There and (Regrettably) Back Again

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

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

My mind grabbed the idea and ran with it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are you trying to say?

Good. Write that down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.