked exactly right. It tasted even better.

Recently I undertook an even bigger task: my mom’s clam chowder. My sweetheart had told me he absolutely loved chowder, so in preparation for his visit, I gathered the requisite ingredients (did you know they sell bottled clam juice? Like, the juice of clams?) and got down to business. My mother was on-call that night, and was not surprised that when the phone rang (several times) it was me on the other end, screaming things like, “OH GOD, IS THE BACON SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE THAT?” (Incidentally, it is the bacon that makes the chowder.) Mom knew the recipe, and the unwritten modifications, by heart, and coached me through valiantly. Unfortunately for my nerves, the recipe doesn’t look like much until you add the final ingredient: the half and half.

But when I did, I swear it was like transubstantiation in a Dutch oven pot.

Where but a moment ago there had been a dubious-looking pile of glop, some miracle had occurred and I was staring into a pot of my mom’s clam chowder. When I tasted it, I actually whooped with joy and began dancing around my kitchen like an idiot. Next stop: Italian wedding soup.

Some of the more scientifically-minded people out there may point out that a recipe is a recipe for a reason: you follow the same instructions and you will get the same results. Not being scientifically-minded myself, I find that to be a precise load of hooey, because in the kitchens of my mother and my grandmothers, there was a lot more going on than just the combination of ingredients. Our lives happened in those kitchens. There were inevitably children of varying ages and dispositions tromping in and out, dogs underfoot, and probably three or more conversations happening simultaneously. “Well-tamed chaos” may seem like an oxymoron, but to me that’s the perfect description of home. And in the midst of that chaos, there was always incredible food.

So maybe that’s why I have a desperate need for my recipes to come out. If I can make something good from the chaos, then the chaos will have been worth it. My long-distance friends have become used to sudden screams and crashes of pots and pans over the phone—they know that just means I’m in the kitchen. I’m willing to be a mess, but from the mess, so help me God there had better emerge something meaningful. Extrapolate that outwards, and you get the idea.

I have learned the hard way that there is no point at which the universe presents you with a certificate of adulthood, ala the Wizard of Oz handing out hearts and diplomas and medals of valor. I make meaning in my life where I found meaning in my childhood: in cooking, in comforting, and in being a chaotic and social creature.

Fortunately, ‘tis the season for all of those things:

I am immensely proud of the fact that yesterday I picked up my first ever solo Christmas tree: a marvelously plump, six foot tall Balsam, which I have named Noël. And I mean I literally picked it up. And carried three city blocks in high-heeled boots to the T. When I got home, I immediately put on the two definitive (if odd-couple) Christmas albums of my childhood: Nat King Cole and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s respective carols. Shortly, my DVD of “White Christmas” will arrive via UPS.

And next week, I will make the traditional family Christmas cookies, because the whole shebang just wouldn’t be the same without them.

The Faith of a Freshman

Though I’ve worked for a large university for almost two years, it was not until recently that I went to work on the main campus. I should have known the fall was truly upon us when small family groups—generally two parents and an anxious-looking upper-adolescent—started boarding my daily bus with enormous bags of bedding and shower accessories. It only really hit me yesterday as I walked through the main quad on my lunch break. Large tents are not uncommon on campus, but the one that now covered a large swath of grass had an enormous sign: FIRST YEAR KEY PICK UP.

My own beloved alma mater did not have such a tent—instead, there was a small office in the basement of one of the central dorms, accessible through a backdoor in a parking lot. My parents and I went there first when we arrived on campus. It must have been pretty familiar to them by then; not only the freshman key pick up, but that very office: both of my sisters had picked up their keys there before me. What we didn’t know (though I wonder if they suspected) was that of the three of us who attended, I would be the one who would love it the most.

The clearest memory I have of the day my parents dropped me off at school came towards the end of the afternoon. It had started to rain a little, and I was wearing my brand new college hoodie, which I had purposefully gotten about three sizes too big. Just before they left, my dad turned and called out to me the exact phrase his father had said to him thirty-five years earlier as he was departing for the same college. After they drove away, I took a deep, shaky breath and walked up the steps of a then-unfamiliar building. I knew that, good or bad, something very big was starting.

But more importantly, here are the things I didn’t know:

I didn’t know that my mother was desperately trying to suppress panic for most of the day: she was convinced that between the bad weather and my asthma, I would probably need to be evacuated by helicopter at some point during the canoe trip I was about to embark upon. I also didn’t know that after they left me, my parents were both crying so hard that they missed their exit and had to drive about fifty miles out of their way to the next one.

I didn’t know that the unfamiliar building I was entering would become my second home on campus (I do know for a fact that I spent more waking hours in that building than I did in any dorm I lived in). That I would eat innumerable lunches on those steps and meet people there who now form my insides. That I would lie in the grass, walk through the mud, stomp through the leaves, and roll in the snow outside that building for four very, very good years.

That a year after graduation, I would visit campus, sit on the same steps, and try very hard not to cry because something else was beginning—my adult life—and I felt like I didn’t know anything.

My parents took a picture of me as I was walking away that I didn’t see until a few years later. I am wearing a pair of blue jeans that I would later wear out while studying in Italy and the giant green hoodie that now has stains all up one arm from a radio-active hot chocolate spill at Homecoming. Having grown into my place at college (if not the sweatshirt), I was always surprised at how small I look in that photo.

Colleges go out of their way to welcome their incoming freshmen—I know that mine did, most obviously in the form of upperclassmen, who chopped off varying degrees of hair, dyed the remainder psychedelic colors, and danced around in resplendent flair. But the real world? Not so much. My college life began with an acceptance letter, and my adulthood began with nine months of rejection. Adulthood orientation has not been nearly as much fun as college, but I think that’s just part of the deal.

My current landscape continues to become more familiar, but eventually I will need to leave it to do something else. And I’m sure it will be scary in all sorts of unique and debilitating ways, so something I should learn is the ability to turn my faith forward. When you’re starting something new and suitably terrifying, it’s almost impossible to be confident in anything, save your own nausea, and the definition of faith necessarily includes confidence: “Faith is the confident belief or trust in the truth or trustworthiness of a person, concept or thing.” Maybe when starting something new, I need to borrow confidence from where I was before: I earned it, I saved it, and now I literally owe it to myself. The confidence I learned as a freshman before might be able to fuel the faith I need in the future.

There still lots of things I don’t know, but maybe that can be something that I believe.

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.

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.