Intolerable Acts of Irony

Two weeks ago, while on a London adventure with a good friend, we were walking down the street in Borough Market when I lunged across the cobblestones to make a jovial point. Instead what I made—or rather, what my ankle made—was a resounding SNAP as my foot turned under me. I went down like a ton of bricks. I was even wearing sensible shoes.

Though I managed to salvage the trip—in large part due to the unwavering devotion and saintly patience of my friend—I spent most of the rest of my time in England swollen and grumpy. I was also afflicted with one of those obnoxious little ironies in life: that while generally I do enjoy being at the center of attention, I also enjoy not being at the center of attention when I so desire. I spent most of that week getting a lot of attention, and I hated it. Try going unnoticed while hobbling around on European Tiny Tim crutches.

God bless us every one indeed. Oy.

I think of myself as being high maintenance as it is, and that embarrasses me. Add “outright helpless” to that, and I just want to die of shame. My ankle may have been sprained (and the size of a cantaloupe), but my pride was severely fractured.

So what do we learn from this particular experience?

First, and perhaps most importantly, that sensible shoes may not save you from physics and cobblestones.

Second, when I am hurt and embarrassed, for some reason I immediately default to being grumpy or downright angry.

Third, I find irony in my day to day life to be deeply annoying.

Upon further reflection, I find the second two items to be more closely linked than I had originally anticipated.

I have been thinking about irony, off and on, for about ten years. Such are the perils of loving Modernist American literature. I loved The Sun Also Rises when I was seventeen, but when I read it at twenty-four, I began to realize how much of the irony I had missed on the first go-round. In college, I understood irony in terms of the Lost Generation—how it was a device employed by authors and poets to distance themselves from a pre-war conviction or sentimentality, which, post-war, rang false. In academia, I understand the use of distance, and even contradiction, between statement and meaning.

In my personal life, I think it sucks.

Not surprisingly, there’s a lot going on in the why behind that thought.

In my family, growing up, whenever one of the daughters would seem to consider the wisdom of saying something in front of our parents—a swear, a dirty joke, etc.—our dad would say, in the same pedantic tone every time, “You are responsible for everything that comes out of your mouth.” I’ve noticed a phenomenon in which a person, usually a person of high education and liberal leanings, will say something really obnoxious—along the lines of acutely annoying or vaguely offensive—in blasé tones. Implicit in this unfortunate statement is that the speaker is being ironic; that is, whatever he or she is saying is inherently excusable because it’s being said with irony.

I’m sorry, but sometimes that dog don’t hunt.

I understand the concept of engaging a topic you do not like—an idea, a policy, a person—with irony as a way of expressing your disdain or opposing views. I also very much understand that you can have too much of a good thing. My sister, an English professor, tells her students that irony in American culture died with Johnny Carson, but has perhaps been reborn in John Stewart. Irony as those two men have practiced it is characterized, in my mind, by restraint; the knowledge that they could really let loose, but a dry raise of the eyebrows is in fact enough to get the point across. Irony as I have experienced it off-screen is often characterized by the idea that the distance between speaker and statement is effectively a “get out of jail free” card for being smug, offensive, and generally insufferable; restraint has nothing to do with it.

And so I would say to everyone from the writers of the New Yorker to the deep-feeling denizens of higher education: exercise restraint. Less is more. Irony is not carte blanche for being an ass.

Now, inevitably, we come to the more bruised, more honest portion of my complaint. Irony in the New Yorker or smug college students is avoided easily enough: close the magazine or put in your headphones. However, when irony gets personal, I get grumpy. In the broadest sense, it is not often that we find stories with strong doses of irony—Shakespeare to Hemingway and everything in between—in which the characters are happy. As I recall, Othello didn’t make it out so well, and “content” isn’t exactly an adjective I would use to describe many Modernist characters. Shocking though it may be (and here I exercise sarcasm rather than irony, since there’s very little distance between my statement and me), I don’t want to live an ironic life. I want to live a happy life.

I have no idea where that sentiment fits on a post-(post?)-modern spectrum. Maybe it’s just trite. And true.

The truest truth is that irony in my personal life makes me vulnerable, something I do not enjoy. I spent most of my early life as a fifth wheel; kind of a “two, and two, and you” scenario, in which my parents were one pair and my sisters another. Occasional torment in school didn’t help my acceptance issues. As a result, I’m still very (overly) sensitive to exclusion, to the sense of being on the outside. When my professorial sister lays on the irony, with all the confidence in the world, sometimes I don’t think what she’s saying is funny. I think it’s offensive, because again, I don’t think irony is carte blanche. The irony opens up this yawning gap between us, and on my side of the gap, I feel like I’m being excluded because I’m not funny enough, not smart enough, or not cool enough to get it. And so, true to form, when embarrassed and hurt, I get just plain grumpy.

I always, always think of the Emperor’s New Clothes during acts of intolerable irony, and yet I’m still not quite able to call foul, even though I know the moral of the story as well as anybody else. Because maybe there is something there that I don’t see, and that possibility makes me scared.

Isn’t it ironic. Don’t you think?

Hemingway, Ulla, and a Promise in Purple Pen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her name was Ulla.

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

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

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

You know. Hypothetically.

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

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

San Sebastian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living and Loving on the Morning Commute

I take the same bus every day, and the more or less similar cast of characters I encounter must have by now grown accustomed to my occasional bursts of laughter. They may think I’m the crazy girl who laughs at random, but mostly I’m just the crazy girl who’s listening to “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me” on podcast and who has no interest in containing her mirth. Or maybe they don’t even notice at all—it is, after all, the MBTA.

Last night on the bus home, I was reading a back issue New Yorker, which was practically in shreds from having lived in my purse for a month. I was reading through David Brooks’ article entitled “Social Animal” when I came to a sentence that made me laugh out loud: “Living is an inherently emotional business.”

It’s times like that when I’m tempted to return to my adolescent vocabulary and respond with a monosyllabically inclined phrase like, “Um, duh?”

It’s easy to find obvious statements like that amusing when your life, and the emotional business therein, is on a more or less even keel.

This morning on the bus, however, I wasn’t so much thinking about David Brooks or the inherently emotional business of living, though I was in the trenches of the latter. This morning I was frantically firing out emails and texts to a tiny network of friends, trying to get news about our best friend and wracking my brain for the name of the city where he is stationed in Japan.

The name came to me in a flash—Sasebo—after I had finished leaving a message for my best friend, the other female quarter of our four-person whole. I launched my smartphone map function and typed in the name, reflecting in a sort of detached way that I had never searched for a place so remote before. The map, having blinked away from Boylston St. in Boston, resolved with a little dot on the far southwestern end of Japan. I had just read on my news app that the earthquake had hit the northeast.

It is always strange to me when an emotion takes on an intensely physical form, when my body responds first and most strongly, almost drowning out coherent thought. In the moment when Sasebo showed up on my phone, far from the epicenter, I felt like my bones had suddenly lost their density and a huge breath escaped me, like a ghost had been exorcised.

Most of my friends, including the man whom I have called my “twin” for twelve years and who is now stationed in Japan as a Seabee, know that I am intensely reactionary. I like to think that as I get older, I can get my rationality to the scene of the event almost as quickly as my emotions, that my reason can wrestle down my initial spike of panic. It is a weird duality, now that my reactions come in twos:

THAT STUPID CREDIT UNION ATM DIDN’T GIVE ME MY MONEY!
Calm down, go inside, ask at the desk. Call your bank. They’ll know there’s an error.

OH MY GOD I FORGOT TO SEND IN MY RENT!
It’s only the second of the month. It’ll get there in a day. You’ll be fine.

However, in those nauseating moments of perspective, when the small, stupid problems with which we busy ourselves daily fall away in the face of something potentially shattering, my voice of reason has a hard time keeping up:

THERE’S BEEN A CATACLYSMIC EARTHQUAKE IN JAPAN—IS HE OKAY?
(Radio silence.)

The panic, the fear that feels like I swallowed a cold, smooth river stone, is so massive that it flattens my fledging rationality. The irony is that for the last twelve years, my rationality has not been self-generated. It had an external source: my twin, my sardonic, reasonable best friend who joined the Navy straight out of college. It is only recently that I have been able to rein my hysteria in without prompting from him. And so I found myself doubly exposed in the middle of my morning commute: my own reason had deserted me, and the unexpected danger to my reasonable half had been the cause.

While a sick, dark feeling in the pit of my stomach persisted—and would not be dispelled until I heard from him—I had a sudden rush of embarrassment: for being the over-reacting, totally irrational, trying-to-cover-up-the-fact-that-I-am-crying-on-the-bus girl. I felt stupid—not to mention inconsiderate—for having texted his brother. It was a large, messy and headlong reaction, and I thought for a moment that he himself would be rolling his eyes lovingly at me, across the length Pacific and the continental US combined.

But then I realized maybe my embarrassment was also a little unreasonable:

My fear for his safety, his wholeness, is equal and opposite to the enormity of happiness I experience when I see him for the first time in months. He is fairly accustomed to my launching at him for a hug (which usually resembles more of a slide-tackle than an embrace), and he’s become very adept over the years at catching me as I flail joyfully. The persistent dread I felt until I got his email was the mirror image of the continuous thread of our friendship: a perfect, platonic partnership between a very reactionary girl and a very amused, unflappable boy, now a woman and a man, slightly less reactionary and still unflappable, respectively.

So I think this morning, when he got my email, he probably didn’t roll his eyes, because he knew that my enormous fear was just a symptom of my even greater love, that for every second of extraordinary fear I was remembering every second of blissfully ordinary happiness. When I step back and look at a bigger picture of our lives in the context of others’ lives, I experience a humbling, crushing awe and empathy for the loved ones of service men and women who live every day with the fear that nearly crippled me this morning.

And I wonder if maybe David Brooks got it backwards: that in fact conducting emotional business, the intense and messy and embarrassing work of loving and fearing and figuring it out every day, is the only way you can really, inherently live.

It is a MESS. And it is worth it.

Modern Love: Across the Great Divide

I used to have a sound-bite I’d drop into conversation amongst my like-minded group of liberal friends. I’d say, with more or less disdain, “I don’t date Republicans. I think it’s bad policy.” This would elicit some amusement from my friends and a pang of foreboding in the recesses of my brain, like a foreshadowing that someday I would grow up enough not to make comments like that. Or that someday I would fall in love with a Republican.

I did exactly that, though when we first met, politics were not really an issue. John and I met in Rome five years ago this spring, while we were both studying abroad. As if that weren’t enough, I saw him out of my window, sitting on the balcony below my apartment. A recklessness I have yet to fully outgrow made me call out to say hello, and a self-consciousness I will never outgrow made me duck back into my room shortly thereafter. When he came up to say hello later, and as we got to know each other over the next couple of weeks, the only debate we ever came close to having had nothing to do with politics.

“Who’s your favorite -ini?” he asked me, as we were standing in Santa Maria Maggiore.

I thought I had heard him wrong. “My favorite what?”

“Boromini or Bernini?” He nodded down at the floor, where the latter –ini was buried. I fell for him in a series of moments just like that. As it happened, we each chose a different –ini, but we decided to get gelato instead of argue about it.

We went back to our respective colleges about a month later and fell out of touch, until last winter, when I found him again. He had been, in many ways, the one that got away: the first guy who had ever made me feel like my entire self was entirely fine just as she was. It was a miraculous feeling, one that kept me poking around for him online every now and then. On one of those occasions, I actually found him and—with no small amount of anxiety—sent him an email. He answered quickly, and a few months of emails became a few months of phone calls became meeting in Washington, DC one Sunday in August.

In another city of columns and marble, he interlaced our fingers and told me with a grin, “You know, I’m really glad you didn’t get married in the last five years.”

And I fell in love with him all over again.

We got to know each other again more thoroughly this time, filling in gaps we had forgotten or never really gotten around to filling when we were in Rome. I learned about his time in the ROTC; he learned about my sometimes contentious relationship with my sisters. We figured out that in spite of his not liking cocoanut, my cocoanut-oatmeal cookies are his favorite. Some knowledge came more by osmosis than outright conversation, so I guess it was not all that surprising when his tone changed noticeably one night over the phone.

“I want to talk to you about something.” He spoke with the tone of someone gingerly stepping out onto a frozen pond, not sure if the ice is solid yet.

I became cautious. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“Healthcare.”

“Ah.”

The time had come at last.

John was raised Republican in Virginia, in a Roman Catholic family. It is worth noting that my mother would correct me with her time-honored admonition: “One raises hawgs. One brings up children.” This reproach is an excellent example of an odd element of my Northern upbringing, which made me very receptive to my sweetheart’s Southern charms: for as long as I can remember, my mother’s best friends have all been Southern. Therefore, with help from my father of course, I was brought up by a pack of Southern women. And I mean Southern with a capital S. As a result, where many of my friends have a more or less dim view of the South, I have no problem with it. Actually, I think they do a lot of things better down there—not the least of which is to bring up somebody like John. My mother likes to claim that I was “bow-un” (rough linguistic approximation of “born”) south of the Mason-Dixon, but I never felt that Fort Lauderdale really counted.

Therefore, for maternal reason, upbringing did not separate us as it might have, in terms of geographical prejudice. It did, however, separate us in terms of politics.

I myself was brought up Democrat, through and through, in one of the most conservative counties in Illinois. I had thought I was fairly radical, until my family moved to northern California and I enrolled in a high school on the Berkeley border. I had to add a few darker shades of blue on my political color wheel after that experience. Nevertheless, I was as much a “cradle Democrat” as I was a “cradle Episcopalian.”

John brought up the question of healthcare as the first step into an arena where we were both fairly certain we wouldn’t agree on much. During that first conversation, I was more on the defensive than anything else: when in doubt, defend Obama. John was not on the offensive by any means, but I had become so cemented in my party’s line that I hadn’t bothered to get many details. As my beloved Republican respectfully began to ask me for specifics to back up my arguments, I found I had few, if any. The next day I did some research on the healthcare reform and figured out why exactly I thought what I thought.

It was a miracle: my Republican boyfriend was making me a better Democrat.

We agreed after that conversation, in tones of relief because there had been no yelling, that we should bring up a contentious issue maybe once every couple of weeks, to keep things honest and interesting.

A few months later, we had our first fight in earnest while he was visiting me in Boston. In the intervening months, John had picked up the sometimes annoying habit of pressing political issues when I had no particular interest in their being pressed. The evening of our fight, I was making dinner for us and some friends, and he brought up tax breaks.

In retrospect, the most dangerous part of our conversation was not the fight itself but the fact that we were fighting with blunt ideological instruments. We never used any specifics—no percentages, no actual statutes. As the fight progressed (or rather, devolved), we essentially became caricatures: Blue and Red yelling at each other from opposite sides of the aisle or, as it happened, my kitchen.

We made up later, but the fight still bothered me. I realized that we hadn’t actually been discussing anything; we hadn’t been trying to accomplish any understanding. We were just yelling at each other. I stepped back from the fight and thought about what I believed, and why I believed it. When I called him and delicately brought it up, I found he had been having similar worries.

As we talked about it, really talked, we found out that we could understand where the other was coming from. He told me he wants to believe that he can be wealthy: that he can work hard, earn a good living and not have the government take more than half. I told him that I didn’t believe the super-rich should receive tax cuts simply because they were super-rich, because I don’t believe the trickledown effect works. We talked about the Citizens United decision and discovered that we had some common-ground on disagreeing with the decision. Miraculously, we found that when we weren’t yelling, we could actually hear each other.

The greatest challenge I have observed, in politics and relationships, is an all or nothing mentality. How can anything work when “give and take” becomes a spiteful form of “you didn’t give me this, so I won’t give you that”? If you think you’re always right, then the other side can’t be anything but wrong. These ideas seem so obvious, but watching any political coverage—or my most recent argument with my boyfriend—would prove otherwise.

After we had fought, but before our real conversation, I went back into my living room where John had stationed himself on the couch. We had, in effect, gone to our separate corners, as much as one can do that in a studio apartment. I nudged his leg down from where he’d propped it on the coffee table and sat down on his lap. I looked him square in the eye.

“I’d rather fight with you about things that are important to us than fight about things that aren’t.”

He smiled at me, the same smile that made me weak in the knees five years ago and still does, and said, “Me too.”

As I was giving my best friend the rundown of the weekend John visited, I told her we had fought, and she asked what about.

I told her: “Tax law.”

Note from Dylan

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.

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.”

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.