Of all of the classical mythology I’ve had to absorb over the years, courtesy of a liberal arts education, the birth of Athena stuck with me most vividly. When I learned, however many years ago, that the goddess of wisdom sprang fully formed from her father’s head, I suddenly imagined Zeus’s skull opening as if on a hinge. Athena, necessarily in miniature but still formidable, steps out: fully armed and ready to go.
Sometimes I wonder who all would step out of my head, were a hinge to be installed.
There are, of course, the various incarnations of self, whom I tend to name by their age. Eight arrives, skinny and tan, with a neat bowl cut. Thirteen has greasy bangs, small eyebrows, and is holding a book of Robert Frost’s collected poetry. Fifteen has platinum skunk stripes in her hair and black liner completely encircling each eye, about an eighth of an inch deep. Nineteen’s hair is long, of natural shading, and she seems to have relaxed, if only a little, sitting astride our Trek mountain bike. Each of these imagined incarnations tends to have something to contribute to my emotional processes, to such a degree that my internal monologue becomes more of a chorus, and not a terribly harmonious one at that.
But my various selves are not the only ones in there.
In the new territory of an adult, romantic relationship, I have come to some remarkable conclusions, which have applications in other realms. For instance, I indulged an anxiety recently, and my brain immediately wove an enormous fight out of a single worry; an imaginary fight in which I filled in all of my sweetheart’s lines to the point of our seemingly inevitable break up. Then I stopped short. I had to think about it carefully, because the most obvious conclusions for me tend to be the most slippery: I wasn’t actually having an argument with him. I was having an argument with myself. His imagined voice was my voice. I couldn’t predict how we were going to grow together or apart, and it was patently unfair of me to suppose I could predict how he would react and respond. I love him because he is very much not me. All I could do was take things a day at a time, love thoroughly, and be thoughtful.
As I told her this, my therapist seemed very close to bursting into applause. Progress!
Twenty-seven, whom I have yet to become, has managed to take up ghostly residence in my mind as well. I can think of no one else to credit for the surprisingly mature thoughts that occasionally formulate from practically nothing. I have no idea what she looks like, but she’s very patient and encouraging. She’s the one who nudges me to apply my newly gained insight to other, murkier areas.
Like my sister.
If Athena stepped fully armed from her father’s head, I feel as though my oldest sister steps out of my head armed only with a certain facial expression she has. It’s enough, though, to send me screaming—towards her with a metaphorical battle axe, away from her towards any convenient cliff, or towards the nearest wall against which I can beat my head.
Her expression is one of intense rationality. It drives me absolutely insane.
The specter of my sister, the one I carry around in my head, isn’t actually my sister. It’s a composite version of her: her eighteen year old arrogance, her twenty-two year old cruelty, and her twenty-seven year old judgment. I have internalized her voice as my inner judge: she archly questions my motives and doesn’t ever seem to think that I’m good enough as I am, as if she’s waiting me out until I become more like her. For many years she did make me feel like that, but I have to wonder where the emotional trauma stops and the echoes just keep going out of habit. I don’t believe that the entirety of my self-doubt can be traced back to her voice; it’s just that her composite is the easiest and sometimes most historically accurate name to put on it.
The problem with a composite is that it lacks any and all subtleties. I remember one particular instance, when my sister and I were fighting bitterly on a ski vacation. It was the worst kind of fight: one born of misunderstanding, old wounds, and things said with poor choice of words at the wrong time. When our mother got mad at us for fighting, we turned on her in unison: bound together by our right to hate each other in peace. It may be deeply screwed up, but it’s one of those subtleties that I miss when my sister simply fills the role of “villain” in my mind.
It’s a funny thing to realize: that two people’s similarities can cause them almost as much damage as their differences. The combination of problematic similarities and differences, especially among family, I have observed to be uniquely cataclysmic. After a particularly severe blowout about eighteen months ago, our relationship has been hobbling back to health. We check in maybe quarterly: I tell her a synopsis of my goings on, and she tells me what she’s teaching and non-food items her dog has been eating. She is not the person who lives in my head. She is the person who lives in Michigan and who can do her own part—which I can’t predict—to mend our relationship.
It’s a tense process. I have to conquer a vintage, desperate need to have her like me, to make her laugh, and she probably has to think carefully about the things she says so that she doesn’t accidentally tread on an old wound she may or may not have given me.
It’s also very difficult to recast her in my head, so to speak. Can I have a relatively successful relationship with who she is now, if who she was then still plays the villain in my mind? Somehow I doubt it. When it comes down to it, though, maybe that’s the best we can do: to have a relationship with each other as we are now, mindful of the past but not dwelling in it. Another observation I made in plaintive tones, which made my therapist laugh, is painfully obvious: Adult relationships are hard.
But who knows? Maybe my Twenty-seven and her Thirty-seven will get it right even more than we do now. We'll have to ask them when we get there.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Chicka-Cherry-Cola Culture (or, Confessions of a Teenage Mutant Awkward Turtle)
Before rolling up my jeans and stepping into the bathtub, I put on a definitive mix in the bathroom. We’re talking Spice Girls, Will Smith, Savage Garden, N’Sync, Backstreet Boys, Sublime: the works. My best friend was kneeling on the floor, arched at a seemingly impossible angle to get her head over the rim of the tub. Her hair was nearly down to her butt, and I wondered if there was enough brown goop in the bottle to cover it all. As we both wailed along with perfect inflection to “Say You’ll Be There,” I stepped into the tub and began slathering her head with hair dye.
It could’ve been ten years ago. But it wasn’t. It was five weeks ago.
My best friend and I have been dyeing each others’ hair for most of the eleven years of our friendship. In one particular instance, I, being of less than sound mind and stubbornly brown hair, decided to go blond. Halfway into the box-recommended time, my better half peeked under my shower cap and gulped, “I think we should rinse. It’s looking more orange than not.” Between the two of us and over the course of our adolescence, we covered more than half of the color wheel on our respective heads, with varying forms of red, orange, purple, and a batch of neon yellow stripes. We’ve also endured varying pierces, fake tattoos, real tattoos, terrible haircuts, braces, glasses, episodes of severe eyeliner, and one botched leg-waxing attempt.
And that’s just in the beauty department.
It isn’t any wonder that her husband has a hard time keeping up with us when we’re together. After all, as I pointed out in my toast at their wedding, she and I have been together longer than they have. (I’m not that much of a jerk—I also added that he and I now had something very important in common: loving her for the rest of our lives, in very different capacities.) She and I speak in a kind of shorthand, collapsing eleven years of shared cultural, historical, and personal experience into a language with a fluent population of two. I must admit he is a very good sport, and I can’t blame him when he eventually backs away slowly, hands aloft in surrender. Good man, that.
My best friend and I are a matched set. I, for one, feel remarkably lopsided when I haven’t talked to her for a few days, like a nestled peppershaker without its salt: just a weird little figurine hugging nothing. We shared the travails of a deeply awkward adolescence and came out the other side similarly scarred, mutually stronger, and bonded for life. Sometimes I wonder if my proclivity for people of similar teenage awkwardness traces its origins to her: I look for people with similar scars, because we’ll probably have a lot more in common than people who don’t.
It’s an honest truth that I am just more comfortable with people who were uncompromisingly awkward in their teenage years: we of the early-onset acne, the bad bangs, who said we liked Tool, actually liked Cake, and secretly loved Billy Joel. We who watched Star Trek: TNG and had enormous crushes on Commander Riker, Counselor Troi, or both. We who appeared voluntarily in public wearing the comically outsized but mysteriously desirable “raver pants.” We, for whom the “Men in Black” dance was the equivalent of the “Thriller” dance. We who wanted desperately to be Full House’s DJ Tanner.
We, who were about to die from embarrassment for many teenage years, salute you.
As someone who was intensely self-conscious and deeply insecure, I spent a lot of middle school and high school trying to triangulate what I should like, what I shouldn’t like, and what I secretly did like. I tried to formulate who I was against other people: if I wasn’t a popular, beautiful person, then I wouldn’t like what they liked; I had to like something different. All of this is to say that my anxiety tended to get in the way of acknowledging the things that made me happy. I have a remarkable capability of getting in my own way sometimes.
It was so strange to get to college and suddenly, inexplicably, be able to own all of my likes and dislikes; to find that the things that I thought made me a mutant, whom only a best friend could love, actually made me kind of interesting. More miraculous still, some of my perceived “mutant” qualities weren’t even unique: I found people who had somehow reconciled a love of classic Paul Simon with a love of the Spice Girls at their peak. I found people who loved Star Wars and the Muppets, danced like maniacs, told fantastic bad jokes, and used big words with joy and without pretention.
It was like the promise land for a weary nerd like me.
To this day I take sincere comfort in finding something of a late ‘90s vintage in common with a peer. Popular music tends to be a good jumping off point: say “chicka-cherry-cola” to just about anybody of my generation and odds are that person will know exactly what you’re talking about. It is no longer shameful to like things that were popular and things that weren’t, all at once. I came into my own in college, and every time I freely admit to something that would’ve made me die of embarrassment years before—yup, I own a Star Wars shirt, and I bought it XXXL at Baby Gap—I feel like I’m redeeming an episode of angst gone by.
It’s an amazingly freeing feeling to simply like the things I like and be fine with who I was, even if only in retrospect. I always do remember, though, that at least one person always liked me in the depths of my awkwardness.
She’s a woman who recognized my toenail polish color, which I applied more than ten years after we met as tragic teenagers. She knew that the color was an homage to a polish from years before, one that I stole from my sister when we were fourteen. She even remembered the unlikely name of the color (“Daisy the Pig”) and commented on it as we were getting her into her wedding dress.
I may not have been sure of much, but I was always sure—at fourteen, twenty-four, and beyond—that since she is the half that makes me whole, I couldn’t ever really be any more than half bad, and therefore never a total loss.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
The Facebook Debate
I had thought about how to approach a particular topic for a while and had spent many email hours polling my friends on their opinions. But really, it would just be me doing the asking when I finally wound up my courage, which I managed to do this weekend.
I was sitting with my sweetheart on his bed in his parents’ house, where we were taking a break from cleaning out the shop that holds, among other things, his dad’s car restoration projects and a keg of beer. I faced him with some trepidation and told him I had a really stupid question to ask him. He looked at me expectantly. I couldn’t even look him in the face as I asked:
Will you be my boyfriend on facebook?
Oy vey. My mortification knew no bounds.
I had been chasing my metaphorical tail on this for a long time, well before my boyfriend became my boyfriend (both on and off facebook—and for the record, I know these two phenomena are very different). On the one hand, I fully recognize that making it (cringe) “facebook official” has very little to do with the actual emotional life and reality of a relationship. If the electronic status of your partnership is the glue, there are significantly larger problems afoot. Mark Zuckerburg does not make your relationship real; you and your partner do.
So why, why if I knew all of these things did I still want it so badly?
It isn’t as though I’m insecure about my sweetheart’s affections. I am not, and have not been, lacking in reassurance from him. He challenges me when I need challenging, and he supports me when I need supporting. His Monday morning texts cause me to start my week with a really dopey smile on my face. But it’s also nice that he refers to me as his girlfriend, and that his friends and family know about me. I love that I am in the public record of his life as he is in mine. While I believe that wanting his friends and family to know I exist as his girlfriend is reasonable, the facebook debate takes a few steps beyond and treads suspiciously outside reason.
Facebook played an odd role in my college socialization. Early on freshman year, a friend of mine asked me if I had signed up, and the blank look I gave her indicated that I hadn’t. She immediately helped me set up my profile. I am one of those unfortunate people who have to make a conscious effort not to talk about myself all the time (and I often fail at that—blog much?). But here was this website that was inviting me to do so. I wondered at the time if people actually cared that I love Cheez-its and biking, and the answer was “no, probably not.” That question, however, has become obsolete in the brave new world of facebook and twitter. In the early days of facebook, during which time I joined, the website was restricted to college students only, and we stalked one other with alarming energy—indeed, we adopted “stalk” as our verb of choice, as if that weren’t indicative of some very weird cultural changes. Sometime before graduation, the site opened to non-college email addresses, and the deluge of high schoolers (disturbing) and then parents (even more disturbing) began. I think I entered into a new realm of weird when my grandmother friended me.
Something tells me that my desire to have people know that I am in a relationship finds its origins much, much earlier than facebook, but the current culture of (over)sharing has certainly encouraged my preexisting leanings and insecurities. I’ve had two boyfriends in the past who withheld (as it were) on facebook to varying degrees. The first was so loathe to even hold my hand in public that an expectation to declare couple-hood online must have been appalling to him. When I step back and look at the bigger picture of that particular relationship, I realize that the facebook relationship wasn’t what I was looking for necessarily; I was looking for any kind of validation, any freely given gesture of affection that might indicate that—for whatever reason—he was the other half of a couple, that I wasn’t just making this up.
In a way, the facebook relationship status is just that: a culturally idiosyncratic gesture of affection, rather than a public declaration of exclusivity. My sweetheart is seldom on facebook, so it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him to update his profile, but when I asked him, burying my head in a pillow so that my words came out a bit muffled, he smiled and said, “Of course.”
What he did in that moment was not decide he wanted to announce to the social networking world that we were a couple. He decided that this thing that was not a big deal to him was, for whatever reason, important to this crazy girl of whom he is very fond. And so he gave it freely, probably a small thing to him but a big deal to me—whether that is reasonable or not was sort of a moot point.
In the ever expanding, networked universe in which we find ourselves, my own insecurities have been given a whole new stage on which to play out their varying dramas. I am reminded of a good line from an unfortunate movie in which Drew Barrymore laments, “I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It's exhausting.” The weirdest part of hearing that line was that I knew exactly what she was talking about. I am often ambivalent about technology, but I have zero ambivalence towards a miraculous phenomenon that I’m sure has been played out for centuries before Mark Zuckerburg was ever born:
The insecure half of a couple seeks an odd form of validation from the other half of the couple, who, being very kind and almost shockingly insightful, gives this validation freely. And suddenly there is a significant change in status—internal, facebook, or otherwise:
Insecure half is… very happy, very grateful, and—by the way—in a relationship.
I was sitting with my sweetheart on his bed in his parents’ house, where we were taking a break from cleaning out the shop that holds, among other things, his dad’s car restoration projects and a keg of beer. I faced him with some trepidation and told him I had a really stupid question to ask him. He looked at me expectantly. I couldn’t even look him in the face as I asked:
Will you be my boyfriend on facebook?
Oy vey. My mortification knew no bounds.
I had been chasing my metaphorical tail on this for a long time, well before my boyfriend became my boyfriend (both on and off facebook—and for the record, I know these two phenomena are very different). On the one hand, I fully recognize that making it (cringe) “facebook official” has very little to do with the actual emotional life and reality of a relationship. If the electronic status of your partnership is the glue, there are significantly larger problems afoot. Mark Zuckerburg does not make your relationship real; you and your partner do.
So why, why if I knew all of these things did I still want it so badly?
It isn’t as though I’m insecure about my sweetheart’s affections. I am not, and have not been, lacking in reassurance from him. He challenges me when I need challenging, and he supports me when I need supporting. His Monday morning texts cause me to start my week with a really dopey smile on my face. But it’s also nice that he refers to me as his girlfriend, and that his friends and family know about me. I love that I am in the public record of his life as he is in mine. While I believe that wanting his friends and family to know I exist as his girlfriend is reasonable, the facebook debate takes a few steps beyond and treads suspiciously outside reason.
Facebook played an odd role in my college socialization. Early on freshman year, a friend of mine asked me if I had signed up, and the blank look I gave her indicated that I hadn’t. She immediately helped me set up my profile. I am one of those unfortunate people who have to make a conscious effort not to talk about myself all the time (and I often fail at that—blog much?). But here was this website that was inviting me to do so. I wondered at the time if people actually cared that I love Cheez-its and biking, and the answer was “no, probably not.” That question, however, has become obsolete in the brave new world of facebook and twitter. In the early days of facebook, during which time I joined, the website was restricted to college students only, and we stalked one other with alarming energy—indeed, we adopted “stalk” as our verb of choice, as if that weren’t indicative of some very weird cultural changes. Sometime before graduation, the site opened to non-college email addresses, and the deluge of high schoolers (disturbing) and then parents (even more disturbing) began. I think I entered into a new realm of weird when my grandmother friended me.
Something tells me that my desire to have people know that I am in a relationship finds its origins much, much earlier than facebook, but the current culture of (over)sharing has certainly encouraged my preexisting leanings and insecurities. I’ve had two boyfriends in the past who withheld (as it were) on facebook to varying degrees. The first was so loathe to even hold my hand in public that an expectation to declare couple-hood online must have been appalling to him. When I step back and look at the bigger picture of that particular relationship, I realize that the facebook relationship wasn’t what I was looking for necessarily; I was looking for any kind of validation, any freely given gesture of affection that might indicate that—for whatever reason—he was the other half of a couple, that I wasn’t just making this up.
In a way, the facebook relationship status is just that: a culturally idiosyncratic gesture of affection, rather than a public declaration of exclusivity. My sweetheart is seldom on facebook, so it probably wouldn’t have occurred to him to update his profile, but when I asked him, burying my head in a pillow so that my words came out a bit muffled, he smiled and said, “Of course.”
What he did in that moment was not decide he wanted to announce to the social networking world that we were a couple. He decided that this thing that was not a big deal to him was, for whatever reason, important to this crazy girl of whom he is very fond. And so he gave it freely, probably a small thing to him but a big deal to me—whether that is reasonable or not was sort of a moot point.
In the ever expanding, networked universe in which we find ourselves, my own insecurities have been given a whole new stage on which to play out their varying dramas. I am reminded of a good line from an unfortunate movie in which Drew Barrymore laments, “I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It's exhausting.” The weirdest part of hearing that line was that I knew exactly what she was talking about. I am often ambivalent about technology, but I have zero ambivalence towards a miraculous phenomenon that I’m sure has been played out for centuries before Mark Zuckerburg was ever born:
The insecure half of a couple seeks an odd form of validation from the other half of the couple, who, being very kind and almost shockingly insightful, gives this validation freely. And suddenly there is a significant change in status—internal, facebook, or otherwise:
Insecure half is… very happy, very grateful, and—by the way—in a relationship.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Cake-Stand Stories (or, The Chronicles of Naperville)
In the town where I grew up, there was a place called “Tasty Bakery.” It had a huge electric sign in the shape of a cartoon baker—imagine the Pillsbury Doughboy, maybe a few pounds lighter, with rosy cheeks. It’s nice to remember my town as it was: quiet, and full of family businesses. I guess when the Starbucks moved in, and the Eddie Bauer followed, the decline was really only a matter of time.
With my twenty-fifth birthday looming—and no, it doesn’t just approach, it decidedly looms—I had a sudden onset of nostalgia for Tasty Bakery, home of the best black and white cookies in the world, other cookies shaped as Chicago Bears helmets, and above all the raspberry chocolate birthday cake. Some of my first memories of home are from my older sisters’ birthdays: my mother would get the cake from the bakery and set it on a beautiful glass cake-stand. I think my love of single-use utensils originates with that stand; melon-ballers, garlic presses, and apple-corers have a special place in my heart because they are items that know their purpose. The cake itself was a two layer contraption of dense chocolate and raspberry filling. On top, around the circumference of the upper layer, were small nests of chocolate frosting and preserves. These, too, served a single purpose: they were where to place the candles.
I went looking for that bakery on the internet, hoping against hope that it hadn’t closed but simply moved. I was out of luck: the number, with my hometown area code, had been disconnected.
When we first moved there, my town was small: two lane roads and empty plots in our development. Storms would come over the prairie preserve across the street, turning the sky a bizarre and thrilling green, and then a thick, dark black. My friends and I would dig holes in the vacant lots and cover them with plywood as forts—afternoon kingdoms fed on goldfish crackers. There was one farmstand where we always bought our corn: a dozen-dozen ears. My dad and the daughters would gather on the back porch and shuck one hundred and forty-four ears of corn, which my father would then scrape, so my mother could freeze the corn-guts for sweet corn soufflé all winter long. My dad and his brother built me the biggest swing-set in the neighborhood with precut lumber; Chuck told my dad it was nuts to have it precut, and when it came together perfectly, my dad was nothing short of smug. I watched my sisters get ready for prom in the brightly lit mirrors in my parents’ bathroom—last minute hysterics over deodorant stains on black taffeta, followed by a deeply enviable entrance down our wrap-around flight of stairs into the foyer.
Sometimes I wonder how Laura Ingalls Wilder felt, writing out her childhood. I acknowledge that there is a very large difference between looking back at your childhood through the lens of industrialization as opposed to yuppification, but I still feel as though I’ve lost something. I view my childhood as something that is over, and therefore in some ways separate from my continuing relationships. I isolate people and places in memory, and in a way, put them in storage: the role they played in my childhood, and who they were then, remains static in the place where I keep my memories. In that space, my oldest sister, who now keeps her hair buzz-cut short, will always have blonde hair down to the middle of her back and wear her letterman’s jacket. My middle sister will always wear dark lipstick and oversized sweaters. My parents are perpetually forty, a time anomaly with which my mother takes no issue.
If one can extrapolate such a verb, I have in essence snow-globed my past—I’ve wrapped glass around the time between my first memories and roughly my twelfth birthday, and every now and then I look into the strange little world and see things that I miss, things that I wonder about. My relationship to my own history is a strange and complex beast, often taking on different incarnations. We necessarily live in our own timelines and tell ourselves stories to make sense of our own history—a post-modern, personalized myth-making, if you will. My favorite history professor in college said once that every generation invents its own past, and I think she’s right, though it’s not a one way street, as her syntax might indicate. As we invent our own pasts, we simultaneously draw on them to inform who we are. This is just one of many odd, tautological cycles I can’t quite seem to shake as I think about getting older. And all of this started because I wondered about a bakery I used to know.
I tell myself a story about my childhood: a snow-globe, a Laura-Ingalls-Wilderization of my history. Taken as simply a story, not as a living part of my own timeline—though it is both—maybe that story is one of those single-purpose objects I love; an emotional cake-stand: mostly useless, but lovely to have when you need it.
When my birthday loomed, then arrived, then passed with remarkable timeliness, I felt incredibly self-conscious, as if the universe were looking at me and saying, “Well? You’re twenty-five now. What do you have to say for yourself?”
I would say that I have some pretty good stories to tell, and that I’m sure it will be a riot to look back at the snow-globe I will inevitably create sometime in the future, and marvel at my sweet and ridiculous twenties.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
The Greatest Sum
Whenever I’m dealing with a particular problem, for better or worse my mind begins to catalogue experiences and memories that might help my sorting out the issue. It’s as though my brain has an automatic search function, and whether I like it or not, I get the search results with remarkable speed. Often in our lives, we base our decisions on our judgment of the situation at hand and our experience in the past. While it can be helpful to have that background—a bibliography for a decision—sometimes I wish I could solve the arithmetic of a problem without factoring in the sum of my complete experience:
It is August, and I am sitting in the passenger seat of the car belonging to the person I think of as my boyfriend. I am sixteen and have spent the entire summer with this charming boy, thinking that the high school experience I’ve been craving has finally started to happen. When I came back from my college tour, I knew instantly something was wrong, and today I ask him what will happen when we go back to our respective schools, and more specifically, will he call me his girlfriend. He gives me a look that will make me cringe even long after this painful hour is gone: the look that indicates that not only are all of my impressions mistaken, but it’s a little embarrassing that I could be that wrong at all. He says, “Well, I’ve been hanging out with an old flame lately… I never thought of you as my girlfriend.”
I am walking with my two sisters and our dogs in the park near our grandparents’ house. It is the dead of Indiana winter, and my eldest sister is livid. Earlier that year, she began referring to the man she was with as her partner, and it eventually became clear to the rest of the family that while they had committed to one another for the rest of their lives, that commitment would not come in the form of marriage. Our parents can be liberal-minded about many things, but this didn’t turn out to be one of them. JR, as I’ve called my sister since I was a child, is speaking more to the cold air and our other sister than to me, but she is relating how our mother told her that if her partner would not marry her, that might mean that he did not love her enough. Far out of my depth, I nevertheless venture the hesitant opinion that maybe it was less likely that they would break up if they were married. JR, who most resembles a bird of prey when she’s angry, turns to me and says, “Calling someone a wife doesn’t make leaving her any less of a possibility.”
I am wearing a surprisingly acceptable coral pink color and sitting in a sweltering church in Connecticut. As I listen to my middle sister read her vows, I am trying (and failing) to hold back tears that seem to come from two wells. The first is totally virtuous and kosher: happiness for my sister and her love. The second is completely shameful: somewhere between self-pity and envy, I am crying because I am not in love, and I feel an alarmingly dense hole in myself; the perfect opposite of the whole my sister is becoming with the man standing next to her.
I am sitting in my favorite margarita joint in Boston with someone about whom I am certifiably crazy; he is in a chair, and I’m across the table from him on the wall bench. He seems discontent with something, and eventually says, “Hold on. I want to move.” For a minute I’m confused, because the only thing my brain can piece together is that he wants to trade seats with me, which I find odd. But he gets up and comes over to sit down next to me, draping his arm behind my shoulders. “That’s better,” he says with satisfaction, and I am completely dumbfounded, both with joy and my brain’s inability to reconcile this guy with anything I thought I had figured out so far.
A Sesame Street tune from two decades ago sings in my head: one of these things is not like the other… one of these things just doesn’t belong. When the larger portion of your romantic experience takes the shape of disappointment, it can be difficult to fit a new, obscenely happy shape in with the rest of the puzzle. Part of me expects this round peg to eventually whittle itself down to fit itself into the square hole of my expectation, but I also have a strangely optimistic impulse to which I am entirely unaccustomed. And that makes me think about what exists in between the various shapes of my experience.
I wonder at what point our knowledge becomes more than the total of our experiences; when we become more than the sum of our parts; and when a belief in something we haven’t found yet fills the spaces in between. Out of what, exactly, do we make that mortar? I imagine it as a combination of hope and gravity, maybe even a biological imperative tucked somewhere near the nesting instinct and pack mentality I find within myself. My brain may not quite believe this thing is real, but the rest of me does and has been waiting for the chance to believe it for a long time.
I think somewhere along the way, my search engine memory also took it upon itself to deduce patterns. I have come to expect a certain trend, and this recent outlier has my brain stumped and suspicious. It would be easy, cowardly, to believe in the trend rather than in this new love, but I’ve come to understand that is the point at which I let the past beat the future before it’s even had a chance. So here are the things that are true:
I am more than the sum of my disappointments. I have never been good at math, so there is no reason to apply any of that reasoning to my emotional life now: trends, outliers, or whathaveyou. And more than this, perhaps most surprisingly of all, I am madly in love.
It is August, and I am sitting in the passenger seat of the car belonging to the person I think of as my boyfriend. I am sixteen and have spent the entire summer with this charming boy, thinking that the high school experience I’ve been craving has finally started to happen. When I came back from my college tour, I knew instantly something was wrong, and today I ask him what will happen when we go back to our respective schools, and more specifically, will he call me his girlfriend. He gives me a look that will make me cringe even long after this painful hour is gone: the look that indicates that not only are all of my impressions mistaken, but it’s a little embarrassing that I could be that wrong at all. He says, “Well, I’ve been hanging out with an old flame lately… I never thought of you as my girlfriend.”
I am walking with my two sisters and our dogs in the park near our grandparents’ house. It is the dead of Indiana winter, and my eldest sister is livid. Earlier that year, she began referring to the man she was with as her partner, and it eventually became clear to the rest of the family that while they had committed to one another for the rest of their lives, that commitment would not come in the form of marriage. Our parents can be liberal-minded about many things, but this didn’t turn out to be one of them. JR, as I’ve called my sister since I was a child, is speaking more to the cold air and our other sister than to me, but she is relating how our mother told her that if her partner would not marry her, that might mean that he did not love her enough. Far out of my depth, I nevertheless venture the hesitant opinion that maybe it was less likely that they would break up if they were married. JR, who most resembles a bird of prey when she’s angry, turns to me and says, “Calling someone a wife doesn’t make leaving her any less of a possibility.”
I am wearing a surprisingly acceptable coral pink color and sitting in a sweltering church in Connecticut. As I listen to my middle sister read her vows, I am trying (and failing) to hold back tears that seem to come from two wells. The first is totally virtuous and kosher: happiness for my sister and her love. The second is completely shameful: somewhere between self-pity and envy, I am crying because I am not in love, and I feel an alarmingly dense hole in myself; the perfect opposite of the whole my sister is becoming with the man standing next to her.
I am sitting in my favorite margarita joint in Boston with someone about whom I am certifiably crazy; he is in a chair, and I’m across the table from him on the wall bench. He seems discontent with something, and eventually says, “Hold on. I want to move.” For a minute I’m confused, because the only thing my brain can piece together is that he wants to trade seats with me, which I find odd. But he gets up and comes over to sit down next to me, draping his arm behind my shoulders. “That’s better,” he says with satisfaction, and I am completely dumbfounded, both with joy and my brain’s inability to reconcile this guy with anything I thought I had figured out so far.
A Sesame Street tune from two decades ago sings in my head: one of these things is not like the other… one of these things just doesn’t belong. When the larger portion of your romantic experience takes the shape of disappointment, it can be difficult to fit a new, obscenely happy shape in with the rest of the puzzle. Part of me expects this round peg to eventually whittle itself down to fit itself into the square hole of my expectation, but I also have a strangely optimistic impulse to which I am entirely unaccustomed. And that makes me think about what exists in between the various shapes of my experience.
I wonder at what point our knowledge becomes more than the total of our experiences; when we become more than the sum of our parts; and when a belief in something we haven’t found yet fills the spaces in between. Out of what, exactly, do we make that mortar? I imagine it as a combination of hope and gravity, maybe even a biological imperative tucked somewhere near the nesting instinct and pack mentality I find within myself. My brain may not quite believe this thing is real, but the rest of me does and has been waiting for the chance to believe it for a long time.
I think somewhere along the way, my search engine memory also took it upon itself to deduce patterns. I have come to expect a certain trend, and this recent outlier has my brain stumped and suspicious. It would be easy, cowardly, to believe in the trend rather than in this new love, but I’ve come to understand that is the point at which I let the past beat the future before it’s even had a chance. So here are the things that are true:
I am more than the sum of my disappointments. I have never been good at math, so there is no reason to apply any of that reasoning to my emotional life now: trends, outliers, or whathaveyou. And more than this, perhaps most surprisingly of all, I am madly in love.
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