A little while ago, I sat down at my computer and very purposefully set out to write an essay for the Modern Love section of the New York Times. Since I discovered it in June of 2009, I have stalked it mercilessly and begun worship at the shrine of Daniel Jones (as far as I'm concerned, he's right up there with Emma Thompson). So I sat myself down and wrote about my (modern?) love. I sent it in, knowing that even if it got rejected, I could still post it here: it wouldn't die of shame in the depths of my hard drive.
It is remarkably easy to be philosophical in advance and even more remarkably difficult to remain so when something sucks. Like an essay being rejected.
I remind myself, though, that being rejected outright is enormously better than being accepted, encouraged, then at the last minute rejected (see my Newsweek trauma for details). So I still love me some Daniel Jones, and proudly present my Modern Love submission. Even if the NYT didn't, those nice folks at Dylan's Middleground (yes, namely me) loved it.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Close and Far and Close
Seven years ago next week, someone I loved very much was killed in a drunk driving accident. For the entire week after that, I had my first taste of acid reflux and would lie on the couch in my parents’ bedroom feeling like my esophagus was on fire. My grandparents were visiting that week, but after one disastrous attempt to get me to come to dinner, my mother relented somewhat and I retreated to numbing hours of “Law and Order” at the other end of the house. Even after a couple of months, I would sometimes lie down on the floor, with my cheek pressed against the carpet, and try to reconcile the enormity of Ben’s dying with the everyday experience of living: trying to find a relative place for the frustration of traffic next to the trauma of loss.
A friend of mine has a video of our group from our sophomore summer of college. We passed around the camera while drinking wine and eating a fruit tart in her room at her sorority. When the camera came to me, I became enchanted with the zoom function. I can be heard narrating: “Chris! Close and far and close and far… Mo! And close and far and close and far…” It’s dizzying to watch as I haul the focus forward and back, but I certainly sound like I’m enjoying myself.
Now, though, my shifting focus is just giving me heartburn.
Here are things that are true:
I like my job. This is somewhat miraculous in light of the fact that less than a year ago, I had another job that ground down my confidence and sanity on a daily basis. I live in a very cute apartment, which is on the perfect route for my commute. I have fantastic friends, and I am in love with a very good man. I know a really good recipe for corn-meal encrusted tofu and have a pack of Diet Dr. Pepper on top of my fridge, which is always nice to come home to.
Here are other things that are also true:
I am engaged in a Cold War with my mother, which is something we have never done before and is remarkably painful. My uncle is undergoing treatment for cancer, as is my paternal grandfather. Someone I love is facing massive and frightening uncertainty in her life, and I can’t do anything about it. I live in constant fear that someone I love will be taken suddenly, or slowly, away from me. An essay I wrote just got rejected from the New York Times, and I have gained twelve pounds in the last year.
If you’ll pardon the lack of eloquence, how the fuck does a person make sense of all of this?
The short answer is: I have no idea.
When Ben died, I imagined that I had this cruel little rock inside of me—like a small, jagged chunk of obsidian—and if I could turn myself inside out, and sort through my organs, I could find where the pain lived. I could take that rock, and look at it, and understand where the screaming was coming from. I could point at it and say, “Here. This is where it lives.”
Now I spread my insides out on the table and look at the collection. My losing Ben has been worn down a little smoother now: a dull ache rather than a scraping pain. I’ve tucked my grandfather’s cancer under an obscuring organ, because I’m not ready to look at it full on, full time, and I know there will come a time when I won’t have a choice. When I think of my uncle, my mind automatically deflects itself to think of his son, my cousin, whom I love like a brother—I’m shoving one more degree of separation in between me and the reality. My fight with my mother has left a raw patch in my chest, and the rejection from the New York Times felt like an unwarranted sucker punch on top of that ache this morning.
It’s sort of a wonder how my joys spread themselves out amongst the sorrows, like insulation, guarding the hard parts from one another so that they don’t come together and become unbearable.
Lately I find myself experiencing a kind of emotional vertigo that leaves me dumbfounded and profoundly useless. My brain struggles to keep up: do I sum the hurts and the happiness? Is there a sliding scale, or are there points categories? Illness is less than death but greater than having wet socks all day? Is a personal hurt greater or less than one with a greater, for instance familial, context? And where do I fit Egypt and Yemen into this, if I do at all?
Is pain a cumulative phenomenon, or is it exponential? And happiness? Happiness is just as complicated as grief. The daily barrage of changing magnitude frightens me, because I know the stakes are only going to get higher as I get older. I zoom in and out of focus daily, and all of these things exist simultaneously inside me: a galaxy contained in reluctant skin and blue jeans. The looming threat of my grandfather’s illness exists right next to an almost intolerable smugness that I got flowers for Valentine’s Day. What upset me today? That I am having a relationship-altering fight with my mom, and my boyfriend’s cookies that I sent haven’t gotten to him.
And it’s very, very difficult to try to figure out how to feel all of those things at the same time and not go stark-raving bonkers.
I wondered aloud once to a friend why I can’t think in more solid terms about global warming. Make no mistake, I’m incredibly nervous about it; I recycle, and I take the bus, but I felt like I should be more worried about it more often. My friend, who probably studied psychology or environmental science, surprised me by shrugging and telling me that the human brain wasn’t built to face biological demise 24/7. Meaning, to a certain extent, that denial (or a least firm muffling) is hardwired into us. I wasn’t entirely convinced, since many of my friends spend their professional and personal hours actively trying to change our environmental destruction, but it certainly made me think.
Maybe I’m not supposed to be able to fully grasp the relativity of the things in my life: how large and small it is and isn’t. The enormous good and bad things and the tiny good and bad things have to live all together, inconsistently and impossibly, within me because for better or worse, they’re mine. Taken as a whole, rather than a sum of very disproportionate and confusing parts, maybe this is just the human condition. People have been losing loved ones and stepping in puddles and finding five dollar bills and overthrowing dictators forever, and many of them have not lost their minds. Perhaps at the end of the day you just keep moving and always remember the ultimate truth in Robert Frost’s great and overarching theory about life:
“It goes on.”
A friend of mine has a video of our group from our sophomore summer of college. We passed around the camera while drinking wine and eating a fruit tart in her room at her sorority. When the camera came to me, I became enchanted with the zoom function. I can be heard narrating: “Chris! Close and far and close and far… Mo! And close and far and close and far…” It’s dizzying to watch as I haul the focus forward and back, but I certainly sound like I’m enjoying myself.
Now, though, my shifting focus is just giving me heartburn.
Here are things that are true:
I like my job. This is somewhat miraculous in light of the fact that less than a year ago, I had another job that ground down my confidence and sanity on a daily basis. I live in a very cute apartment, which is on the perfect route for my commute. I have fantastic friends, and I am in love with a very good man. I know a really good recipe for corn-meal encrusted tofu and have a pack of Diet Dr. Pepper on top of my fridge, which is always nice to come home to.
Here are other things that are also true:
I am engaged in a Cold War with my mother, which is something we have never done before and is remarkably painful. My uncle is undergoing treatment for cancer, as is my paternal grandfather. Someone I love is facing massive and frightening uncertainty in her life, and I can’t do anything about it. I live in constant fear that someone I love will be taken suddenly, or slowly, away from me. An essay I wrote just got rejected from the New York Times, and I have gained twelve pounds in the last year.
If you’ll pardon the lack of eloquence, how the fuck does a person make sense of all of this?
The short answer is: I have no idea.
When Ben died, I imagined that I had this cruel little rock inside of me—like a small, jagged chunk of obsidian—and if I could turn myself inside out, and sort through my organs, I could find where the pain lived. I could take that rock, and look at it, and understand where the screaming was coming from. I could point at it and say, “Here. This is where it lives.”
Now I spread my insides out on the table and look at the collection. My losing Ben has been worn down a little smoother now: a dull ache rather than a scraping pain. I’ve tucked my grandfather’s cancer under an obscuring organ, because I’m not ready to look at it full on, full time, and I know there will come a time when I won’t have a choice. When I think of my uncle, my mind automatically deflects itself to think of his son, my cousin, whom I love like a brother—I’m shoving one more degree of separation in between me and the reality. My fight with my mother has left a raw patch in my chest, and the rejection from the New York Times felt like an unwarranted sucker punch on top of that ache this morning.
It’s sort of a wonder how my joys spread themselves out amongst the sorrows, like insulation, guarding the hard parts from one another so that they don’t come together and become unbearable.
Lately I find myself experiencing a kind of emotional vertigo that leaves me dumbfounded and profoundly useless. My brain struggles to keep up: do I sum the hurts and the happiness? Is there a sliding scale, or are there points categories? Illness is less than death but greater than having wet socks all day? Is a personal hurt greater or less than one with a greater, for instance familial, context? And where do I fit Egypt and Yemen into this, if I do at all?
Is pain a cumulative phenomenon, or is it exponential? And happiness? Happiness is just as complicated as grief. The daily barrage of changing magnitude frightens me, because I know the stakes are only going to get higher as I get older. I zoom in and out of focus daily, and all of these things exist simultaneously inside me: a galaxy contained in reluctant skin and blue jeans. The looming threat of my grandfather’s illness exists right next to an almost intolerable smugness that I got flowers for Valentine’s Day. What upset me today? That I am having a relationship-altering fight with my mom, and my boyfriend’s cookies that I sent haven’t gotten to him.
And it’s very, very difficult to try to figure out how to feel all of those things at the same time and not go stark-raving bonkers.
I wondered aloud once to a friend why I can’t think in more solid terms about global warming. Make no mistake, I’m incredibly nervous about it; I recycle, and I take the bus, but I felt like I should be more worried about it more often. My friend, who probably studied psychology or environmental science, surprised me by shrugging and telling me that the human brain wasn’t built to face biological demise 24/7. Meaning, to a certain extent, that denial (or a least firm muffling) is hardwired into us. I wasn’t entirely convinced, since many of my friends spend their professional and personal hours actively trying to change our environmental destruction, but it certainly made me think.
Maybe I’m not supposed to be able to fully grasp the relativity of the things in my life: how large and small it is and isn’t. The enormous good and bad things and the tiny good and bad things have to live all together, inconsistently and impossibly, within me because for better or worse, they’re mine. Taken as a whole, rather than a sum of very disproportionate and confusing parts, maybe this is just the human condition. People have been losing loved ones and stepping in puddles and finding five dollar bills and overthrowing dictators forever, and many of them have not lost their minds. Perhaps at the end of the day you just keep moving and always remember the ultimate truth in Robert Frost’s great and overarching theory about life:
“It goes on.”
Friday, February 11, 2011
Indiana, Take Me In
People will sometimes ask me where I might want to end up living eventually. These people are usually my peers, and I believe their curiosity, which I share, comes from a newfound realization that some of the plans we made might need a little tweaking. We live in places in chunks of two and three years, and we puzzle over where we will end up on a more or less permanent basis. So when I am asked, I give an honest answer: “Indianapolis.”
People will almost invariably laugh at this. They think I’m kidding. They think it’s absurd. And I, for an irrational moment of defensiveness, think that they are assholes. Here’s the thing: I have lived on both coasts, in the south (very briefly), and in the middle. One thing I have noticed is that though each coasts believes it is better than the other, they come together in mutual agreement that they are both superior to the middle. People in California in particular tend to think of the Midwest as more of a theory than an actual place—as in, the place you fly over when you’re going to New York. When I was in high school in Berkeley, a girl in the class above me asked me once, in all seriousness: “You’re from Chicago, right? Do you know my friend Anna?”
Oh yeah. Anna from Chicago. She lived two doors down from me.
(Pause while a small piece of my soul dies.)
The coastal condescension reminds me of the phenomenon in which Harvard and Princeton disagree as to which is the best but can at least agree that they are both better than Dartmouth. As an alumna of both the Midwest in general and Dartmouth in particular, I can attest to the outright fallacy of the claims of the Snooties—both regional and collegiate.
I have no problem with people being loyal to the cities and regions of their upbringing—I think that’s only natural. I take issue, however, when loyalty becomes disdain for other places. Sports rivalries, I will grant you, inhabit a different theoretical space, but the fact that many people I know, honest to God friends of mine, are willing to discount a place they have never even been is downright annoying.
I grew up in suburban Illinois, but both sets of my grandparents lived in a small town in Indiana, about an hour northwest of Indianapolis. My parents were high school sweethearts, and before that they were childhood neighbors: they grew up across the street from one another. As a result, both sets of my grandparents were localized in one square block of Crawfordsville, IN, and I emerged from childhood with strong connections to both Illinois and Indiana.
In some cases, my loyalties between the states are a bit mixed: the Bulls of the mid 1990s are sacrosanct, and so is Walter Peyton. After the genuflection to Sweetness, however, my allegiance leaves the Bears entirely and heads to Indie: I firmly believe Peyton Manning is a demigod, and I live and die by his right arm. The best pizza in the known universe is made by Pizza King Pizza, serving central Indiana since 1958. The best hot dog in the world, though, comes from the Chicago recipe: mustard, cucumber, tomato wedges, celery salt, pickle spear, and chopped onions on a poppy seed bun. God help you if you even think about bringing ketchup anywhere near it.
Fortunately there are enough regional characteristics to eventually overcome my being an Illinois/Indiana crossbreed to make me simply, proudly Midwestern:
Any beverage that is sweet, carbonated, and comes from a bottle or can is called pop. If you were to order any of the following items from any fair, you would not be met with blank stares as you would anywhere else: black cow, brown cow, elephant ear, Turtle Sundae. (For the record, I have tried to do a patch job on the sacred Turtle Sundae out east, but walnuts do not replace pecans. Epic fail.) Sprinkles are called sprinkles and milkshakes are called milkshakes—because that’s what they are. Halloween costumes must be roomy enough to cover a snowsuit. Ears of corn are purchased by the dozen in roadside shacks—the grubbier the better—and traffic delays caused by tractors and freight cars are simply a part of life.
During my senior year of college, I interviewed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which is (in my opinion) the crown jewel of the most underrated, visionary museums in the US. It is set on 100 acres of land grant in the city and is home to historical houses, botanical gardens, outdoor installations, and a new state-of-the-art museum facility. The director, the magnificent Max Anderson, is nothing short of a badass, whose staff would follow him off a cliff in a heartbeat. I spent the most remarkable day in the IMA, at the invitation of the director, touring the departments, meeting staff and curators, and looking at art. At the end of the afternoon, I left the museum and walked out into one of those perfect, Midwestern spring afternoons: warm and a little humid, but with a cool breeze. I was high from the amazing museum and the kindness of the staff, and the thought of an empty I-65 through the cornfields made me borderline euphoric. I knew, in a very real way, that I had come home and that I would probably spend many adult years trying to get back there.
And so I would issue a challenge: to those who would cast aspersions at the Midwest, maybe spend some time there first. Go to Indianapolis, go to Cleveland, go to Minneapolis, and spend time in the parts of the city that are the equivalent of where you hang out in your East Coast and West Coast cities.
And when you’re pulling out of the beautiful museums and parks, on streets which follow a blessed grid instead of a cow path, notice how people will let you turn left across traffic. Then you can ask yourself if such a miracle would occur anywhere else.
Monday, January 24, 2011
One Villain, Hold the Subtleties
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.
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.
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.
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